-- By Tom Phillips
 |
| Kolonial: Stefanie Batten Bland |
America is starting
to emerge from 14 months of viral living, but like all traumas, this pandemic
year will live on in mind and body. Reams of research and acres of art will
record how we lived and died with the coronavirus, and how it changed us. Ahead of the game, the Baryshnikov Arts
Center of New York is offering the first fruits of an ugly season --- a
piece created and performed during the pandemic, under medically-prescribed COVID
health and safety protocols.
Choreographer
Stefanie Batten Bland assembled half a dozen dancers in BAC’s Jerome Robbins
Theater, in an installation by Conrad Quesen. They begin the drama in separate plastic bubbles, close enough to see each other but barred from touching. In a recorded introduction, Bland says Kolonial
is about isolation, being on display, voyeurism, the desire to
touch; finding ways to be with others, and then finding why we can’t be. The 20-minute
video performance captures the recurring misery of pandemic life, its constant
approach and avoidance of human contact, its multiple barriers of plastic.
