Today, Jade and I finished leading our first Facebook Live Dance Class, with our friends at Halton Down Syndrome Association to celebrate National Dance Week!
It’s a strange time to be celebrating National Dance Week. As dancers, we are used to engaging with our bodies, through movement and interaction with our environment as well as those around us. Dancers love performing. Performing traditionally involves a stage in a theatre; a theatre that is meant to hold hundreds to thousands of people! It’s a funny thought right now, considering I haven’t left my house in a month.
Right now, because of the current COVID-19 pandemic many of us have transformed our homes into the things we need it to be; an office, a classroom, a gym, etc. For dancers, our homes have become our dance studio and sometimes a performance space – through sharing videos, and finding just enough space to get the movement we crave, but not enough to really express and perform full out the way we dream of.
Mallory & Jade’s new virtual dance class set up at home.
What is more challenging to replicate right now is the incredibly unique experience of performing, on stage, in a theatre that is full. The moment in the spotlight, when your music fades and the applause echoes off the walls! Performances, especially for our Dance Ability Movement groups, are so much about the interactions and improvisation that occurs in the moment on stage – the reactions of the audience, the “in-the-moment” joy of our dancers, it’s something you have to experience to know and feel for yourself.
We are determined to find a way to Keep Dancing at home, and to celebrate together, in whatever capacity that looks like for each of us right now.
We have been inspired by our community during these times, and how, yet again, the power of dance has empowered us to stay connected, stay moving, and to keep our moods lifted.
We would love to hear from you. Do you have a story to share about how dance has impacted you during these times? Have you found a new way to dance, or a new meaning behind what it means to be part of a dance community? We invite you to share with us your stories, so we can continue to support each other, and celebrate the positive moments that are coming out of these changing times.
Let’s continue to choose to find joy, and take control of the things we can.
Our solution to living at home during the pandemic?
Just keep dancing.
With gratitude,
Mallory
