Kaitlin Fox and Lindsey Jennings met at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where they completed their MFA and BFA in Dance (respectively) in 2020. They have danced together and shared processes for 3+ years and continue to find overlap in their understandings of dance, trauma, the body, and humor. Kaitlin currently resides on the occupied land of the Penobscot people, known as Mount Desert Island, Maine where she works as a residential painter, studying the somatics of manual labor and durational movement. Lindsey lives on the unseated land of the Lenape people, now called Brooklyn, New York, where she dances, collages, writes, and runs too many social media accounts.

Meet me at the tennis courts is a product of dance-making within the restrictions of the pandemic. Kaitlin and Lindsey came together for a brief COVID-safe residency in Maine with plans to work on separate solo projects in the same time and space. Once in the studio together and held in the same sonic environment, these plans for independent trajectories quickly fell aside. The communion of two bodies in space supported by rhythm, familiar movement vocabularies, and a desire for brief collaboration felt more a priority -- being able to dance with somebody felt like the rarest gift that needed to be honored. 

 

This minimal resource production was made out of desire and not necessity. It is a brief meeting up of rhythm and gesture that transforms individual initiation to collective choice-making, weight shifts, and focus. The face becomes an important and luxurious communication tool in the duet, as the jaw and mouth are restricted by mask-wearing, a normal offering of social cues that help one gauge safety that has now become inaccessible. Thus, where do we find safety? In rhythm? In stride?

 

This ever-shifting and candid tennis court duet serves as a trailer for what dance can look and feel like during a moment when time and space for process is scarce. It does not seek to inflate beyond what was capable of the moment. It is unadorned in body, costume, filming, editing and sound, but the work is critically considered, organized, and cohesive. Kaitlin and Lindsey initiate choreography from the constraints of the pandemic, inviting both restriction and longing to be visible in their bodies.