Finding Facebook and settling down is not unlike settling in to a dark auditorium. I like the feeling of being alone at home, as much as I like the moment lights go out and I feel alone in a theatre. Through a social media platform, Footnote New Zealand Dance presents a recording of a performance of Mass Solitude (群孤), choreographed by Sarah Foster-Sproull, and developed as a collaboration between the New Zealand based company and Guangdong Modern Dance Company, based in Southern China. Mass Solitude was created in Guangzhou in 2018.

This particular performance was presented in the cavernous space of Auckland’s Bruce Mason Centre in February 2019, with lighting design attributed to Low Shee Hoe 刘诗豪. The lights on my murky screen are shades of steely blue and grey, misted white, golden haze and the sudden panache of bright yellow. It is impossible for me to see who is dancing what, so I have left a full acknowledgment of the dancers above. Group work surrounds and binds the mandalas of dancers. There are sumptuous solos and intense duets. At the rim of a top lit light orb, etching the red costumes of the swirling dancers, arms reach in and out, bodies’ eddies dependent on one another.

Music, composed by Eden Mulholland takes the dancers and me, in my Ponsonby home, on an unremitting journey, unashamedly musical and avoiding crescendo. I love the slightly pixelated delayed movement that my internet entails. The dance sequences are based around a similar complex percussive texture. Though stiller in time, movements are so fast and centre stage, the dancers leave action behind before they complete them. Only the last solo deliberates stillness in boundaries set by corrugated light on the floor.

Reacting to Mass Solitude (群孤) in its movement cadence, is like breathing in a vaster purpose. This inspirational work, set in episodic phases, is a generous contribution to the human interval of the coronavirus. By watching bodies in such close connection watching each other, I exhale thoughts of humans’ bonding rather than the prevailing layered-ness of health-beckoning solitude in lockdown. That is, feelings of aspiration engendered by these dancers, are movements made to surpass the sorrow of frailer members of our global communities currently subdued and in much much more extreme isolation.

[Performer credits are here]

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