When I worked at Willowbrook Arts Camp a few summers back, the Native American Arts specialists—Harold and his daughter Harmony—would always treat the kids to a performance of the Jingle Dress Dance. We all gathered under the main tent to watch and listen. Harold struck a big drum, and it rang deep as he sang. Harmony danced in a skipping motion, her dress layered in metal cones that shook like sleigh bells—incongruous and beautiful in the July heat.
Apparently, the Jingle Dress Dance originated around the time of the 1918 influenza pandemic. A man from the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe had a recurring dream of four women dancing in differently colored dresses, covered in “little metal pieces.” He told his wife, and the dresses were made, and the dance learned—and a young girl who’d been struck ill rose from her fever to dance along. A healing ritual was born from tobacco-can lids, radically repurposed to make the first jingle cones.
A virus is invisible, and silent. So we look and listen more carefully. Walking through my neighborhood, my ears tune to every footfall. I sense the slightest break in my peripheral vision—if you’re walking, too, I might feel your presence before we’re even on the same street. Everything is fainter, but there is still sound and movement. Music is vibrating air, and dance its engine. Its waves travel to touch us, even when we can’t touch each other. And for now, that has to be enough. The beating drum. The ringing metal. The remembered connection through space, tangible in its intangibility, as we all move through this together.
[image c/o Smithsonian]
