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Scene - 1-2: Performance in the Pandemic, Dec 2022

Volume 10 Number 1

1-2: Performance in the Pandemic, Dec 2022

  • Editorial

      • Performance in the pandemic

        https://doi.org/10.1386/scene_00043_2

        The in-person assumptions of social experience, of performances and performers of all sorts, was changed by the pandemic. From being high on the list of activities to shut down at the start to being amongst the last sanctioned to resume, the traditions of performance derived from centuries of practice took a beating. Accompanying this were alternatives to going dark. There were already substitutes for in-person theatrical experiences in films, games and images. New outlets included online presentations, revisiting recent (and older) recordings, TikTok challenges, internet performances, socially distanced work, the use of PPE in costume and character, shows on Zoom, positing new ways to engage with performance. Technological enhancement reduced distances between people, solutions were found to latency issues, training continued online, the quality of home cameras and sound improved, and a redistribution of who and how to perform, for how long and to what audience with what skills and in what location emerged to reassert the sense of performance and reset the context. The resulting collection in this volume is an account of the variety of ways the pandemic affected the concept of performance. Time will tell whether the strategies and devices resorted to and collected here will sweep away centuries of traditional performance, whether they will find themselves incorporated into that tradition or if they will branch off on their own. But there is no doubting the imagination applied, not just in these examples but in many more worthy of collection. The instinct to make and perform was not snuffed out by the pandemic and its lockdowns, that the acts of creativity seen here are as essential to cultural continuity as finding a vaccine.

  • New Models

      • https://doi.org/10.1386/scene_00044_1

        There can be little disagreement that the pandemic disproportionately affected the arts. Whilst it removed livelihoods and purpose for many overnight, it afforded the performance industry a pause in which many thought about what and who the industry was for. The rise of streaming and online cultural activity – necessitated by governmental indicatives and changing social responsibilities – created a new type of audience and, it is argued here, the beginnings and conditions for a new genre and/or way of making work. This article argues that the ‘liveness’ of performance art is key to the essence of performing and that the streaming of ‘past glories’ did not give audiences and creatives what they needed and wanted from interactions and cultural product. In order to see positives in a potentially negative situation, a new genre – here named – is suggested, that democratizes, empowers, facilitates and builds creative culture for artists and audiences alike. Using tropes from theatre, film and streaming, presents provocations to posit a new way of creation, distinct from these progenitors – one that strives to be more inclusive.

  • New Practices

      • Instead of a body: The animation of Japanese in COVID-time

        https://doi.org/10.1386/scene_00051_1

        For a puppeteer specializing in the rare and beautiful Japanese , the story might have ended at COVID if it were not for a series of unexpected turns. First, there was a surprise primary school lockdown job making films of reading-books to beam into pupils’ homes; then, the sudden COVID precautionary ejection from the school building carrying an inadequate stock of books to continue the filming from home; then, the unexpected and possibly ‘barmy’ personal decision to write any extra books needed when the school stock ran out. Over weeks, my books, mainly drawings, were mounting up and intriguingly the filmed performances offered something extra, they became the stories and the images to mount on rigid fans for me to play with. I rediscovered my ‘performance body’ in a ‘theatre of paper’ – small, private Japanese or ‘paper-theatre’. My body and brain woke up. The move from a Japanese-type puppetry pre-COVID () to another kind during and post-COVID was happening. Lockdown was now promisingly creative. Directly out of the pain and suffering of COVID, and enforced restraint, a little known theatre practice was offering restitution.

    • ‘Keep people safe’: Designing a participatory performance within the strict parameters of social distancing in Australia

      https://doi.org/10.1386/scene_00045_1

      This article recounts designing and performing an intimate encounter with strangers during the pandemic. At the end of 2020, as Australians emerged from a long period of ‘lockdown’, the celebrated Sydney Opera House again opened its doors to the public. Commissioned to create a new work for the Sydney Opera House’s Antidote Festival, I designed a ‘touch’ performance that met the Australian Government’s COVID-19 protocols for social distancing at indoor events. Instead of being frustrated by the restrictions, I used the health and safety rules as if they were conceptual instructions. Surprisingly, I was reminded of the 1960s and 1970s conceptual artists whose experimental capacity was borne from instructive limitations. Seeing the restrictions as an opportunity, I discuss how the physical limitations ushered in by COVID-19 (along with the heritage status of the Sydney Opera House) provided the parameters for conceiving a scene and an experience that was everything the pandemic denied – public, participatory, intimate and physical. I also reflect on what I learned in the process and how needing to brought profound ethical understanding.

    • Site specificity in : A critical reflection

      https://doi.org/10.1386/scene_00052_1

      The COVID-19 outbreak made theatre and performance practitioners think to find alternate ways of performing for an audience. This article engages with the idea of site specificity in relationship with the living experiences of the residents’ pre- and post-COVID outbreak. It also illuminates the alternatives which were designed to bring the audience in a physical space following lockdown guidelines. The article investigates the different aspects of site-specific theatre, and seeks to understand what role site, space and place play in thinking about dramaturgy for a performance. Using a practice-based research example, (), which was devised during the lockdown in the United Kingdom, I examine the potential of unconventional theatre lights (ceiling bulbs, table lamps), sound and pre-existing objects to find scenographic solutions in devising a site-specific performance.

    • : How to create a scene to explore the seen and the unseen through live Zoom performances during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond

      https://doi.org/10.1386/scene_00049_1

      This article provides a reflective account of how, since November 2020, I have been developing forms of livestream poetry performance practice that, contributing to my ongoing critical digital pedagogy research project , use Zoom as an immersive autoethnographic storytelling prototype. Emerging as a positive of using Zoom under COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, it will theorize, articulate and demonstrate how I have explored the possibilities of Zoom to really enhance my creativity in what I am doing in terms of combining my performance, poetry and live cinema practice to create a multitude of regular livestream Zoom performances from the (, dis)comfort of my spare bedroom in South London. Innovative media re-use, text back and looping, voice layering and the use of filters on the Zoom platform result in a repetitive multi-layered multimedia socially specific creative live performance. Through colourful, immersive, structured, organic and disorientating collage, I narrate the experiences of many young queer people through my personal autobiography. Sharing these performances with other queer people and communities beyond, I generate, what I refer to as . They begin from the idea that queer existence itself is inherently performative; engaging the various roles that present themselves in a world of diversity. The world wide web introduces new possibilities for the construction of queer identity. In the manner of bricolage – building and constructing from what is at hand, piecing together images and visuals available on the internet and from my own personal archive of artworks as an artist of more than 25 years to explain one’s identity to oneself.

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