'Like a New Experience': Dancing in the Park, Free of Four Walls and a Screen

PS 89 students, from left, Gabirella Friedman, Sofia Uriburu, Leah Krutonogly and Alessia Ruello in Battery Park City's Rockefeller Park perform movements inspired by the Grace Paley poem, "At the Battery." Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

In normal times, a few kids trying some loosely choreographed moves in the outdoors would hardly be cause for notice. But these times, of course, have been anything but normal. So when four PS 89 students gathered with their dance teacher the other day in Rockefeller Park, “it was like a new experience,” as one of the young dancers, 4th-grader Sofia Uriburu, put it.

The students, Sofia Uriburu, Gabirella Friedman, Leah Krutonogly, and Alessia Ruello, members of Catherine Gallant’s after-school dance class, were performing together for the first time, unconstricted by four walls and free of their long, remote-weary separation.

The girls had worked on the moves at home during their twice-a-week class. The first piece, performed on the park’s expansive lawn, was about “challenging the space, to move in a big way even at home,” Gallant said. “We spent months together doing it in our small little spaces. You have to make adjustments so you don’t bump into the wall.”

Now, as she translated the choreography to the open air, Gallant noticed the girls didn’t move as freely as they might have before.

“I could see that making that shift, actually having space, was not so easy when you’re not used to it,” she said.

This is Poetry Month, and Gallant used the occasion to create dances in Rockefeller Park inspired by some of the poems along the park’s “Poetry Path [1].”

Like all teachers, Gallant went into remote teaching last year with no idea of how to do it. But she said she had one advantage. “I’m always so grounded in improvisation and finding new ways of doing things, it wasn’t so daunting for me,” she said. “I just thought of it as yet another challenge.”

Still, she noted, “There are some things that just do not translate.  Like, we’re not going to hold hands, right? We always have contact in our dances.”

At the conclusion of the brief outdoor performances, Gabirella Friedman recalled how she had felt cramped—and isolated— dancing at home. And now? “I really like it because I have a lot of space again. I can just move around, and talk to my friends.”

“It’s just so beautiful for the kids to have this opportunity,” Cecilia Friedman, Gabriella’s mother, added. “The face-to-face interaction with their peers, it’s so important.”