#CoronaChronicles: on dancing

Crédit : Danse en Seine

Last week, I did something crazy: I got to spend 3 hours (an hour and a half each time) in a dance studio.

On Monday and Wednesday, I was lucky to be able to meet other people in a closed space in the evening in order to dance. It’s astounding how in a few months, what was once routine has become almost reckless (though they weren’t, social distancing was thoroughly observed).

The moods in both rooms were very different. On Monday, my frustration from the current crisis and my exhilaration at being on an actual dance floor, two weeks after sports facilities shut down for the second time this year, created an explosive mix. It was a sweaty, stomp-filled masked hour and a half of krump. My moves were messy from the excitement and the lack of practice but none of it mattered. I let it all out and freed myself of my worries of the day.

Wednesday was a softer moment of contemporary exploration of the corporeal experience of a hug (without ever being able to give or receive one, sadly). The thought that, as we were dancing, our President was telling the country that we’d have to be home by 9 PM every night for the next 4 weeks at least, on top of our emotional chosen subject matter, made me melancholic. But the space was large and there were few of us so many of us took our masks off and danced at a few meters’ length of each other. How lucky were we to have this dedicated time and space to move and dance as a reprieve from the traumatic outdoors.

I don’t think I’d realized during lockdown how odd it was to only dance alone, in front of my screen. It was the only available option, what else was I to do? I saw my friends’ smiling faces and found joy in knowing we were moving together, despite the distance, connected by Internet waves.

Once studios opened their doors again in June and July and I was swayed once more by the physical sensation of energy flowing and colliding between our moving parts, I marveled at how much more fulfilling the experience felt. Moving by myself was beneficial for my body but moving in communion with others did wonders for my soul. Sounds cheesy, but it’s true. Hearing the others breathe, seeing in detail how their muscles contracted, feeling the heat building up in the room as we danced made me to dig deeper in my interpretation, take my movements to greater lengths and own the space around me more confidently than I had in my living room. It’s a feeling of agency like no other.

This weekend, the evening curfew took hold of Paris. Those privileged studio moments might be even harder to come by but I will make damn sure to seize every opportunity I get to relive them.