How Jana Harper Reimagined a Performance Piece in Response to COVID-19

Even before Jana Harper’s performance piece, This Holding, transitioned from a staged presentation to a video, it featured prescient themes of social isolation. 

“The piece started with a question: What are the burdens we carry?” the artist and Vanderbilt professor tells the Scene. That question led to a series of follow-ups, she explains — like what those burdens might look like in a partnership, in a family, in a community. 

Harper is an artist who is always questioning, in her work and also in conversation — she drops several open-ended questions into our interview, and she enjoys nudging people to think deeply and reach their own conclusions. That fluidity of thought served her well when it came time to reimagine This Holding for a post-pandemic audience. 

“The transition to video raised some new questions and interesting challenges,” Harper says. “Like where can you shoot in a city that’s shut down? Where can you gather if not on public property? How do you choreograph a dance for people who can’t touch?”

This Holding was originally conceived for the stage — it was intended to be a live performance with dancers engaging with sculptural objects along with musicians playing an original score live. Harper had already performed a version of the piece at the Havana Biennial in 2019, and had received funding from multiple entities, including Metro Arts and the National Endowment of the Arts, to perform it onstage at OZ Arts this spring. So when the news about COVID-19 and the isolation it necessitated began to spread, Harper was concerned — and not only for herself. Eight full-time dancers were depending on weekly checks, she says, not to mention the choreographer and musicians she’d partnered with.

But Harper decided the work could be just as effective, and maybe even more effective, if it were adapted for video and made available to stream online. She worked with her collaborators — choreographer Rebecca Steinberg, musician Moksha Sommer and filmmaker Sam Boyette — and created a brand-new work that built on her original concept but was shot, edited, mastered and mixed during the pandemic. The result is a uniquely current piece of art — debuting Friday night via OZ Arts’ YouTube and Facebook pages — that is at once timeless and completely of our time.

There are five scenes in This Holding: Traces of Contact, and only one of them features people touching — those are dancers who had been sheltering in place together. Seeing people touch, even on screen, has added weight now. It’s similar to the way seeing shots of the Twin Towers can take you out of a movie scene — it’s something that once felt commonplace, but now seems ominous and strange. Creating a work during a global pandemic gives the artist insight into those kinds of small, sometimes temporary phenomena. Another detail Harper has watched in the wake of COVID-19 is our heightened sense of the passage of time during the day. 

“The hours of the day have taken on new and different meanings,” she says. “And so when we were planning the shoot, we planned each of the five scenes for a different time of day, and were really thinking, ‘What’s the feeling right now in the morning?’ ‘What’s the feeling right now at night, when your thoughts are racing and you can’t sleep?’ ‘What’s the feeling of the middle of the day when you’re just trying to go through the motions and end the day?’ All those considerations have gone into the work now.

“My biggest hope is that people see themselves in it, and recognize that they’re not alone,” Harper says. “This is a kind of lonely moment, and we’re spending so much time trying to be connected online. But I hope that this resonates in the body, so that people can feel less alone inside their bodies when they watch it.”