Locked-In Dance: Reflections on the Pandemic Experience

This essay documents and analyzes dance practices during the COVID-19 lockdown in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The aim of the paper is to investigate corporeality in lockdown through dancers’ own accounts. The essay uses the concept of ‘thinking through the body’ to conceptualize the experiences described in the interviews by performers and dance practitioners, including both professional and non-professional dancers. The author employs anthropological methods, including recorded semi-structured interviews with practitioners in the field, as well as auto-ethnography, to explore practices of dance within dancers’ living spaces. The analysis suggests that the lockdown of spring–summer 2020 provoked a bodily rethinking of the living space, and a reconsidering of people’s bodily relations with watched choreography and relationships with their bodies in general.