Journey vs. Destination

At a dance convention I attended a few months ago, a choreographer shared a quote with us that I would later find oddly applicable in my life. In between phrase work in the contemporary class, Tessandra Chavez, a renowned choreographer, shared her insight about the dance industry. “You don’t win the award for the performance;” she said to the room of 100+ young dancers, “You win it for the rehearsals.” She went onto explain that when she won Emmys for her choreography, it wasn’t about the way her dancers performed in a given music video or “World of Dance” episode; it was about the hours they spent working through the movement and learning from each other. 

Just two months later, my dance conventions would be canceled. My weekly ballet, jazz, and contemporary classes would continue over Zoom. My body once accustomed to the Marley dance floors and large spaces would have to learn to work the same way in my smaller, carpeted basement.

In what seemed to be almost immediate, as the rest of the world shut down, every activity you could think of shut down as well. It couldn’t matter less how hard a theatre company worked on its musical or how passionate an athlete was. Every sport or activity that could result in the gathering of people will not see a tangible finish. 

Many programs have struggled with what to do and how to fix this. How will we celebrate our spring sports seniors? How will our musicians take their final bows? How will our graduates receive their diplomas? 

They won’t. And there’s no solution for this. 

When one sees the disappearance of a finishing moment, it’s easy to forget about the preparation behind it. I know that for me, seeing my dance performances canceled indefinitely was a punch to a stomach, and it was easy to say my hours in the studio had gone to waste. Really, though, there is a more holistic way of looking at this. I learned more from my rehearsals than I ever will in a performance. 

This logic can be applied to just about everything cancelled and postponed due to COVID-19. Maybe our finals for school were cancelled, but that does not cancel out the time we spent inside the classroom learning the material. 

We as humans are such problem-solvers that we feel as though everything must have a start and finish, and that everything unfortunate must be fixed. There’s no fix to missing out on your last day of school or a huddle before a game. We can try and come up with Zoom alternatives, but that’s just missing the point. 
Our time in quarantine is a journey itself. We are all so focused on pushing towards the “end” of our time at home and looking for that light at the end of the tunnel, but why? We're all on a journey where we're learning to dance in our basements. We continue pushing against an invisible enemy in search for final gratification, but, in reality, that satisfying moment may never happen. Instead of working for an end, we should embrace this as an opportunity to work to get better without a finish line to cross. Ultimately, it was never about the culminating moment anyway.