covid – Creative & dance journal

Beginning Contact Improvisation, January 2023

I taught a day workshop on 22 January for people beginning contact improvisation. My good friend and dancer Aundre Goddard attended. During the Covid pandemic we’d created dances outside in the park but now ‘post covid’, I could finally introduce Aundre to my favourite dance practice: contact improvisation.

Corona chaos 2022!

In the winter of 2021, I started to plan for a return to dancing in physical contact (no social distancing) at Oxford Contact Dance. However, a new variant of Covid – the Omicron variant – stopped that. Eventually, I restarted the class and dance sessions for contact improvistion on 29 May 2022 – almost two and half years since the start of the pandemic.

Invitation to dance: Cube

In February 2022, I invited members of Oxford Contact Dance to join me in creating a landscape dance called ‘Cube’ which involved dancing with two concrete cubes set in the countryside near Oxford.

Torus 2.3.3 – a dance #LandscapeDance #FoundDance #Voluism

This dance was recorded on two occasions in January 2022. While this is a solo performance. It is also a duet. For I dance with the embodied memory of my previous dance. Thus the past is present: always present.

New dance (2021) – Coming Home

Dancer Jo Blake and I created a duet. We had less than six hours dancing together, and we used a score with three parts to create this new dance. Subsequently, I submitted our dance to Dancin’ Oxford for its Moving with the Times 2021 commission.

One year on: stay home, save lives, do Qi Gong!

It’s about a year since the Coronavirus epidemic began in the UK (March 2020) and there have been two periods in lock-down (stay at home order). During this period, I’ve had a regular practice of Qi Gong (Qigong) – the 18 movement form – and this is what I’ve found in it.

Becoming Gentleness: performance

I’m very proud that despite a global pandemic, we still managed to create a new dance – ‘Becoming Gentleness’ – at Oxford Contact Dance. We danced with sticks – outdoors – in University Parks, Oxford on 23 October 2020. There was a beautiful sunset and a carpet of autumn leaves.

Zoom! Dancing together – alone

When the UK Coronavirus lock-down started in March 2020, dance sessions and classes were halted. The response of many organisers was to host the sessions by teleconferencing – often using the service from Zoom. Here, I reflect on three Zoom sessions at London Contact Improvisation with Robert Anderson, Rachel Dean, and Angus Bainbridge in spring and summer 2020.

Dancing contact improvisation with ‘contact-through’

In an age of coronavirus (July 2020) with the need to avoid bodies in contact, we can have some contact with each other through the use of artefacts like – balls, ropes, fabrics, sticks or poles. We can ‘contact-through’ them to other dancers while dancing outside. This article includes Government guidelines about reducing infection risks.

Dance with Social Distancing

Each summer, Oxford Contact Dance has organised Dance in the Park – where we dance contact improvisation outside. This year’s Dance in the Park is going to be a bit different due to COVID19. We won’t be dancing with our bodies in contact but physically distanced (‘social distancing’) and there must be no more than six dancers – by law (in England). Let’s investigate and research this configuration – six people, two metres apart. Let’s dance six two (#dance62)!