Miranda Quinn | Life After Juilliard

Creating ways to be together

The week of my graduation, I was privileged to join the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Having finished my first season as a temporary member, I am eager to return for my second season—as a full company member. These months in quarantine have proved to be difficult—being away from the company, the studio, and the stage. Fortunately, I’ve been able to take advantage of spending this time with my family and our pets as well as giving more time to hobbies that bring me joy and peace. Lots of crafting, cooking, and reorganizing going on here!

Being unable to work in-person together, my coworkers and I have been doing our best to keep each other inspired, creative, hopeful, and productive. Our mission at Ailey is always to give dance back to the people from which it came, and to do that we’ve been creating videos of ourselves dancing “together” at home to share on social media. The first video we created was from Ailey’s iconic Revelations. I proposed the idea after imagining us all in our own squares quarantining, but looking like the theme song of The Brady Bunch. The video is of the “I Been ’Buked” section of the ballet, in which we portray an unwavering resilience in the face of communal suffering and oppression—quite fitting for the current state of the world. We’ve gone on to bring to life many more videos like it so that we can spread hope, joy, and empathy through a language without words.

I’ll admit it’s been tough to stay motivated to dance when there’s no one to dance with in-person, but Ailey gives me a platform to create new ways to be together in spirit until we can return to some form of normalcy.
Miranda Quinn (BFA ’19, dance)