Gold Collective comes together annually in order to create, curate and produce the Gold Series. The series is an experimental dance event connecting artists within our larger performance community, and works that speak to each other as they address the ever-changing theme of gold. Each year the Gold Collective offers a work wherein we ask, what is gold now? In 2020, we considered what we found most valuable: the gold at home, resting within, engaging in the world, alone together, even as balance became difficult to maintain amidst the challenging events of a global pandemic, necessary BLM protests, and the presidential election. Since we weren’t able to create work for live performance or share space and practice together, the Gold Collective collaborated with filmmaker Taso Papadakis and our new dance film ALTARS was conceived.

Creating solo scores as gifts to each other in order to keep dancing through Stay-At-Home orders, ALTARS is a meditation on presence and being together while being apart. We asked: How can we remain present and responsive to our inner and outer environments in a quarantined world? What does it mean to be masked and unmasked? How do we continue to connect, and how do we go on?

After a month of individual practice, Taso Papadakis filmed each performer dancing in the different spaces we’ve been inhabiting since the shut-downs in Los Angeles. Shifting from one space to another and back again, ALTARS begins with Carol McDowell running into the Venice Beach sunset wearing a surgical mask with gold streamers whipping behind in a high wind. Cut to Daniel Miramontes dancing on the edge of the L.A. basin with the buildings of downtown shrouded in the mist below. Wearing a gold crown, Madison Clark wrestles a mattress in her apartment bedroom. As if to conjur the wind, alexx shilling dances next to a found altar along the edge of Ballona Creek leading to the sea. In the rain, Sarah Leddy stomps and screams a rage dance up a steep hill in Glassell Park. At the top, she stops still and looks upward. The sun breaks through gray clouds; she smiles, and later we learned that this is the moment Joe Biden was announced as President-Elect of the United States of America.