DIY Digi-corporeality: Lockdown & Post Pandemic Performance

This practice research examines a rapidly evolving lockdown and post-pandemic performative landscape and the potential of what I have called ‘DIY Digi-corporeal’ practices to disrupt perennial theatrical paradigms.

Ubiquitous technology is facilitating the gathering of actors and audiences online from across the globe, producing a ‘live’ collaborative, and interactive, event. It is a new and intimate kinesthetic experience, made possible by a unique encounter between socially and culturally diverse bodies in a DIY digital space. An emergent example is Live Zoom Digital Theatre which uses Zoom, iPhones and Apps to define new dramaturgies, and ticketing platforms to create financial autonomy. Such digitally mediated DIY performance events are made unique through unplanned collisions, where audiences enter the actor’s personal spaces and often-unstable digital connections create viscerally felt potential jeopardy. It is these shared instabilities that add to the feeling that you are ‘in’ a ‘live’ communal event. In this way, DIY Digi-corporeal practices are questioning perceived notions of agency, access and ‘liveness’ in theatre. It is implicitly a choreopolitical movement, where rapidly developing ubiquitous technology is demonstrably questioning ideas about proximity, perspective, agency, virtuosity, access and mobility, both in theatrical settings and beyond. Based around a series of DIY Digi-corporeal performance projects, the research uses a novel choreographic lens to examine how the pandemic has changed performance practice in a positive way, and to articulate the lasting legacy of these re-imagined spatial practices. In doing so, the research asks, why, how, when and where performance takes place, who is granted access to it and under what conditions. 

‘(dis)location’
Made during a five day ‘Digital Transitions’ online intensive with University of Chichester Dance MA students
Tools: Smart Phones; WhatsApp; InShot; Zoom; Computers; iMovie.

‘Lockdown Ornithology’ (remix #2)
Tools: Smart Phones; WhatsApp; InShot; Zoom; Computers; iMovie.

Macbeth Cycle #6 - A collaboration between Os Satyros and Royal Birmingham Conservatoire
Tools: Smart Phones; WhatsApp; InShot; Zoom; Computers; iMovie.

Alone We Gather
Made at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown in April 2020. Exploring how we could gather together and move. Using various ubiquitous digital technology to develop choreography remotely and in isolation, and to breathe together as a working ensemble.
Tools: Smart Phones; WhatsApp; InShot; Zoom; Computers; iMovie.