What does patience mean in a pandemic? Ryan McNamara offers one answer with “Fleshcore” (above), a three-minute video whose percussive audio remixes the hold music that callers endure when trying to file unemployment claims with the New York State Department of Labor. McNamara doesn’t appear in his new piece, but he is a magnetic performer in his own right—a dancer with no formal training who is at his most inventive when he’s thinking about bodies as bridges between physical and virtual worlds. In the slight but touching “Fleshcore,” an online commission for the Guggenheim’s “Works & Process” series, McNamara unites nine of his longtime collaborators—Kim Brandt, Burr Johnson, Kyli Kleven, Mickey Mahar, Jen Rosenblit, Quenton Stuckey, Brandon Washington, Josh Weidenmiller, and Emily Wexler—by layering choreographed movements that each dancer performed for the camera in isolation. As all the faces, fingers, torsos, and feet merge, trancelike, into one exquisite corps de ballet, the solitary confinement of quarantine gives way to the tenderness of human contact.
— Andrea K. Scott, The New Yorker