Danceletter 21
Danceletter 21
It’s hard to hold everything at once right now. On another beautiful Saturday in New York City, from my couch, I see images on social media of people, mostly young-ish, gathering in the city’s parks, with and without masks. I’ve just learned that an elderly family member is in the hospital with Covid-19 (in stable condition, thankfully) and that a cherished member of the dance community, in her 60s, has died of cancer.
I’ve decided not to go out on weekends, to limit walks (with a mask) to less crowded times of the week. On this tempting spring day I step outside only to meet a friend who has biked over to deliver me a book (Jill Johnston’s Disintegration of a Critic). As we stand talking, me on the stoop and her on the sidewalk, an awkward distance between us, I’m uncomfortably aware that she is wearing a mask and I am not. I had thought, “Well, I’m just running downstairs for a few minutes.” Am I putting her at risk?
I have things to do. Things overdue. A bi-weekly sibling happy hour turns into a fight. Disintegration of a family Zoom call.
I want to say something about Nancy Stark Smith, the cherished member of the dance community mentioned above, but I think I’m still processing this one. Usually I don’t like the phrase “dance community,” because it’s too vague. But Nancy’s reach was so far and wide, the breadth of the term seems appropriate here. For those who don’t know, Nancy was a pioneer of contact improvisation, and maybe it’s a cliché to describe her this way, but she really was a force of nature. Losing her hits especially close to home because she lived in Western Massachusetts, where I grew up, and was a friend of my mom’s. My mom owned a travel business and was Nancy’s travel agent for many years. We have a story that always makes us laugh, regarding my realization, as I got older and broadened my dance horizons, that this person I’d often heard about was, in fact, a postmodern dance icon. In high school, when I was really into Irish dancing, my mom would sometimes try to nudge me in the direction of Nancy’s contact improvisation workshops, but I brushed off the idea, maybe thinking they were “too weird.” It was probably in my junior year of college, when I saw a video of Nancy and Steve Paxton dancing together in this sort of mind-blowing way, that I asked my mom: “Your friend Nancy Stark Smith, is she… the Nancy Stark Smith?!” Which my mom, listening as I finally came around to appreciating Nancy’s genius, thought was hilarious. Ever since, Nancy has been “the Nancy Stark Smith” to us. (To my mild embarrassment, my mom told her this story, and she got a kick out of it, too.)
This is just one personal anecdote. There is so much to say about Nancy. This morning I admired these words from choreographer Jeanine Durning.
It’s important to keep finding pleasure. For today’s newspaper, I wrote about what has been an unexpected source of pleasure for some dancers during quarantine: TikTok. This story was so much fun to report and to research through my own use of the app, which, though the story is complete, I don’t think will cease anytime soon. Turns out I absolutely love a TikTok challenge. And it’s a great way to connect with my 13-year-old niece, a TikTok expert whose insights were instrumental to my writing process. I also genuinely appreciate her feedback on my dancing:
This week I also wrote a bit about Netta Yerushalmy’s Paramodernities Live, a six-part deconstruction of the 20th-century concert dance canon, with special guests, which begins tomorrow (Monday, May 4). I missed this dance/scholarship marathon at New York Live Arts last year and am hoping to tune in. I received an incensed reader email yesterday, expressing that this recommendation filled her with “disappointment and despair,” because she had watched a snippet of Netta’s work on her website and didn’t think it was really dance. If you’ve seen anything by Netta, whose choreography can be dizzyingly complex, you’ll know how absurd that is. I just had to laugh.
On a non-dance note, who’s watching Normal People on Hulu? I am limiting myself to two episodes a day, which, let me tell you, has taken discipline.
I’ll leave you today with this minute of Steve Paxton and the Nancy Stark Smith, from the 1987 film Fall After Newton: