Shay Kuebler never wanted to make a show about the COVID-19 pandemic. Back in 2018, when he started developing a dance performance around ideas of isolation and loneliness, he was thinking instead about how essential social bonds are to the experience of being human. He was considering how everything from individualism and corporate success to social media and artificial intelligence can impact those bonds.
When the pandemic happened in 2020, it presented him with a challenge in terms of not staging a “pandemic performance.” However, those years also underscored the issues Kuebler was looking at with Momentum of Isolation and may have made people more open to a show examining them.
He says putting the show together from 2018 to 2020 was profound for him as a creator because he was doing it at a time when everyone in his industry was also grappling with being unable to perform live and wondering whether their careers actually mattered.
The success of the show has given them an answer.
Since premiering in 2021, Momentum of Isolation has travelled across the U.S. and Canada, and as far abroad as Austria. On October 23, Yukoners can see Shay Kuebler and Radical System Art bring it to the main stage at the Yukon Arts Centre.
Over the course of the show, seven performers tell a story through solo and group performances that are highly physical (Kuebler credits this, in part, to his background in both dance and martial arts) and sometimes satirical.
For instance, there’s a scene based on the dating app, Tinder, where a dancer does quick duets with a circle of other dancers before “swiping left” and sending their one-time partners spinning off across the stage.
There’s another social media scene that plays out sort of like a gameshow, skewering the idea that everyone online is putting the most extreme versions of themselves out there in a way that feels competitive. Who’s the most successful? The happiest? The saddest?
Kuebler says the show’s lens on social media appeals to younger audiences (he’s taken the show to high schools as well as theatres), but that he’s also received messages from seniors about the way Momentum of Isolation resonates with them.
That’s the kind of broad audience base he wants. Kuebler says one of his main career goals over the last 10 years has been to get “non-dance audiences” out to performances. Working as a creative director, show director, artistic director and choreographer, he’s tried to develop work that’s accessible, athletic and relevant. He thinks he’s done that with Momentum of Isolation. The physical component of the show reaches people on a basic, visceral level, he says, because he looks at movement as a language, and bodies as instruments.
“I’m always looking for ways for the physical vocabulary to translate,” he says. “For me, it’s always a fun balance of exploring how the dancing body, with its training and capabilities, can become a storyteller.”
With this story, the narrative isn’t so shrouded in mystery and hidden meaning that you need an arts degree to understand it. There are unexpected turns in the tale, he says, but audiences understand where they came from and where they go.
In the end, he says the goal isn’t to solve the problem of loneliness, or offer solutions to isolation—Kuebler never wants to make work that acts as a public service announcement—because he doesn’t think there is a perfect answer.
“I want us to step away from the show willing to talk about this more,” he says. “Meaningful connection gives us purpose … connection is vital to humanity. It’s what makes us human.”
Go to yukonartscentre.com/whats-on to purchase tickets.