The last two years have placed us in a unique relation to loss and grief.

While the daily figures of COVID deaths may have numbed us to the sheer scale of suffering that people have endured, they are a constant reminder of the presence of loss in our lives. Even if we have been lucky enough not to lose loved ones directly during the pandemic we have, through various lockdowns, lost the presence of friends and family members in our lives. At the same time, we have been grieving lost work, ways of living, socialising, being together.

The audio performances reflected on for this project are often deeply aware of the present absences and absent presences in the gap between recorded performance and the moment of listening. While there may be potential here to communally discover, or at least reflect on, insights around loss, absence, presence there is also a sense in which audience and performer may continually miss each other in audio performance work. As Claire Cunningham states in her reflection on her own sound pieces made during the pandemic, this kind of work can be frustrating because ‘I don’t really get to feel where it meets the world’. She describes her live performance work as a kind of ‘mutual witnessing’ between her and her audience. There is an ethical dimension to this: as a disabled performer Cunningham gives the audience permission to observe her which is predicated on her being able to observe them back. In her sound work she feels no ‘reciprocity’ it’s ‘all energy out’. A loss of assembly cannot be fully over come through sound, of course.

However, the various losses during the pandemic have opened up spaces of possibility too. The first lockdown in the UK in March-June 2020 forced some of us to slow down, to notice our immediate locale, the changing seasons, bird song, wildflowers growing in the park, and the blooming of urban wildlife due to reduced human intervention. In an earlier version of her response Amy Sharrocks observed too that lockdown allowed her to ‘unthink or undo so many social constructs I hadn’t thought to question’. The loss of our ‘normal’ way of life has made space for alternative visions, new structures. From mass protests following the deaths of George Floyd or Sarah Everard, to the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue, or the sense of a galvanising confrontation with climate emergency, in a series of events over the last two years anger and rage has turned into possibility.

…

We have endured this time in both senses of the word. We have survived and suffered. Recorded sounds also endure – they outlast the moment of their recording; they live on in our memory. In what ways has live performance outlasted this moment, what has it had to suffer? What has it done to resist?

In Sarah Hopfinger’s reflections on her audio performance Pain and I, an exploration of living with (enduring) chronic pain, she makes the point that art can be useful in times of emergency as a way to think, resist and repair. Drawing on Olivia Laing’s (2020) work, she comments that art provides material with which to think and can act as an ‘invitation to sit with things’ – like living with chronic pain, or living through a pandemic.

Similarly, Matthew Goulish from Every house has a door has written on the importance of continuing to make art during this time. He writes that in the face of the suffering endured in the USA by the winter of 2020 – and in the context of a divided post-Trump America – writing, dance, performance can help us to ‘think in an unthinkable world’:

‘I confess that I have at times held the obscene belief that I can write a way out of this disaster for all of us; that we collectively can dance our way out of it, or make a performance that will heal every malady of body, mind, and imagination, that will restore us and bring us together into a just world. We only need to find the form.’

(Goulish 2020)

The pandemic has forced performance makers and live artists to experiment with form in search of spaces to think, resist and repair in a time of enduring pain and loss.

–H.W.

List of References:

Laing, O. (2020) Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, London: Picador, Macmillan

Goulish, M. (2020) “Winter Return to Winter”, Every house has a door newsletter. 22 December 2020. https://everyhousehasadoor.org/newsletter/winter-returns-to-winter [accessed 19 November 2021]