Two tight bursts of the future

This is a story about a little bit of hope.

I’ve been fully vaccinated since February — my second shot was on Valentine’s Day — but I’ve been playing it safe, since I live with an unvaccinated (or now, half-vaccinated) person, and it’s only becoming more clear now that vaccinated people probably can’t spread the virus. And while we have our own variants of the virus here in New York City, we also have been vaccinating up a storm, and it’s starting to look like it’s effective against those variants.

That’s all new information. So other than a couple brief reporting trips inside mostly-empty museums, I haven’t been doing anything different than usual this winter, and I haven’t yet been to the movie theater.

But this weekend I felt the shift start.

New York’s cultural institutions have been working hard to figure out outdoor seasons, something you can do in this climate. In New York City, winter can be harsh and cold and disgusting, but spring tends to show up mid-March and, though it wobbles, fully establish its foothold by April. And the warm weather season gets longer and longer every year; I distinctly recall a 70 degree day when the election was called in mid-November last year. So there’s plenty of time to work with, and plenty of venues spread throughout the city’s parks and public spaces that already get a workout in a normal summer. Outdoor movies, summer concerts, plays and opera and symphonies in the park, dance on the plaza at Lincoln Center, impromptu jazz concerts on street corners and in subways — this place hops in the summer, and everyone’s invited.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music, our local performing arts institutions (and one of the oldest and most venerable in the country), has gotten a jump on the season. They announced a performance of Influences, from the French performance troupe Le Patin Libre. It’s ice skating. It’s modern dance. It’s kind of theatre, too? It’s exactly the sort of the BAM does well: A fusion of art forms that breaks down barriers, a little daring and experimental, surprising, unapologetically alive. Over the years we’ve seen hundreds of performances at BAM in the same vein, but never one on ice.

There’s a skating rink (well, two next to one another) in Prospect Park, a short walk from our home, and that’s where the performance was being held. So on Saturday night we bundled up (it was a warm day, but once the sun sets it cools fast) and went to the rink, where we sat in our pre-assigned seats spaced from our neighbors and watched.

Five skaters — four on figure skates, one on hockey skates — glided onto the ice and performed an hour-long program. Several short-form pieces that played with the space of the hockey rink and the movements of skating; one longer one that played with the tensions of power differentials in human relationships. Each skater had a different strength, like jumping, or gliding in long arcs, or incredible dancelike moves. They used their skates to bang out beats on the ice and spun like tops, and it was not like anything I’d seen before. The freedom was beautiful. It would have been beautiful no matter what was happening.

But of course, this wasn’t any old day. On the way into the rink — a place I run past nearly every day — they took our temperatures (on our wrists, a newish development in New York) and the ticket-scanners made their quick dinging noises, the same dinging I’ve been hearing for 15 years at BAM, and I felt electricity on my spine. I felt, for one second, the same thing I usually feel when I am rushing into the Harvey Theater to meet Tom for that night’s show. Anticipation. Excitement. A little weariness — my evenings are usually taken up by back to back nights of shows and movie screenings, a routine I love so much and miss so much.

The skaters ended their program jubilantly and the entire crowd jumped to their feet and clapped their hands and yelled and hooted and whistled. Everyone was masked, but you wouldn’t know it from the sound. We were all so, so happy to be there, with the fog rolling in and sirens on nearby blocks in the background, just together, in the open air, still alive. Still here.

On Sunday night I got on the subway and took the long ride up to the Guggenheim, on the Upper East Side. I haven’t been up there since I visited the Met for a piece in October. I joined a long queue snaking outside the museum and waited as they let us in.

I was there for a performance of the Passion Fruit Dance Company, a piece called Trapped, choreographed by Tatiana Desardouin as part of the Guggenheim’s Works & Process initiative. This was among the pieces generated out of two-week “bubble residencies” in upstate New York.

After my wrist was scanned again, I took the number they gave me at the front desk and climbed the stairs and then the spiraling ramp around the Guggenheim’s central rotunda. (If you haven’t been there, it’s a long spiraling ramp that goes up several stories; you can see a picture here.) I found my place and waited as others filled the room, each individual or group placed a long way from the next.

There’s usually art on the walls at the Guggenheim, but right now those walls are blank, which is eerie. And a little anxious.

But the Passion Fruit dancers came out and took their places on the ground floor, and then danced for us. Six women in black, but they started out covered in stretchy scarlet hood-type materials that, slowly, they stretched and shedded as they moved away from them. I never have all the vocabulary I wish I had when talking about dance, but there were shapes from modern dance as well as hip-hop in their dance, and each seemed to move to her own arc as she broke free of the scarlet cocoon separating her from the others. Slowly, slowly, they moved away from being trapped in one space on the floor, unable to see or reach each other, and into freedom. By the end, the whole group was sitting on the floor, waiting as each dancer in turn performed, and we all watched from above, like angels, or ghosts.

Not really ghosts. The performance was just a half hour long, but people made noise, and by the end the applause and masked cheering was deafening. When it was over, I slipped back into the night and walked back to the subway in the dampness, remembering other New York springs, hoping with all my heart that some day this will become routine again.

I made it through most of this awful year with my chin up, but the last two months or so broke me — broke a lot of us, it seems, but it’s felt at times like whatever shattered in my chest might not ever get put back together. Two nights of watching artists perform their hearts out doesn’t fix it, but I am reminded why the platitude about art being a healing force exists. Art doesn’t fix us, and it doesn’t make us better people. But it does, it can, make us people again. Not individual persons, alone, barely hanging on — but people, bodies in the same space as other bodies, perceiving and rejoicing in the burst of life from still more bodies and souls. Right now, that feels like the only thing that can matter.