It started with a question: How can we create a shared space in two completely isolated spaces?
Sara Outing and I were planning on doing an ArtDate together before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. We'd met to talk about her creating a set for my piece תהום– The Chasm. Doing an ArtDate would be a way in to collaborating together. Then, life changed.
Quarantined, I suspended work on The Chasm after a few frustrating rehearsals where I felt like I was working on something from another time. Sara and I decided to move forward with our ArtDate, my first virtual collaboration in a while.
From the desire to create shared space between us and a shared desire for play and adventure, we made this video.
It was so delightful to play and create, pulling things from our closet and creating sets for ourselves. I decided, on a whim, to send the video to my mother, Suzanne Bernstein, and see if she wanted to create a soundscape for it (a surprise for Sara). In a break between recordings, my mother read this letter to The New Yorker about Albert Camus' novel The Plague. The letter writer, Kyra G. Morris, points out a scene where the protagonists go swimming and, in freeing their minds and moving together, find respite from the pain of the historic moment. Morris says "Camus calls this 'a happiness that forgot nothing.'"
I am so grateful for the opportunity to continue to collaborate across distance. If you'd like to conduct an ArtDate with me or someone else, please email me: m.s.coppersmith@gmail.com.
P.S. I forgot to put him in the credits, but yes, my cat Kairos does make a cameo appearance.
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