Six Verbs Dance in the Age of Corona

Last year, the Black Mountain Institute’s Believer Festival commissioned the choreographer Annie-B Parson to conceive and create the festival’s opening night at a desert amphitheater in Red Rock Canyon in Southern Nevada. (You can get some sense of the space from the photograph that ran in this piece.) Parson’s colleague Elizabeth DeMent from Big Dance Theater Company paid a visit to Red Rock; they developed a score that would feature fifty dancers from Southern Nevada—bodies in collective space, plus French horns. Following the festival’s theme of here + after, they made a single, site-specific work to engender a radical presence, an awareness of that landscape’s vistas, light and sounds.

Then the world changed, and everything canceled, and suddenly we’re at home, and we are not bodies in collective space, not at all. We’re bodies in galley kitchens eating pickles and bodies working from our bedrooms where we have two bedspreads—one for sleep and one to turn the room into an “office” during the day—and we’re bodies sitting in front of our phones for Zoom conference calls where suddenly we’re supposed to feel other people like they are three dimensional but we can’t, because they are two.

So the festival curators went back to Parson with another question: How can people connect when isolated? And she conceived another idea—to make a dance score for us all to do alone, in our homes. 

Parson created American Utopia with David Byrne, which has since been called “the best live show of all time”—an absurd hyperbole, but one we nevertheless endorse. She is the founding artistic director of Big Dance Theater, and has made work with Spike Lee, St. Vincent, Anne Carson, Salt-N-Peppa, and Jonathan Demme, among many others. She is the author of Drawing the Surface of Dance: A Biography in Charts.

—Joshua Wolf Shenk

These are weird times to be sure. We don’t know what’s coming next or how to spend our days; we no longer know how to greet each other or even pass each other on the street. Our breath, our saliva, our sweat, our proximities, are suddenly very much in focus. Issues of the body in space are being discussed, parsed and governed. The power of the body is suddenly very present.

Presence itself is in question.

Dance scores have been used since the 1960s and they serve as an open-ended prompt.

This score is for everyone, not just dance-makers! Throw out the word “amateur,” or re-claim it as a source of pride. Consider your power—and the virtuosity of intention.

Here, in the score below, the focus is...