2020.

It's weirdly hard to remember what was going on pre-CVD-19. Audiences said we'd done the best BLOOM residency program in our history - partnering with Talking Stick Festival to feature Indigenous dance artists. I'd just seen Olivia Olsen's superb Ahkmatova. And, inspired by work with archivist Abigail Sebaly and an invitation from Peggy Baker, I dove into two ideas I'd worked on back in the ’70s.

A wonderful cast - Eowynn Enquist, Erika Mitsuhashi, Alexa Mardon, Marisa Gold, and Ralph Escamillan - has since worked with me throughout this year on the two ideas - shocked at how prescient and vital the work feels in 2020. In PRIVILEGE we're looking at Beckett and Beethoven, two game-changers, and how their inspiration from other centuries is useful in 2020. It is a privilege to work in abstraction. In lessness, we discussed how Samuel Beckett presaged the feeling of the pandemic in his short story never but this changeless dream the passing hour. In the sand no hold one step more in the endlessness he will make it

Shelter In Place expanded the MascallDance community. It was ‘reach out from the shelter and gather in’ - come in out of the storm. Seventy-one people helped carry us through the year, rehearsing, inspiring, educating, dancing, videotaping, writing, governing. Three groups of performers working on three projects kept us ranging around the city, looking for residencies, parks, sharing studios one person at a time. Filling in a space, anytime it was allowed.

As we search for outside residencies with cover from the rain, we try on titles for our current group of commissions centred on the set-piece sculptor Alan Storey originally created for The White Spider to replace “Lurch”, the sculpture's rough, endearing nickname. Sarah Chase suggests five climb fourscore. This year we’ve worked on it at Malkin Bowl, on ZOOM, in David Lam Park, on ZOOM, in Trout Lake Park, at Left of Main, and back to ZOOM again. We commissioned Justine Chambers and Sarah Chase to work with us and they inspired. One with a single idea that got more and more beautiful and evocative; the other with a pattern that changes your thinking, nervous system, image-life, and ability to live.

We hired people we had only met on Zoom.
We made bringing jokes to work mandatory.
We designated people to fill the “zoom gloom”- the moments of silent waiting that in a studio would be the time to catch your breath. And the year has changed us: our ideas of performance, what we charge for, what we value, who has access. Aline Laflamme has sparked us in the beginnings of a bridge to include everyone. Clearly, when facing inward, sheltering, not always reaching out to the maximum, we are hungry to talk - about privilege, hierarchy, the intimate relationship of student and teacher, performer and choreographer, and social action. What is the body’s equivalent to social action, I wonder? A charley horse? A rebellion against that sudden unprecedented shift of a muscle? Shifting the angle of your gaze?

Overnight, dance is global. We are all in the same piece, making our own steps and assessing our own decisions—too close, too crowded, not that aisle….this one. The World’s ballroom is learning the SocialDisdance - lurking, skirting, rounding, side-stepping. deaking out, stepping back, veering, plodding, estimating, waiting, adjusting the angle.

Work on the impossible has already happened (our current performance project on water, in co-production with Footnotes New Zealand Dance) took place with Claire O’Neil in her Auckland studio, full size on ZOOM; it doubled the space we were working in - and her close-up 10X10 face made us able to feel her. Our research team charted their own household water patterns for a week. At our house, there's now a kettle by the sink - to save wasting 2 litres of water to run warm water for washing my face! In early 2000, Medecins Sans Frontiers set up a model refugee camp in Vancouver’s Vanier Park. They described how each individual there received 5 litres of water a day for cooking cleaning washing. Our 2 person household used 105 litres a day, 145 litres less than the Vancouver average. We have a way to go….

We mourn Olivia Thorvaldson, who was part of MascallDance 1991-2005. Olivia died March 9 just before Lockdown. Conversations with and about Olivia - her life, her life in dance, MascallDance - are available in a podcast coming out in early 2021.

Jumping with masks on is steamy. Our hearing is muffled.

Best wishes to you in 2021,

Jennifer Mascall