The Gift of Presence
On March 13, I attended an in-person performance for the first time in more than a year.
The dance piece, Prism, presented by Nashville’s OZ Arts* and conceived and choreographed by David Flores, is a spare, gorgeous 35-minute piece that transcended my expectations for a pandemic-safe performance. It was intimate and deeply moving.
This isn’t a review of Prism. I’m highly unqualified for a great many things, and dance critic is certainly toward the top of that list. But, I am an expert on what moves me. What knocks me sideways, sends me home in a giddy, thoughtful, melancholy haze.
So that’s what we’re talking about today: how did it feel to go out and do art stuff in the world?
First, let’s talk about what’s at the top of all our minds. How safe was it?
OZ Arts, for those unfamiliar, operates an 8,000 square-foot warehouse performance space in an industrial area of Nashville. This piece was staged in three compact playing areas within the warehouse, leaving the majority of the room free for the audience to move about the space (there were only a few chairs along the wall). OZ only allows 20 attendees per performance (masked, of course), and they helpfully marked out safe distances on the warehouse floor in tape. I felt safer than I do at Trader Joe’s or the doctor’s waiting room. (I understand that many don’t feel safe, even with these precautions, especially immunocompromised people, so please honor your own comfort level over mine.)
Prism is anchored in the struggle between separation and togetherness. Be that race, love, borders, sheltering-in-place or the seemingly impermeable boundary of the digital screen behind which we’ve lived and connected for so long now.
After a quick briefing on safety protocols from OZ Arts staff, the audience is led to the performance space. The doors are open, the house lights are down, and the dancers are already moving onstage. You enter the piece in medias res, and exit it that way, as well. It’s like entering a concert in the middle of a song, or a film in the middle of the first scene, and leaving with the actors still onscreen.
When you first move into the vast, dark room, two dancers are already circling one another around a twisting column of glowing thread and a small pool. The music pulses slowly.
Exhilaration.
This was the first emotion that hit me. A kind of exuberant, almost illicit thrill of once again being in a dark room with strangers.
No preamble, no exposition. I am dropped into the black with these two bodies. Entering and leaving the performance this way gave me the impression that I was walking into an ongoing process, an act already in motion and perhaps endless. Maybe this was an eternal loop or just a fraction of a long story that I and other audience members wandered in and out of, as we do the lives of others.
As the dancers circled one another, I circled them, growing closer and more comfortable. For the immense amount of space we were granted, the performance was intensely intimate. In many ways, I was able to get closer to the dancers than I would in a traditional performance. I could choose to move back toward the musicians — yes, live music played by live humans — and watch the dancers from a distance as they stretched and angled into long planes or battled with glowing swathes of elastic cords, or I could move close enough to see beads of sweat and goosebumps.
I could come close enough to note that, for a very long time, no two dancers actually touched. They only almost touched. And that, friends, was a palpable feeling in the dark with these strangers after a year of so very little touch.
Self-Consciousness
Exhilaration was mingled with a bit of embarrassment, or at least self-consciousness. Accidentally making eye contact with a musician or another audience member. Trying to figure out what to do with my umbrella. Wondering how the dancers felt about all this and if it was hard to dance for an extended period with a mask on.
The self-consciousness faded as I fell deeper into the piece. The dancers are chosen at random for each segment, and on the day I attended the first and final segments were performed by Becca Hoback and Emma Morrison. Hoback is possessed with a singular and paradoxical elegance that’s simultaneously fluid and angular, sophisticated and raw. Her long limbs folded around Morrison’s compact frame like a heron moving around a dove. As the tension between them rose and fell, as they pushed outward and retreated inward, the same movements rose and fell within me — enough that I backed away, from a need for space and privacy for both them and myself.
At first, my heart and head jumped in with abandon. Then, startled, they retreated. This feeling of communion between audience and performers that we had begun to take for granted, the gradual synchronization of heartbeats and attention, it came back in fits and starts.
As the full company of dancers entered the space to surround a small, transparent home with a domestic struggle happening within, I backed away to take the full spectacle in. My body relaxed and my mind slowed. I stopped interpreting, stopped thinking, and just beheld. What does it mean? Who cares? It’s beautiful. The music is like warm water lapping back and forth. The dancers are all planes and surfaces, heart and breath, sharp limbs and stray locks of hair.
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Photos by Tiffany Bessire for OZ Arts
Joy.
That’s when the joy came. And I didn’t realize how much I’d needed it until it flooded over me, and I sought a place deeper in the dark while the full tension of the past year seemed to come unsprung and burst from my body.
I’ve only reached what I call “belly sobbing” twice while attending live performances — once in Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size at Steppenwolf Theatre, and once in Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. In both those instances, I’d been flayed to the bone emotionally — and, in the case of Einstein on the Beach, physically… it’s five hours long, after all.
I didn’t belly sob on this day, though that may be only because of the sheer joy that flowed in to soothe the laid-bare grief. It could be that the balm of being in communion with other people in the sacred space of the theatre transformed blood into wine.
Prism moved forward, with dancers struggling to break through a tangled screen and, eventually with Morrison and Hoback returning to their center ritual, only this time actually touching. Even cradling one another.
This return to touch, this breaking through of all the previous barriers both physical and emotional, felt hard-won and earned, and it felt like a touch for us all — a proxy contact within which all of us once again touched, held one another, drew our faces close.
Gratitude.
For the past year, we’ve watched a small, loud contingent of anti-maskers and back-to-normal-ers fight every small inconvenience that personal safety and the public good required. Experiencing this live performance after more than a year of missing it, I felt a compassion I hadn’t before for people trapped in denial of the great pause. They might never feel this deep sense of gratitude that comes from having gone without the simple pleasure and holy gift of presence — presence in the moment, the wordless presence of other bodies, the simple nourishment of community — and regaining it again.
As Joni Mitchell sang, “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” (Cinderella said it too, but we won’t go into that here). Flores and the dancers of Prism gave me, gave all of us in attendance, the simple and pure gift of community.
Anticipation.
Now, as we move forward into the new Whatever the Hell Happens Next, as we get vaccinated, reopen venues, re-engage with live art, we must ask ourselves: what will we do with this gift?
We’re getting community anew. We’re coming out of the birth pangs of a long-needed racial reckoning. We’re a nation divided. We’re a people cast out to sea and returning to shore to find unstable economy, joblessness, fear, tentative hope.
What do we do with this gift of live art? We, the art makers and we the audiences have a responsibility to one another. We have a responsibility to the work. What will we make? Who will make it? Whose stories will it tell?
What do we do with this gift of community? Do we try to get “back to normal,” or do we build a new normal together — an inclusive, equitable, joyful, loving one? A life-affirming normal? Maybe we just do away with “normal” altogether. What could we replace it with? The joy of impermanence? Embracing difference? Intention? Humility?
Part of Prism’s emotional heft is that it contemplates just these things — our common current moment. How have we been pulled apart? How will we come back together? Will all our voices be heard? Will all our bodies have a place?
Will we touch, or will we just almost touch?
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*Full disclosure: I am an OZ Arts/Porch Art Wire Fellow for the 2020–21 season. While I attended Prism in that respect, this article is not a part of that fellowship, nor is it sponsored by OZ Arts. Learn more about The Porch here.
New Dialect — Banning Bouldin’s stellar dance company that Prism was born from
