AUDIENCE REVIEW: Alison Cook Beatty Dance stays inspired through Covid-19!
Company:
Alison Cook Beatty Dance
Performance Date:
Summer 2020-Winter 2021
Freeform Review:
During the 2020-2021 Covid-19 pandemic, the New York-based modern dance company Alison Cook Beatty Dance found an inspired way to keep dancing and performing original works. Dancers must dance, and they must dance while young. And so, each member of the intrepid Alison Cook Beatty Dance nonprofit dance company rehearsed digitally, quarantined, and then gathered throughout the year to film a series of performance-happenings that, like a tarantella, were employed to resist the ongoing reality of encroaching disease. They turned hauntingly empty NYC sites into performance spaces. An abandoned Central Park ball field came alive with their balletic summer baseball game; an open church brimmed with dancing holiday worshipers; a snowy section of Central Park became the dancer’s winter playground and a Harlem Brownstown’s stoop, and hard-wood interior flooring provided an impromptu dance party. While a normally artistically brimming New York City endured isolation, depression, and ever-present death, Alison Cook-Beatty and her irrepressible troupe demonstrated that art is truly a dormant garden waiting for its spring.
Sheila Hickey Garvey, Ph.D.
Professor Emerita of Theatre, Southern Connecticut State University
Author: Circle in the Square Theatre, a Comprehensive History
Author:
Sheila Hickey Garvey
Photo Credit:
Michael Feigenbaum
