Our piece was a durational work split between two afternoons. We were part of an open air art walk hosted by Arts Gowanus—a yearly open studio program’s response to honoring arts and audiences during the pandemic. We were given a corner and paired with a company that allowed us to draw in chalk on their green construction fencing. We improvised for six hours each afternoon. I was dancing and Eric was on trumpet, percussion, synthesizer, and vocals. The rules we established were these: we start with improvisation. At any point we find a natural pause we signal each other to draw. The drawing is a graphic and instructional score of what we just did. After drawing we were to start again to repeat what we had done from the score, and then continue on until the next pause. In time we were working together and, influenced by the passersby, responded to the environment. Over time a live score emerged that was constantly acquiring new information, marks, and meaning. We went back to the same drawing the second day and picked up where we left off.

One of the biggest challenges was pushing past fatigue. The score helped us do that in that we could always look at the drawing for information about where we had been or where to go next. What we honed in on was that past exhaustion our improvisational choices were deeper and more authentic. We lacked the energy to dictate to ourselves or run through our habitual performative practices. Each day we got to a worn down place together where we could be more acutely present. We built patterns of movement and interaction in time and over time that we followed again and again like a map of who we were moment to moment.

To us it was playful and abundant, while mirroring the cyclical nature of the quarantine we, as a global community, had been confronting. We wanted to acknowledge the ways we had all been looking for newness and freshness in the repetition of similar days and we wanted to accumulate gestures over time in a way that would not actually allow for us to record and keep. Our final act was to wash the wall of it’s drawing, letting what had occurred be as fleeting as ourselves.