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“Dancing Alone Together”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 August 2021

Peter Dickinson*
Affiliation:
School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Extract

My experience of this pandemic began with bureaucracy. I want it to end with dancing.

Type
Special Section: Notes from the Field: Remembering Times of Crisis
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors, 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Society for Theatre Research, Inc.

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Footnotes

I am beholden for my title to Vancouver dancer and choreographer James Gnam, who coined the phrase in relation to the dance piece Digital Folk (2016–19), a work collectively created with his company plastic orchid factory, and which now feels eerily prescient.

References

Endnotes

2 I was right about this timeline. I received my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine on 11 May 2021. Our Ph.D. was formally approved by British Columbia's Minister of Advanced Education on 21 May 2021. As part of the second phase of BC's “Restart” plan to ease COVID-related restrictions, live theatres in the province were permitted to reopen with limited capacity as of 15 June 2021.

3 Mark Bachman, “In-person Instruction: Some Classes Have Already Returned,” SFU News, 24 March 2021, www.sfu.ca/sfunews/stories/2021/03/in-person-instruction--some-classes-have-already-returned.html, accessed 14 April 2021.

4 Dickinson, Peter, My Vancouver Dance History: Story, Movement, Community (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020)Google Scholar.

5 See Ahmed, Sara, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8.2 (2007): 149–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Crawley, Ashon T., Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017)Google Scholar. Victoria Fortuna examines how dance and choreography can offer alternatives to the disciplining of movement patterns and bodily comportment in contexts marked by political violence in her excellent Moving Otherwise: Dance, Violence, and Memory in Buenos Aires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

6 Su-Feh, Lee, “Openings and Obstacles,” The Capilano Review 3.43 (2021): 12Google Scholar.