Four image pairs have been adapted from a performance originally commissioned by the Toronto Dance Theatre as a choreography for a solo dancer. Archival photographs on the left side of the images document moments of exhaustion during depression-era dance marathon contests in the 1920s and 1930s, in which the male participant is asleep while being fully supported by his female partner. For A Rest, dancer James Phillips re-enacted those poses as a cycle of endurance feats, holding as motionless as possible for extended durations. Stances that are restful when buttressed by a partner become unsustainable stress positions that cause the solitary body to strain. The poses progress in terms of difficulty, culminating in a final posture that is anything but restful; struggling against gravity, the dancer's body shakes and finally collapses. This is a dance comprised of involuntary movements, charting the forfeiture of control as fatigue wins out over the performer's skill and training.

Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, these images—produced well before the virus’s discovery and global spread—take on new significance. Fatigued bodies straining against their own precarious positions become legible as stand-ins for the cumulative effects of depression, isolation, remote working and learning, job and housing insecurity, and ongoing social and economic collapse. In the performance images, the absent support figure gestures to the often unseen, undervalued, and gendered work of affective and caring labour: frontline healthcare, childcare, eldercare, janitorial, grocery, and domestic work that is risky, chronically underpaid, and overwhelmingly reliant on a labour force of women (with Black and racialized women making up a significant proportion of the workforce). Amidst widespread unsteadiness, how can we bring our reliance upon one another into view?