“What the hell is happening,” is a question I ask less and less, because the events of the recent past (almost two years?) have been utterly surreal. Our world was becoming disjointed before, but now we’ve been subjected to this new brand of cabin fever that prevails inside our homes…our screens…our minds. The pandemic has propelled us into this dystopian future we’ve been reading about in science fiction novels for centuries. It’s been hard not to desire numbness, for me. It’s hard to pursue creative endeavors. I’ve often chosen the former over the latter.
“We’re all carrying the burden of having gone through this.” –Julia Erickson, principal ballerina and my dear friend
So, I asked some of my peers in the Pittsburgh art scene about this: what they’ve gone through and how their jobs have been affected, etc. It has been relieving to relate with them, and I gained a lot of insight through our conversations. One of the people I spoke with is Daniel Stover, who, when I asked him to describe himself, responded with:
“I generally consider myself a cultural provocateur, which is a made-up title…sometimes I’m an artist. I run an arts nonprofit.” (he also has commissioned multiple murals to be painted in Virginia and was nominated for “Best Artist” by a newspaper there; one of his recent works was sold at the Redfishbowl art gallery. I saw it, it was brilliant)
“God, there was a good portion of this pandemic where I just lost time,” he told me, “Sometimes I’m not good at dealing with that…a lot of mornings I wake up and am confronted with a lack of purpose,” he said. I could relate.
“My typical ways of connecting with the world are kind of gone…I can’t just be a weirdo, I have to be a weirdo that has a method of communicating with the world, or the world’s not interested.
“Maybe that’s just it,” he went on, “Creative people are just a bunch of goddamn weirdos who have no way of fitting into society unless they can produce something for people to understand. If I’m standing in front of a painting, people are like oh, okay. This explains why Daniel is who he is…and if I’m not standing in front of a painting, they have no context.”
Victoria Watford, fellow dancer at Pittsburgh Ballet, felt a personal shift as well. We’ve been through multiple layoffs during this time, and the loss of an entire season’s worth of performances in theaters. She said to me,
“It’s been very influential. I was just miserable for a very long time because people were dying, and because nobody was caring about Black people dying. I had a really hard time with that.
“…also I got sick, but I think it was a blessing in disguise. It made me actually figure out why I’m anxious all the time, why I get so nervous about stupid things…not even ballet, just like: oh my god, what are people going to think of me? …and I just worried myself into a pit.” she said.
She also told me she no longer has pity for anybody who doesn’t “treat human beings like human beings,” she said, “I cannot deal with bullshit anymore. We’ve had a year to figure out who we are, and what’s important to us. If you went through this, came back, and nothing about you changed, then I don’t want that energy.”
Christian Garcia-Campos (another friend & coworker of mine, who moved to the U.S. to dance) told me she keeps having to remind herself how she felt, when we were in quarantine for so long:
“…it’s interesting to see that already starting to go away a little bit,” she laughed, “Sometimes I will start to get nervous again and I think no, no, no! I remind myself…remember when it was gone and you thought: I’m not going to be nervous. I’m not going to take this for granted again.
“It’s always going to be a reminder…there’ve been rehearsals where I’m tired, I don’t want to do it,” she admitted, “but then I’m like, no! You wanted this! I think it makes us very resilient. (ballet) It’s a constant struggle, but it’s a good kind, if you know how to navigate it.”
Chris and I joked about the humbling experience of dancing on Zoom every day, but she also said, “When I was taking class at home, I could just try things without feeling that if I failed, people were going to judge me. So, not having that pressure helped build back up my confidence. Maybe it was all in my head. I think it is easy for us to forget that it’s a blessing. We’re dancing for a living; it should be fun. I want to be doing this for myself.”
Tori told me something similar: “Something about the pandemic made me think, what if I am talented enough? …which is a thought that scares me a lot, because I’d always kept ballet at an arm’s length so that I couldn’t be hurt by things, by not getting the part, etc.” We talked about this being a complex in the dance world: “never feeling like enough, and like you should just be grateful.” Hopefully, that’s beginning to change.
“I think there’s actually space for self-love in the dance world, finally. That’s incredible” –Eva Trapp, former soloist with PBT and dancer for Twyla Tharp
I used to dance with Eva, but now she is a massage therapist, yoga teacher, body worker…just an overall magical human being. She told me she thinks that artists have been hit the hardest, especially the performing artists.
“Leaving the dance world when I did,” she said, “was good timing for me. I didn’t have to go through the daily: how do you stay in shape? …let alone trying to create, but I will say I’ve shifted as an artist in such a different way than expected.
“It forced everybody to have this isolation. I was calling it “the time of the lone wolf” for a while because we literally were forced inward, doing this internal dialogue with self…some cool creative processes can come from that portion. I became ultra-creative, to the point that I could not even get it all out,” she laughed, “but I think that’s a testament to having stillness, not being pulled by these other things, having time to invest in ourselves and our creativity.”
My friend, Benaiah Sombke, is the marketing manager for Early Music presenter, Chatham Baroque, but he’s had to take on a lot more responsibility since the pandemic escalated. “A lot of what I do is those “other duties as assigned” that they have in basically every nonprofit job description,” he said.
Chatham Baroque presented the Venice Baroque Orchestra in February 2020, which was one of their best-attended concerts ever, “…and then we had to postpone the rest of the season. We had to kind of scramble- give people refunds if they wanted, which I think not very many people did. I think they understood.… After that it was like, what do we do now? How do we keep doing our education programs and get our music to people?”
For the 2020-2021 season, they decided to do a video concert series, of which Benaiah said, “I didn’t think I’d have to be the guy for it. Luckily, I have a friend whose job is to prescribe cameras to people for specific projects, so we hopped on a zoom call and she helped a lot in deciding what initial equipment to get. Then it was up to me to figure it out. What works visually? What doesn’t? How do you edit it and put it all together? What does the final artistic product look like, and how do you get there?” Some dancers I know tackled this process to edit videos for social media, and it doesn’t look easy.
“I just wish I had another person,” Benaiah explained, “I told my boss, I said, “Listen: what we need is like, three of me.””
Recently, I spoke to Skylar Scholl, drummer and marketing manager of local band, The Roof. The band was literally on their way to begin a tour:
“We got to Ohio and had to turn around,” he told me, “Sometimes tension creates for a good song. It’s human nature to take things for granted,” he said, “but in the midst of it, we felt we could never take it for granted again. It knocked us down a few notches…
“We had all this momentum, $900 tucked in a container in the rear seat…that was supposed to be for gas money, but when we had to turn around, we were like, “Let’s buy a new bass!”” Their last show before lockdown ended up happening spontaneously in Akron, in a bar where they were playing pool.
“…a great way to go out with a bang,” he said, but he’d been so ready to explore.
Once things shut down, “there were 3 or 4 songs that we wrote,” he told me, “and then honestly we kind of died off. Five guys living in a two-bedroom apartment…we were just perpetually annoyed with each other, naturally. Everything’s closed up…it was hard to be creative when you’re so immersed in just living with each other…”
This tension led them to confront communication issues head-on though, Skylar said, and they’re “far better off because of it.” The Roof has played around 30 shows since restrictions let up and now they are about to start working on their first full-length album!
Jack Hawn, fellow dancer as well as accomplished pianist and composer, experienced some claustrophobia as well, while quarantining with two other dancers/friends as roommates:
“I was like, I’m so done with this place,” he joked, “I’d rearranged it a bunch of times, like I was trying to forget that I was dancing in my living room. The ceiling and walls were closing in on me…we had a lot of people in that tiny space trying to dance.” Nevertheless, his passion and dedication live on:
“Jennifer Homans (who wrote Apollo’s Angels) describes dance as a kind of religion. You go through the ritual every morning: say your prayers; do your tondues. You live this life in constant reverence to this thing. What it’s done (COVID), is strengthen that notion for me because the more time you spend away from it, the less you feel connected. The whole idea: once a dancer, always a dancer…maybe that holds a lot of weight, but I think as you’re going through the motions: getting in that mindset, paying it the mental energy and time allocation that requires so much of you, that’s when you get something back. It’s so much different being a person without all that.” I said it was exposing an alternate life, in a sense…he affirmed:
“Yeah, there is maybe a question of…is this really a purposeful life, being a dancer? Is there something higher here? It’s numinous in a sense, that there’s sort of a direct line between how much respect you’re paying to the thing and what you get out of it. That’s a challenge when you’re a dancer who’s not dancing.”
Julia had just jumpstarted the next chapter in her dance career, after having retired from PBT. She was touring through Europe with Lines Ballet when everything started to shut down. Their shows in Italy were cancelled, so they retreated to France. She said that one morning, everyone woke up and was frantically trying to book flights home:
“Pandemonium…” she told me. She said she could feel the anxiety in the air, traveling at the airport. They still proceeded with their last show, but they had frantically packed to catch a bus afterwards.
“It was this beautiful, final show,” she reflected, “…when we were taking class, we felt it was probably going to be the last live show any of us were going to experience or witness for a long time. It felt very sacred, given the circumstance. We thought, “We have to take advantage of this moment.””
The audience was “off the hook,” she said, “These kids in the front row were screaming and jumping up and down. We got into the streets and people were honking at us on our way home. Then we went to the hotels and grabbed our stuff.
“Also, way to jostle the concept of something,” she said, about everything being shut down, “…like what are we even doing? What is ballet?”
Her upcoming performances after the Lines tour were cancelled, so instead, she tried to focus on gratitude: “…getting quiet and doing the work,” she explained, “People ask what I’ve been doing and I’m like…I’ve been processing. I did a lot, but I also meditated and did the things that get put aside when you’re on the “go go go”!
“Sometimes that’s kind of prickly and not super enjoyable, but I’m proud of myself for doing some thinking, having some spaciousness, learning about racial injustice…really looking at shit.” We talked about pressure to “do” things, and I know many of us felt that pressure.
My lovely friend, Hunter Paulson, creates incredible music through their band, Thousandzz of Beez, as well as other collaborations. They were also on the cusp of a tour when the pandemic got worse:
“At first I was a little thrilled,” they said, “because I could focus on making music, but then I realized that most of my income was from playing shows, going on tour (with bands including Lavender Country & Sneeze Awfull) I think people realized an artless world sucks. We got a little taste of that.
“It was kind of a big slap in the face, because artists were the first to be shut down and then they’re the last to open up. It was long into the pandemic before unemployment went through, in a lot of cases. I realized how fickle it is to depend on art for your main income. I was just like…oh! I have to change my path in life; this can just go away in a second.
“…I always feel grateful to be paid for my art. I’ll totally play shows for free, but I think promoters are getting more keen to the idea that people aren’t going to work for free anymore, for their art.” We discussed the highs and lows of last year, having been in the same quarantine tribe:
“I think the winter was especially hard…this was the first time I couldn’t go out dancing, to keep the winter away…it was just a really bad time,” we both couldn’t help but laugh, recalling it.
“It feels like a dream,” I said.
“It feels like a big ol’ dream…” Hunter said, “…during COVID, I thought music is going to be so boring. Everyone’s just going to be writing about being alone, in their room…but there are people who create fantasy worlds with their music. It’s not always solely experience (writing) but I still need it. I realized how much I depended emotionally on playing shows…a lot of self-discovery during this time.”
“That’s a good thing,” I suggested.
“Yeah, even if it kicks you in the ass,” they said, “I made some music, tried to focus on other things, read a lot…”
(We agreed that having a social life helps keep the juices flowing)
“Also, having deadlines…when I played shows, I’d be like, okay. I need to finish this…and a lot of my stuff I don’t record; I test it out live. That’s how songs will flesh out, but that’s become a limited option,” they said.
I asked how they feel about the local art scene here:
“I think it’s a very potent art scene…it doesn’t really leave Pittsburgh, which is unfortunate. I love it though, I love the artists. A lot of them are best kept secrets here.” We discussed how venues often only book musicians who are from out of town, and who don’t book local bands to open their shows. Meanwhile, Pittsburgh has so many talented, local musicians who deserve the support and exposure…
Julia and I often debate about what is necessary for the progression of our art form:
“We have so many gifts to offer through art, but let’s not be completely tone deaf and daft, you know: Bada bada bada! The show must go on! Okay, relax. How ‘bout we think a little more critically, and into our heart space a little more?
“In a way, I was happy not to be working for a larger institution,” she went on, “but I didn’t feel as much a part of a crew anymore. It wasn’t the same, shared experience that I could have before: stimulus from having conversations with a lot of different people, ideation with a lot of different people. I felt a little bit like I was going crazy, trying to figure out that balance within this whole additional layer of normative thinking, the chatterbox in the brain…it was a lot. I had an anxiety attack for the first time in my life, and I didn’t even know what it was.”
Eva told me that one of the many things she learned from dancing with Twyla was “she created art everywhere, all the time. I’ve seen so many more people doing that, making space almost irrelevant, because art should exist everywhere. I thought I had all these parameters, and it turns out we don’t,” she said. I felt that as well.
“I basically relearned how to love the art of movement,” (after having retired and left the dance world “cold turkey”) “My biggest creative outlet right now is for myself, which feels foreign because we were not trained as dancers to do that. All of that felt dictated, so I have had this enormous release of old garbage because I now connect to movement in a way that feels good for myself…that love of where heart meets music, that only dance can really, fully convey…the entire body in that sphere.” I told her I had a similar reckoning, although I hadn’t vocalized it so eloquently.
“Even if you look at nature,” she said, “so much of it, we find beautiful because it’s chaos, because it’s sculpted in the way that it was meant to grow. I think art, when given the right reigns, when no one can dictate it, I think it holds that same value that nature has. Imagine the destruction of Fall; it’s literally things dying, parting, moving on…yet, it’s absolutely stunning. I think art has always been that, but humanity has a way of taking things and changing it a little bit…but yeah, art everywhere.
“…only took a pandemic to figure it out, right? I think we’re forever changed. I don’t think we’ll ever go back,” she concluded.
It has taken a lot of reflection and humility for me to realize that being an artist is one of the most grounding contributions to my life. I need to be an artist, whether I’m making a difference with it or not.
…whether I’m “good” at it or not.
…whether it is deemed “essential” or not.
It has been remarkable to see the innovation and diligence exerted to keep art, of all forms, alive during this time…on institutional, and especially personal levels. I am so grateful that these people are continuing to cultivate their artistry, no matter what…even when it’s been seemingly impossible. To all the surviving artists out there: I applaud you.