This edited collection gathers UK and international artists, academics, practitioners, and researchers in the fields of contemporary performance, dance, and live art to offer creative-critical responses to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their work.
Themes addressed in these case studies include the ways in which liveness functions across digital platforms, the new demands on audiences and performance-makers, and the impact on international festivals as the digital removes geographical and locational restrictions. Brought together, these examples capture the creative activity and output that this unexpected cultural moment has provoked. Creative-critical responses interrogate what the global pandemic has taught us about what it is to make live work during lockdown and explore what the future of performance-making in a post-COVID world might look like.
For all scholars and performance-makers whose work brings them into the sphere of contemporary art and culture, this is an essential and stimulating account of practice at the beginning of the 2020s.
Introducing Performance in a Pandemic: Laura Bissell and Lucy Weir
I. Precarity and Vulnerability
1. Katherine Nolan: Life on Pause: Entanglements of the Maternal and the Mortal in a Global Pandemic
2. Lito Tsitsou: The Impact of COVID-19 on Freelance Contemporary Dance Work: Precarity and the Vulnerabilities of the Dancing Body
3. Denise Espírito Santo and David Gutiérrez Castañeda: Embrace your Vulnerability: Cultivating Art, Theatricality and Performativity in Times of Catastrophe
4. Judd Morrissey & Mark Jeffery (ATOM-r) in collaboration with Abraham Avnisan: The Tenders: Cover to Cover – Liner Notes
II. Art in an Emergency: “It’s work”
5. Shona Macnaughton: Here to Deliver: Conversations with the Ghosts of Gig Work
6. Marc Silberschatz: Exploring Mars and other Impossibilities: Liveness as Labour
7. Chris Elsden, Diwen Yu, Benedetta Piccio, Ingi Helgason, Melissa Terras: Recorded Performance as Digital Content: Perspectives from Fringe 2020
III. Outreach and Inclusion
8. Sarah Bartley in conversation with Anna Herrmann: ‘How we open the doors to a community’: Creative collaborations and aesthetic strategies in social isolation
9. Rebecca Stancliffe: Mediating experience: Online community Arts Participation, a Postphenomenological Framing
10. Rachel Clive in collaboration with Hughie McIntyre, Euan Hayton, Chloe Maxwell and Alison Mackenzie: not panicky
11. Gudrun Soley Sigurdardottir: Invitation: On making together, apart
IV. Curation: Performing the Archive
12. Judit Bodor: Presence at a Distance: Alastair MacLennan and Performing Drawing in Lockdown
13. Tamsin Hong: Recording My Body, My Archive at Tate Modern: A Collision Course of Curating on the Eve of COVID-19
14. Kate Craddock: Curating Community and Connection in a Crisis: GIFT 2020
Postscript: Laura Bissell and Lucy Weir
Biography
Laura Bissell is Interim Head of Contemporary Performance Practice and Lecturer in Research at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
Lucy Weir is Chancellor’s Fellow in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh, where she specialises in dance and performance studies.
