NEW YORK, NY.- Keely Garfield is used to the questions. How is a dancer a chaplain? How is a chaplain a dancer?

For her they are intertwined.

“It’s all centered in the body,” she said, “and a deep curiosity about what it means to be embodied and in a body, which is a weird, weird thing.”

In her dance life, Garfield has long created works — dreamlike, full-bodied, strikingly unruly — that have often focused, no matter how indirectly, on what it is to be human. Beyond dance, she has explored an array of mind and body traditions including yoga and Zen Buddhism, which has led to her current position as a chaplain in end-of-life and trauma care at a community hospital in Brooklyn.

Garfield knows there is some confusion around just what a chaplain is: a person who supports the spiritual and emotional needs of patients and their loved ones whether they identify as religious or not.

“There’s still a pretty broad misconception or conception that the chaplain,” she said, “runs around waving magic sticks and magic water.”

While chaplains provide spiritual care, they are also full members of the clinical medical team who undergo rigorous training. That involves, Garfield said, “competencies such as presence, active listening, compassionate awareness, meaning making, facilitating expression of feelings.”

This is also how Garfield, a veteran New York choreographer who was born in London, approaches dance. In her surreal landscapes, dignity and daring hold equal weight. Living takes bravery, and so does the kind of dancing she embraces: vulnerable, brash and unafraid to expose the rawest of nerves.

Her new work, “The Invisible Project,” which opens Friday at NYU Skirball, is a dance, but it is also informed by her chaplaincy work, which began in 2019. How could one not affect the other? Her body is the material for both. She cited a Zen koan that she’s been thinking about lately: How is it when the tree withers and the leaves fall? Body exposed in the golden wind.

“That could be the kind of theme of my life: Body exposed in the golden wind,” she said. “That’s my life. And I think that there’s a very strong expression of that in this piece.”

“The Invisible Project” makes things that are intangible — patience, rest, endurance — visible through dancing. Joining Garfield is an extraordinary cast of collaborators: Paul Hamilton, Molly Lieber, Angie Pittman and Opal Ingle. They began making the dance over Zoom during the pandemic shutdown, but it has developed and changed in the studio, Pittman said, just as their lives have, especially Garfield’s. She was a frontline hospital worker during the early days of the pandemic.

“It’s a lot to hold so many people’s stories in your body,” Pittman said, “and so many people close to passing, or in crisis or trauma, in your body. I can feel it from her in the room. So I think it’s definitely affected and shifted how she’s made decisions and how she makes the work.

“Her intuition is strong. I still feel her choreographic pull and her choreographic listening through it all.”

One of the first dances in “Invisible Project” is a walking pattern that requires just that — deep listening — if the performers are to stay connected. While it’s simple, it’s also “confoundingly challenging to so-called get right,” Garfield said. “The piece is actually only doable, achievable, if we practice it with patience, which is a funny thing to do onstage.”

Patience is essential for the audience, too.

“It’s not just us,” she said. “Maybe someone will be impatient. And sometimes in the midst of it, I’m like, ‘Can we get to the end of this?’”

Garfield isn’t fooling herself.

“I know that there are sections where people will be like, ‘I can’t stand this,’” she said. “I don’t care. And I don’t mean I don’t care. I’m a chaplain. I care. I mean, yeah, it’s suffering, and lean in. Afterward, you’ll get a glass of wine. You talk about something else. It’ll be just fine. You’ll be fine.”




The dancers also explore the notion of rest: specifically, Garfield said, practicing it as a form of activism.

“As performers, it’s an emotional experience,” she said. “It’s confusing; it’s grounding. It’s risky because it is in the setting of performance.”

Rest relates to her chaplaincy work, which began with an internship and residency at Mount Sinai Hospital.

“It is not the people who are burned out at the hospital that have time to rest,” she said. “And most of the patients in the hospital are not there because they have been having a very nice life where they’ve been resting. Rest has not been part of what has contributed to their illness or circumstances. So who gets the rest and who doesn’t?”

There are faster sections, too, like one she calls airplane, which features a series of jumps. Another part, a duet for Lieber and Pittman — two astonishingly grounded dancers — started out fast and frenetic but has been slowed down.

“Like underwater slowed it down,” Garfield said. “The dance was invisible; the actual dance was inside of the first.”

In a way, “Invisible Project” is an invitation to look more closely, to practice paying attention. If during the pandemic many people were forced to stay inside and embrace stillness, the lucky ones were those who could find solace in exploring the interior, seemingly invisible parts of themselves. Garfield’s dance — and its title — is an opportunity to take a breath and to remember what you discovered about yourself.

While “it’s not a sad piece,” Garfield said, it does dig deep. “But that’s good,” she added.

“What are we going to do, pretend that nothing just happened? It’s still happening. And it’s not a dance about COVID and yet it’s a dance made in the context of COVID.”

The score, by Jeff Berman, contains electronic soundscapes, as well as two original songs written by him and Garfield that tap into her experience of being a chaplain. One song at the start, she said, acts as “a little container for the stories of my patients.”

There is an unspoken relationship between the words “patience” and “patient” in “Invisible Project.” The real work of a chaplain, Garfield said, is to almost become invisible. It comes down to how present she can be, how well she can listen. She finds it difficult to discuss her experiences without it seeming performative. If she needs to talk about that work, she knows she can do that with other chaplains. At this point, it’s too soon and too hard to reflect on what’s happened.

“But I do think that this dance is a dance that is not shying away from the experiences we’ve been through,” she said.

It’s a crystallization of certain acts: noticing, listening, attending. What if, Garfield wonders, the processes behind making a dance and being a chaplain were simply how everyone lived?

“It’s the work,” she said, “of being a human being.”

And despite the seriousness of that work, Garfield remains herself — sharp, irreverent and always questioning.

“Even though I’m a Buddhist, I don’t believe in reincarnation,” she said. “I don’t believe in anything. The whole meditation thing is extremely annoying, because it’s been brought to us with, you know, this is how you will become peaceful and you will change your mind. And it’s not that. It’s really about Oh, rage! Hello, rage.”

She’s experienced other feelings, too. “Invisible Project” has also put Garfield back in touch with her deep reverence for dance — what it is to dance and to make dance.

“I’ve thought for a long time that choreography is simply a vehicle for dancing,” she said. “The choreography is interesting and needs to be attended to, but it’s actually what happens inside of it that matters.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.