2020 | Distance Measures [sketches] | screendance

This screen dance was shot in County Limerick in one day, at the heart of the first COVID-19 confinement.

These strange days have put many of us close to extreme endings and binary feelings. We connect to our past as a source of comfort, resource, nostalgia and melancholy. We connect to the future as a place of hope, new beginnings, incertitude and fear. Distance measures became a place to explore and drift away. So far, so close. So far, there were only a few places we could venture to dance and capture video, very close to home.

I remember, as a child, skimming the cream off the surface of the milk, just collected from the farm. We did just that with these videos sketches - when weeks of confinement came as the first pause in more than a decade creating dance projects. We skimmed elements that came to the surface. Quickly, intuitively, in that semi-improvised way that we like. Using obvious elements of costumes and props from our recent works (Merlin, Revolver, ... ). Using also elements of movement, with a refreshed sense of what they meant. Now reframed (literally), re-contextualised, sometimes clarified with a new sense of relativity, emergency and simplicity.

This is not so much about quality and crafting. It is more about where we have been, where we are now, and - suspended in time as if in a spider web - where we will go next, with a certain dose of impatience, irony, curiosity and fear.