TACTUS FALL2021
FINDING CONNECTION AGAIN Written by Nicola Bertoni Dedmon Western Region Repertoire Specific R&R Chair I am sitting down to write this in early July, a time during which I would typically be finishing up my repertoire selections for the following year and planning for the year’s events. As one of the Repertoire and Resources Coordinators, you might expect to hear from me regarding practical issues related to programming or something similar; however, it would feel odd to write about such topics when many of us are struggling to see a clear and realistic picture of what this year will look like. We’ve endured more than a year of sleepless nights grappling with seemingly unsolvable dilemmas such as recruiting, keeping up with ever-changing health guidelines, debating internal choir policies like mask or vaccine mandates, etc. These very real and anxietyproducing issues affecting our daily operations can be very distracting; however, I would like to pose a broader question to perhaps recalibrate our mindset when considering this impending return to the choral rehearsal room: how can we feel connected—not just socially, but also physically—as a community again? I don’t need to spend too much time listing all the different ways this pandemic has hurt the choral community—we are deeply and painfully aware. It has been a nightmare, filled with death, illness, isolation, deep economic hardships, psychological crises, and grief. Early on, due to several tragic super-spreading events, choral singing was identified as a dangerous activity that is very efficient in spreading an airborne virus. For a lot of us, this changed our calculus. Almost overnight, we were stripped of not only our careers as we knew them, but also of our passion. “Zoom Choir” was too often demoralizing. Masked and distanced outdoor rehearsals, however grateful we were for them, felt too sterile and devoid of the connection we once enjoyed.
of returning to in-person rehearsals gave me acute cognitive dissonance because even though I yearned for it so deeply, I also feared what might happen if we tried it. When eventually my choirs did return to in-person rehearsals, there were so many safety protocols in place that this fear of human contact wasn’t exactly alleviated. For months on end, we had essentially conditioned ourselves to avoid human contact, which inevitably led us to the point where it was easy to view other people as vectors of disease, rather than fellow community members. The intent behind this conditioning was indeed an altruistic and necessary one at the time—to avoid spreading a dangerous novel pathogen!—yet I do believe that now, in a post-vaccine United States, we should acknowledge that we may need to un-learn some of these habits – which in the extreme can seem unhealthy and borderline survivalist –as we attempt to return to a place of connectedness and empathy within our choirs. This past winter, we were given the greatest gift from our scientific community that we could possibly be given—the existence and availability of not just one, but three highly effective, very safe vaccines in the U.S. that protect us against serious consequences of COVID-19. We now live in a world where we have the power to prevent COVID deaths, and the risk of serious illness is remarkably lower than it was before vaccination.
"HOW CAN WE FEEL CONNECTED - NOT JUST SOCIALLY, BUT ALSO PHYSICALLY - AS A COMMUNITY AGAIN?"
Yet, for many of us, underneath our desire to return was also, paradoxically, a deep sense of fear and anxiety about physical connection with others. I can speak from personal experience: for much of 2020, I would feel physical sensations of a fight-or-flight stress response every time I came close to another person. The thought 8
