For Assistant Professor of Dance Rachel Barker this was “a fun piece I made over Zoom over the summer with [dance students] McCall McClellan and Maddie Butler. This was the piece for which I got a grant from the LDS Center for the Arts for their Art For Uncertain Times projects.”
“It’s not super high quality, because of Zoom,” Barker continued. “But that was the intent. It’s definitely a good reflection of how we’ve continued to make our art in the midst of COVID-19 and social distancing in dance.”
Quarantine Book Club: A Zoom dance piece
Choreography: Rachel Barker in collaboration with the performers
Performers: Maddie Butler, McCall McClellan
Music: Michael Wall “3 166” and “War Machines”; Yann Tiersen “The Old Man Still Wants It (Portrait Version)”
Music and Video Editing: McCall McClellan
This piece begins from a desire to explore personal physical histories. Particularly, during this strange and uncertain time of the COVID-19 pandemic, as we are all struggling to navigate major changes in lifestyle, relationships, financial situations, living and dancing spaces, etc., I am curious about how we catalogue these changes in our emotional and physical states through movement. We are all processing a great deal, and there is much to be mined in our bodies.
In true COVID-19 style, Quarantine Book Club was created completely over Zoom, with one dancer, Maddie, in her backyard in California, and the other, McCall, in her garage in Provo, while I was at my home in Salt Lake City. We never physically met together throughout the entire process. Choreographing through digital means was not without its challenges, and proved to be very tedious—a 150 ft ethernet cable was purchased, and multiple “you’re frozen” statements were muttered—but it was exciting to play with rich, disparate spaces which offered much more than a studio or theater could. I encouraged the dancers to explore and dance with their particular spaces in a site-specific manner—lifting up a garage door, tipping over a chair, hiding behind a palm tree… Much like we as a global community have tried to find ways to continue to connect despite isolation, in this piece I worked to connect these two women , albeit in a quirky manner, across time and space through movement.
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