"It's not going to be back to 'normal'" says Seattle ballet dancer

Voices of the Pandemic features people in the Seattle area coping with the coronavirus outbreak.

When Pacific Northwest Ballet had to cut its season short, company member Amanda Morgan decided to use her downtime to make one-minute dance videos for Instagram.

When this happened, it was almost like, everything had to stop and it gave me a lot of time to think"What do I really want to do and what do I want to say to the dance world? What do I want to make and create with other artists?"

Like I know so many people are going to post these photos and be so sad that they’re not onstage and this and that, and I was just like, "Why don’t we take that aspect and change it into something positive and just have everyone dancing?" And just do a kind of one minute jam session so that when people go on Instagram they don’t just see all these sad posts about what it used to be.

I’m doing this for people to just kinda stay positive and inspired, but I’m also doing it for me because I just want to dance.

This is the first time that dance is accessible to every type of person. Because it’s on the internet, through social media, and it’s free! I really care about making the arts accessible to every type of person, because I want to see a lot more diversity in dance and in art.

Minority artists are not valued as much in Seattle and they need to be.

I don’t have a big platform yet, but I’m hoping once I get to that point, I’m going to make sure to say what I believe in and stand up for what I believe in and try to change as much as I can.

It’s not going to be back to normal. I don’t know if it ever will be in that normal sense that it was before all of this. There were some things about that normal that I didn’t like. I think it didn’t include every type of person, I think certain things were valued more than others. And, I’m hoping that going into this next phase after all this, it’ll be a little bit more connected.