Pits of the Pandemic

Kolonial 
Stefanie Batten Bland, choreographer 
Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York (online) 
May 3-17, 2021

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 already out with 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.  The drama begins with the performers separated  in 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.   

The dancers are clothed in rags, and streaked with dirt. They scuffle in their bubbles until their locked-up energy turns into vibrations, spasms, paroxysms, seizures. The booming, growling sound score by Grant Cutler evokes the gnashing of teeth. 

Halfway through the video, the color scheme changes from a ghastly blue and white to a warm yellow and brown – colors of flesh. And the participants rip through the walls for what looks like to our freaked-out eyes like an orgy – they actually touch, and climb on each other to make a people pile. They end up in something like a smoldering fire zone, standing around unmasked and too close for comfort, but not looking at each other, disengaged, waiting.

Kolonial was recorded in December 2020, during the loneliest of holiday seasons. The program says the installation was based on colonial exposition parks of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, but that reference is not clearly developed.  It looked to me more like a pandemic anxiety attack inside an environmental disaster area.  The piece stands as an artifact of a sick era in our present century, a trial by ordeal with a verdict yet to come.  

The first of three Digital Spring productions from BAC, Kolonial is being streamed free on demand through May 17 at www.bacnyc.org.

copyright 2021 © by Tom Phillips