Screenshot from the website of Monica Bill Barnes and Company

The Dancer is Present with Monica Bill Barnes

By Garth Grimball

Modern dance is being very considerate. Before March 2020, experimentation meant confronting expectations for many dance makers. The role of the spectator, “acceptable” lengths of time, and the very definition of dancing were all questioned in a post-post-post modern sensibility. Audiences weren’t meant to be comfortable. Success meant a kind of inside-baseball thought provoking that usually only other modern dancers would take time to consider. Not so in October 2020. The audience of nine months ago is now impossible. The confronting and collapsing of expectations is the norm. Every single day.

Monica Bill Barnes & Co have created the first work of art I’ve seen that is about living in a post-coronavirus world without being – all caps – ABOUT THIS MOMENT. Keep Moving is specific, generous, and well-adapted to digital presentation. Access to the show was a sliding scale donation. Co-commissioned and presented by the American Dance Festival with support from Jody and John Arnhold/Arnhold Foundation, Keep Moving is ten chapters, eight videos and two audio, from 6 to 23 minutes a piece, meant to be consumed, as Barnes says in chapter one, as it fits into your life. How considerate. She and co-creator Robbie Saenz de Viteri even encourage you to step away from the screen for the two audio chapters. Take a walk, water your plants, a.k.a. maybe it’s a good time to get off the couch. (I felt very seen.)

Keep Moving is an adaptation of The Running Show which MBB&Co presented at Fall For Dance in NYC in 2019. The general theme of the work, perseverance, and love required of being a dancer remains. Barnes and Viteri are joined by the cast of The Running Show, dancers who were/are affiliated with Hunter College. Each chapter highlights personal narratives of the cast. Viteri conducts the interviews and acts as a gentle narrator guiding us through trials and tribulations. Some dancers contracted COVID-19, one is an essential worker, most are living in the tight quarters of NYC apartments, often packed with relatives. The narratives expand beyond pandemic induced limitations to limits of acceptance and communication. How can you express the need to dedicate your life to something few people value and makes no money? How can you reconcile that dedication with inherent prejudices that devalue you? 

Barnes, Viteri, and the creative team behind Keep Moving excel at showing and telling in ways only available to the digital medium. Several chapters feature recordings of Zoom rehearsals. We see the cast separated in their tiny frames, then our view zooms into one box and one dancer. Imagine the Ken Burns effect on a proscenium stage. The dancers don’t exit; the limits of the frame create off-stages and on-stages, simultaneously. We see repetitions of Barnes’s choreography. A propulsive, athletic phrase that eschews the modern dance face of neutrality for furrowed brows, grins, and triumphant yowls. Keep Moving juxtaposes rehearsal and performance footage from pre-pandemic to now. The dancers’ energy is constant, devoted.

I cried twice during my time with the ten chapters. Not out of sadness or happiness. I felt overcome with a sense of art-relief (there’s probably a perfect word for this in German or French). Keep Moving is a compassionate exhale. Dance will continue. Dancers will always dance. Monica Bill Barnes & Company made me feel embodied in a way I didn’t know possible via online performance. Forget “Keep Calm and Carry On.” Keep Moving and see what happens.

Screenshot from the website of Monica Bill Barnes and Company

 

Garth Grimball is a writer and dance artist based in Oakland, CA. He hosts the podcast Reference Desk and is co-director of Wax Poet(s).

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