Page - 207 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/01

my surroundings, staring blankly at the wide horizon of nothing-in-particu- lar-ness around me, and reading children’s books. Perhaps, then, Johnson’s performance is a visual representation of many of our journeys through 2020. In fact, we share a lot in common with the Works & Process performers. Like them, we are trying to navigate the challenge of finding new ways of being-and-moving-in-the-world. Our normal work- and life-spaces have been overturned, locked down, closed. We are trying to find our footing on new ground, aware at all times that one wrong step could end up costing us dearly. We are all, like Roberts, disoriented. And yet we forge ahead. The curtain is already up; it always is. We are on stage. We are who we perform ourselves to be: what new characterizations have we discovered within ourselves as we’ve moved through our own quarantines? Limitation is the very condition of possibility. Our quarantine spaces are stages of sorts. Those spaces don’t exist some- where out there, but are constituted by our very movements within them. If we adhere to the strict recommendations laid down by the Centers for Disease Control, then our performance space spans the roughly six-foot dis- tance between us. Dancer Gabriel Lamb explored this theme explicitly in her piece “5x8”, named after the dimensions of the Persian rug on which she danced around her Hamilton Heights neighborhood.6 During her five-and-a- half-minute performance, the camera captured Lamb dancing fluidly in sev- eral different locations, never straying, however, beyond the boundaries of the rug beneath her feet. “Home and the outdoors have been our refuges during this time of uncertainty”, she wrote in the accompanying Artist Note, “so there was a peculiar logic in the combination.” Home, in other words, is often thought of in opposition to that which is outside of it. Yet what happens when we relocate the most intimate spaces of our home outdoors? Is home something we carry with us, like a rectangular piece of fabric? Or maybe home is the musical setting that continues to play within us as we move be- tween both spaces. Lamb’s project is different from many of the others because its compila- tion was public, a fact of which she gradually became more aware during the filming process. “During my shoot with cinematographer Melissa Wu, I noticed that outdoor rug dancing provokes a lot of curiosity in passers-by”, she writes in her Artist Note. While New York City has been off and on under 6 Gabrielle Lamb, “5x8”, 3 August 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbtf-2_kl_k [accessed 5 January 2021]. Dance Video Review: Works & Process Artists (WPA) | 207www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/1, 205–210