This is the story of creating when it seemed like there was nothing but roadblocks, of attempting to make something substantial when it seemed like the bare minimum was too much, of trusting my gut and using every skill at my disposal, even some that I thought had become dormant.

This is the story of RABBIT HOLE

I probably don’t need to tell you about what happened in March of 2020, but in case you are reading this from another dimension, the COVID-19 virus spread rapidly in the US and pretty much every school shut down. We were told we’d be back in 2 weeks, and since just a decade before we had taken a week off to deal with Swine Flu and that “worked,” 2 weeks seemed plausible. Now it seems like the most idiotic thing we ever thought. We never went back to school that semester and everyone spent the summer trying to figure out what we were going to do.

As a dance teacher at a fine arts charter school, I spent the summer trying to figure out how we would move forward in the studio. What is safe? What is dangerous? What is permitted? As a director entering just her second year of leading 2 student companies FILLED with talented student dance-artists, I spent the summer being bitter. (Yes, my first year as director was cut short by a pandemic (?), and yes, I’m still bitter about it. I have many strengths and holding grudges against global happenings outside of my control is one of them.) As faculty chair of our department leading 3 teachers that were in their first or second year as FWAFA teachers, I spent the summer researching what others were doing.

At first reading suggestions from others was frustrating. I mean, we were all just spit-balling here. In consulting other dance teachers I inevitably bumped up against people that were willing to take risks I was not, and also those that were taking precautions that I felt were unnecessarily restrictive. (which… is really not all that different from any time I ask other dance teachers’ advice- none of us teach the exact same way, nor do I expect that we all have the same list of “nevers” or “always” – this just felt so… life or death, health or ill, and what if your choice, or non-choice, led a student or their family to get sick?)  In consulting teachers outside of my discipline (both academic and dance) I ran into the same problem except that I learned about my colleagues own struggles in their teaching areas (the dangers of singing for our music and theater departments, struggles with small group projects and student culture for nearly every teacher, etc.), which made me feel guilty about all that we COULD do in dance (have you ever led an entire dance class without even talking? I have, and it is possible!). I felt like no matter what I did, it would be too much or too little, and honestly nothing felt consistent nor all that helpful.

And even trying to consider all the different precautions we would need to take felt pointless because we still didn’t know what school would look like. At one point, I was convinced that we would be online all year and that I would never see any of my students in person. While I was getting my head wrapped around this idea for class, I couldn’t imagine anything when it came to performances; I’d already used up all my ideas for at home dance performances* at the end of spring semester of 2020 (I love a good quarantine kitchen dance… and I’ve seen too many now…).

*I should mention that I have now seen a number of performances created primarily at performers’ homes that were incredible! Jennifer Mabus produced one for her program at University of St. Thomas Houston with choreographer Mike Esperanza that was astonishing https://youtu.be/1pO_Mv3GC2E. I saw a fantastic piece performed live on zoom with dancers in different homes that was produced by Chapman University. And, while it’s not dance, I think we’ve all seen the possibilities of performance demonstrated in Bo Burnham’s Inside. My point in bringing these up is to point out that just because I didn’t want to and wasn’t forced to create solely at home performances (nor did I have the skills or equipment to execute them), doesn’t mean that these types of performances were impossible. Many people did them, and did them well!

Some people reading may wonder why we wouldn’t just cancel performances. We did some of that and considered it for all of our shows. But with students that had been at our school since elementary and had devoted themselves to their art, we HAD to do something, AND it needed to be good. These dancers had worked hard to be in our performing companies, and some of them were already losing so much of what they expected their senior year at FWAFA to be, we had to give them an opportunity.

So I spent a lot of time in the summer thinking a lot of different things: I kept thinking what if this was just the way life was? What if we had always lived in a pandemic, what would dance look like? What would performances look like? I thought about how much I’d lectured students about how some of the best creativity came out of the most restrictions. I thought about how this would be my chance to prove whether or not I really believed that.

And, I spent a lot of time thinking about all that we couldn’t do. That was hard, and will never stop being hard, but at one point I just stopped. Anything I wasn’t sure about, I just took it off my list of possibilities. If we couldn’t do it to our best, we weren’t going to do second best. We weren’t going to attempt a subpar version of the programming that we always did. So if everything we’ve always done is not possible… what do you do?

You do something you’ve never done before.

To be continued…