How to Love a Wolf: April 23, 2020

How to Love a Wolf: Movement

Dear "Molly":

1) Were you this concerned by what other dance artists were doing to satisfy their needs, wants, desires for personal practice prior to COVID-19, online or offline, "live" or virtual? If yes, carry on. If not, why are you now?

2) COVID-19 is prompting painful questions about survival, that ill-named beast sustainability, and in/equity. Your opinion about the amount or dearth of other peoples' online course offerings is utterly irrelevant to this fact.

2A) Of course liveness is better. Please don't act like you alone are protecting the virtue of the live. We are not robots. ...Yet. Also, some of us are completely alone...it's nice to connect, even in a weird way... and some of us can't fly across the country/world every time an artist we like offers a workshop...but we *can* drop $1-10 to touch in virtually.

3) Artists and arts organizations adapt, or do not. This is a painful reality rife with capitalistic bullshit and much of that reality is tinged with the injustices of inequity. Unless you're willing to rail against the inequity of wifi connections (and this is warranted) stop with the commentary on what other people are putting online. Some of it looks like shit and is high quality; some of it looks ring-light glitzy and is empty. Non-political content is frankly more wholesome, sourdough-y, and inspiring than Instagram circa early 2020.

4) This moment is both temporary (spoiler alert they all are) and challenging what each of us took for granted‚ or what we activated, researched, or practice in favor of or against, in the previous moments. Many if not most of us will survive this moment but there is no going "back." There never was and there never has been in the history of time.

5) Uncertainty is the lifeblood of creating. Judge how others address uncertainty and you impugn creating, writ large. "The show must go on" was always a crock of shit. People get seriously injured, family members go into hospice; shit happens. The show really does not need to go on. But you and I do need to go on in our world of uncertain creating. This was always the thing that needed to "go on."

6) Stop reading opinion pieces about how dance artists are responding to COVID-19.

7) Do you feel pressured, weird, angsty, or annoyed about what 'other people are doing'? What nugget of uncertainty pressured you at 3AM just before we catapulted into COVID uncertainty? Attend to it. Close your device.

Molly