Training Artists in Times of Crisis

Abstract

This article is co-authored by lecturers on the Contemporary Performance Practice BA (Hons) Programme (CPP) at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS) and offers a response as to how to train artists in this current moment of ecological, political, social and health crises. The CPP programme aims to develop socially engaged artists who contribute to the world as performance-makers, educators, advocates and active citizens. In these months where there was a palimpsest of crises, all clamouring for our attention, we had to consider what it means to make art and educate artists in the context of a pandemic. When the UK-wide lockdown happened at the end of March our working practices as we knew them ceased and we had to find ways to deliver our curriculum online and encourage our student artists to be responsive, creative and curious about what the move to digital platforms could offer our artforms.

Conceived through the conceptualisation of online spaces as utopias/dystopias, this article disseminates the way in which our learning and teaching has adapted to respond to the challenge of social distancing and isolation and how we have found new ways of working, training and being a community of artists in these unprecedented circumstances. CPP is an interdisciplinary performance-making degree focused on the generation of new and original performances that sit outside of traditional theatre and is committed to exploring the ecological and social function of performance and how performance can be an ‘act of community.’ Here, we reflect on how making art in an emergency is necessarily as much about creating the kinds of spaces and experiences that that are needed as it is about directly engaging with the politics, issues and wider ideas of crises.

The definition of ‘contemporary’ is ‘existing or happening now’ (Cambridge Dictionary 2020). This article is co-authored by lecturers on the Contemporary Performance Practice BA (Hons) Programme (CPP) at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS) and offers a response as to how to train artists in this current moment of ecological, political, social and health crises. The CPP programme aims to develop socially engaged artists who contribute to the world as performance-makers, educators, advocates and active citizens. The programme is committed to exploring the ecological and social function of performance and how performance can be an ‘act of community’. CPP is an interdisciplinary performance-making degree focused on the generation of new and original performances that sit outside of traditional theatre.

Our original intention was to disseminate our approach to the kinds of training that artists need in a time of ecological crisis and we planned to reflect on the outdoor learning and teaching practices we use on the programme. Since we submitted the proposal for this issue of Performance Research, global events have disrupted the daily lives of millions of humans around the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the landscape of performance-making has been drastically altered. This global health crisis and the first UK national lockdown that began on 23 March 2020 meant that our full- time undergraduate curriculum and all our performance-making processes had to move online. The murder of George Floyd on 25 May, almost two months exactly from the decision to quarantine the UK, saw protests against the violence of police towards Black communities and individuals erupt across the US and in more than sixty other countries across the world. Anti-racist protests and huge demonstrations and public gatherings (despite the ongoing coronavirus epidemic that disproportionately affects people of colour) have illustrated the global crisis regarding racism and inequality. These multiple crises – climate change, a global pandemic that has ground travel and the economy to a halt and anti-Black racism – have become layered over one another, a palimpsest of emergencies that clamour for attention and action. Within our learning community we were also experiencing a period of change and a shift in leadership as a result of an independent review into the culture of the programme that took place in November 2019. We were navigating a sensitive and complex situation with our students and while this was a very challenging time, it provided an opportunity to evaluate what was at the heart of our pedagogy. We were able to clearly position the ethos the current staff team wanted to develop – one of equity, openness and social justice.

While our lived experience of the world has at times felt dystopian, the familiar made uncanny and surreal by the social distancing measures, wearing of face-coverings and governmental advice to ‘stay at home’, this particular moment also seemed to offer a sense of hope and utopian potential for significant change through a global disruption to the norm. Indeed, the ‘norm’ for many communities and individuals was already a crisis, and so the idea of ‘getting back to normal’ is a dystopic prospect.

In Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby (2013) she discusses the etymology of the word ‘emergency’. The root of the word is from ‘emerge’ – to appear or to be revealed. Solnit (2020) suggests that it is in emergencies that we are revealed, ‘as if you were ejected from the familiar and urgently need to reorient’. What are these current emergencies revealing about what it is to be a human in 2020? How can we as artists, find creative, hopeful and new ways to be together and to make art? How can we respond to this particular moment in our pedagogy and our artworks? How can we, as educators, train artists in times of crisis? This article disseminates the way in which our learning and teaching has adapted to respond to the challenge of social distancing and isolation and how we have found new ways of working, training and being a community of artists in these unprecedented circumstances. Sherry Turkle in her seminal text Life on the Screen (1995) claims, ‘We are tempted to believe with the utopians that the Internet is a field for the flowing of participatory democracy and a medium for the transformation of education’ (1995: 232). Here, we reflect on our shift to online learning through the lens of utopia/dystopia and examine specific case studies of teaching practice, learning moments and how we have approached training artists in times of multiple and concurrent crises.

CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE PRACTICE

The student journey over the four years of the Contemporary Performance Practice degree begins with The Ego-centric Artist: Digging from where you stand, which focuses on autobiographical performance-making; The Socio-centric Artist: Radical pedagogy in action takes performance-making and facilitation out to a range of social contexts in the second year; the third year is framed as The Researching Artist: An ecology of mind; and the final year of study is The Eco-centric Artist: Living a sustainable practice. While studying the four-year CPP programme students encounter a range of concepts including social practice, live art, performance art, post- modern and post-dramatic performance, installation, performance research, site-specific and documentary practices. The diversity of practices means that students are equipped with multiple skills, not only in performance-making but also in facilitation, working in communities and collaboration.

As educators on the programme, we frame performance-making processes as enquiry-led and students are encouraged to take risks and be experimental in both their performance practice and their critical thinking. This approach is informed by pedagogue bell hooks who claims: ‘in my classrooms, I do not expect students to take any risks that I would not take, to share in any way that I would not share’ (1994: 21). hooks also argues that ‘teaching is a performative act’ (11) while Henry A. Giroux and Peter McLaren (1989) argue that pedagogy and cultural studies must combine ‘theory and practice in order to affirm and demonstrate pedagogical practices engaged in creating a new language, rupturing disciplinary boundaries, decentring authority, and rewriting the institutional and discursive borderlands’ (cited in hooks 1994: 129). The CPP programme focuses on praxis and developing researching artists who are engaging with and responding to the world we are living in. What does praxis and research-led art making look like when the world that teachers and students are responding to is a palimpsest of very real crises and emergencies?

WORKING OUT DOORS

A key practice of the programme since 2012 has been engaging with outdoor making practices. Framed as an ‘annual outdoor creative residential retreat’, we have visited Wiston Lodge, a Victorian hunting lodge in the Scottish borders, every year since 2015 to spend time together as a community and to engage in outdoor art-making practices. This five-day retreat has allowed us to create performance beyond the rehearsal rooms of the RCS while removed from the patterns of our usual lives.

If we are to retreat, the word ‘retreat’ suggests that we are moving away; we are withdrawing, recoiling or fleeing something or someone. Antithetically, a retreat (or more recently to be on retreat) holds connotations of a place that offers seclusion, withdrawal, solitude, isolation, privacy and sanctuary (to move away from something to find peace, space and time). ‘Retreating’ explores the ways in which drawing away from our everyday lives can have profound benefits on creative processes in terms of what Cal Newport calls ‘deep work’ (2016), and how these practices can improve thinking, writing and being.

RETREAT INTO NATURE

While the benefits of pressing ‘pause’ on our normal, busy lives might be evident, recent studies indicate that in order to make the most out of a period of deep work, a natural environment is the most suitable, and as well as being devoid of the usual distractions (assuming we disconnect from the Internet) has other effects in terms of health and well-being. As Kathleen Jamie says in her essay ‘Into the dark’ (2003), it can be easier said than done to remove ourselves from humankind-built structures, buildings and spaces, and sometimes difficult to find a natural or wild place to be. We are reluctant to use the phrase ‘being in nature’ as it implies that we ‘go out’ into nature, that it is something outside of us and our normal lives. The binary between natural, rural environments and built-up, unnatural urban ones is an unhelpful dichotomy and perpetuates ideas that we are other than, or even against nature.

The modernist concept of ‘nature’ as dichotomous to ‘culture’ has long been problematized and dismissed, with current ecological and posthumanist thinking attesting to a more complex interplay of nature–culture and of the entanglement of human and non-human life and materiality (see, for example, Bennett 2010; Barad 2007; Morton 2010). Admittedly, we have become very disconnected from our ‘natural world’ and environments – or, more precisely, from our entanglements with more-than-human processes and materials – in most aspects of our lives, and most of the working-age population have few regular encounters with ‘natural environments’ beyond their urban place of work and home.

As we prepared for our fifth residential retreat in April, another kind of retreat from our usual patterns of working was forced on us as the UK moved into lockdown due to the COVID-19 epidemic. Not only were we unable to deliver our usual teaching in practice rooms with students, we also had to pause our work outdoors while under quarantine conditions and our Wiston Lodge trip was cancelled. Rather than moving away from technology to enhance ‘deep work’ we had to move towards it, finding ways to deliver our curriculum entirely online. Rather than switching off and going outside, we were switching our devices on and being told to ‘stay at home’ as part of the government guidelines. This shift was radical, swift and raised many concerns about student access to adequate technology and Wi-Fi in order to be able to engage with the learning opportunities we could provide.

MOVING OUR PEDAGOGY ONLINE

In the weeks that followed the announcement of the first UK lockdown on 23 March, we amended our modules for the new context of online learning. Framed as ‘emergency remote teaching’ by the European League of Institutes of the Arts (ELIA), this shift to delivering every aspect of our curriculum called for a significant reframing of some aspects of learning. While some modules transferred online without issue, performance- making processes requiring participants or directing processes were more challenging to conceptualize. How do you collaborate via a screen? How can you run a practical workshop on Zoom? How can these platforms, which were not designed for performance-making, become sites for generating and sharing new live performance? As we began to reframe how to devise new contemporary performance online, we quickly became aware of both the positive and negative aspects of remote learning. Long hours on screens were causing headaches; students were struggling to undertake all classes; and reading and research tasks online as well as the volume of work for staff was huge as we transferred all resources and materials to the virtual learning environments. Although our teaching hours were shorter, the time it took to prepare for online classes was arduous. On the positive side, we were considering with a new sense of clarity what was at the heart of the learning experiences we were facilitating. Students were able to access learning from wherever they were in the world and those who had struggled to attend classes due to health or mobility issues were able to access all resources and sessions from home. The disappointment and grief at the loss of everything we had prepared for was replaced with a sense of optimism about the potential of working online, particularly in terms of expanding our range of practices, developing new art forms and engaging a larger audience from anywhere in the world.

Sir Thomas More wrote the first utopia in 1516 coining the word from the Greek ou-topos meaning ‘no place’ or ‘nowhere’. The almost identical Greek word eu-topos means ‘a good place’. The Internet or ‘cyberspace’ could be referred to as a non-place and has been framed as both a utopia and dystopia (Wellman 1997; Fisher and Wright 2001; Yar 2014). Both concepts of utopias and dystopias provide a lens through which to ‘centre upon the challenges brought about by rapid social change and the place of technology in shaping human relations’ (Yar 2014: 1). Turkle (1995) refers to Victor Turner’s notion of liminality as a transitional state and acknowledges that the idea of being in flux may no longer be temporary – as these multiple crises continue to unfold, the idea of returning to a point of stability or the old ‘normal’ seems unlikely. She states: ‘Liminal moments are times of tension, extreme reactions and great opportunity. In our time, we are simultaneously flooded with predictions of doom and predictions of imminent utopia. We live in a crucible of contradictory experience’ (268). This relates to Jon McKenzie’s theory of the global performance stratum, that ‘power and knowledge are becoming mobile to the point of nomadic’ (2001: 195) and that liminality is here to stay. Our learning contexts changed from practicing outdoors to practicing only indoors; to trying to work ‘live’ while avoiding the mediated, to working solely online. These seismic shifts to our processes made us consider what we were trying to teach the students. What is it about art-making that is important now? We created a Manifesto for Art- Making in Times of Uncertainty in the first week of lockdown to outline our key principles and tenets for working. It opens with:

We are artists

We are creative people.

We adapt and are flexible.

We can be responsive.

We are in a hugely challenging and uncertain moment.

How can we as artists, find creative, hopeful and new ways to be together and to make art? (CPP staff team 2020)

While these ideas were useful as principles for working, the actual task of creating new work online seemed more daunting. We quickly realized that there was no ‘live’, or certainly not as we understood it previously. What there was instead was the digitally mediated live, a performer, in their space, being watched by someone else remotely in their own space in real time. The invitation to watch their live action remains the same; however, physical proximity and a sense of shared physical space is impossible. With this, the complex transaction of audience and performer must be reconfigured, the subtle shifts in body language and the lingering eye-contact, which has been so vital to nurturing connection, intimacy and trust, has been disrupted by the screen.

Peggy Phelan and Philip Auslander debate about whether live performance is a fleeting, once-in-a-moment experience, where ‘its only life is in the present’ (Phelan 1993), or if mediation can also be considered a part of the live. Auslander’s (2008) claim that ‘live forms have become mediatized’ was realized in these weeks. In this context, Phelan’s idea of performance being ‘of the moment’ moves away from having temporal significance and can be considered literally. The performances being developed over digital platforms just now are of the moment – in fact, they are distinctively and uniquely of this moment. The context of quarantine and self- isolation demanded that performance change, in some ways quite radically, in order to exist. It is of the moment because unlike previous social or political situations that might shape the content of work, the global pandemic has completely shifted the context, forms and mediums in which we can work.

A FESTIVAL OF DIGITAL PERFORMANCE

The experience of teaching contemporary performance at this time brought into sharp focus the impossibility of the live, the differently live and the new demands of audiences and performers as we navigated this moment. What will performance be after this? What will it look like? How will it feel? These questions offered a framework for the Contemporary Performance Practice Propel festival that took place from 3–12 June. Propel showcases work from all levels of the Contemporary Performance Practice BA (Hons) and is the culmination of all the performance-making processes of the academic year. In 2020, for the first time, due to the lockdown restrictions, the Propel festival was presented as a festival of digital performance and was performed over various online platforms including Zoom, Zoom webinar, Instagram, YouTube Live, a website, a chatroom and even a live performance over the phone. The student and staff learning this term was not only how to offer our curriculum online, but how artistically we can create new work online. Marshall McLuhan discusses beginning at the end of a process and working backwards as the ‘invention of invention itself’ (cited in Plant 1998: 26). We started with the concept of a ‘festival of digital performance’ but had no idea what this would look like until the work itself emerged. The platforms available were not designed for creating performance, but students quickly adapted and experimented with them and used them for this purpose. Did the festival feel ‘live’? We hope so. It was ephemeral as it is now over (although we do have documentation of the work) and Propel was certainly of this moment. The global response to George Floyd’s murder meant we opened the festival a day late as we participated in #theshowmustbepaused and many of the events suggested ways of donating to anti-racist causes in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Propel Festival Graphic, 2020. Photo Niall Smillie, Fourtwentyseven Design Ltd.

Maddie Granlund’s, ‘Further Down the Beach’ (part of a diptych called A Site Seen from Within and Without alongside Craig McCorquodale’s Intervals), Propel Festival 2020. Photo courtesy of artist

The artworks were hybrid, digital, part- recorded/part-live and intermedial. Pedagogue Robin Nelson states that intermedial performance has ‘elicited a new cultural way of seeing, feeling and being in the contemporary world’ (cited in Bay-Cheng et al. 2010: 18). In the next section we will disseminate case studies of examples of learning and teaching on the Contemporary Performance Practice programme during the lockdown. These are written from the perspectives of our various subject positions and we share these as experiments, reimaginings, compromises, innovations, failures, opportunities and moments of learning.

SCENOGRAPHIC ASSEMBLAGES IN A VIRTUAL CONTEXT: REFLECTIONS BY RACHEL O’NEILL

As part of the level one module Re-Imagining Classical Text, students undertake a self-led project in the Aesthetics and Composition class to create a new piece of performance, which demonstrates their knowledge and understanding of the active role of aesthetics and composition as part of a performance-making practice. Framed through anthropologist Tim Ingold’s ‘art of enquiry’ (2013) students are led on a process to experiment with materials to ‘prise them open and follow where they lead’ (7). The Aesthetics and Composition strand leads students to consider ideas of expanded scenography and how the material, spatial, visual, phenomenological and environmental components of performance shape its making and meaning. It also asks how we, as artists, can be part of developing this language of aesthetics in order to create spaces for people to encounter.¹ The idea of being in residence and immersed within a place enables the students to explore the complexities of aesthetics and consider ideas of site-specific practice. The act of embracing the context as part of the work draws attention to a social shift out of art spaces and into the institutions of our society as pioneered by the The Artist Placement Group.

The main challenge in quickly switching to a digital context was how to respond to our new site in order to make work, and how to lead students on a process of working deeply with materials, objects and place in an online environment. Furthermore, the site that each of the students were in would be viewed through a screen, which added another complex layer of material and meaning.

In an attempt to create a new site and inspired by Forced Entertainment’s Complete Works (a table-top adaptation of all of the Shakespeare plays using a collection of everyday objects as stand-ins for the characters), a household table- top was identified within each of the fourteen students’ homes as their personal location to research, develop and produce their final piece of work. This would be their place of residence for the next six weeks. In hindsight, the idea of zooming-in and narrowing down the parameters of each site seemed to offer a reflection on the idea of new forms of site-specific practice in the context of lockdown. To start the process of investigating each site, students were introduced to cultural sceneographer Rachel Hann’s term Scenographic Assemblages (2018), where they ask how scenographics can evoke a sense of place. Using an experiential moment from a personal story concerned with place as stimulus, students constructed their Assemblages guided by Laura Marks’ theory of haptic visuality, which she describes as a ‘visuality that functions like the sense of touch’ (Marks and Polon 2000: 22). Students created a two-minute film capturing their live table-top performance that was presented live online to staff and students on 22 May 2020.

The live experience of watching this series of Scenographic Assemblages was like entering into multiple locations, worlds or landscapes. Each performance communicated its own sense of place through a precise and thoughtful choreography of materials, objects, light, atmosphere, text, sound, environmental elements and the live body. Through this crafting of components, I felt immersed in an experience evoking touch, beyond a symbolic language where I could see and feel the place that the students had created.

RADICAL PEDAGOGY ONLINE: REFLECTIONS BY GARY GARDINER

The second year of study, informed by the theory of Paulo Freire and framed as ‘Radical Pedagogy in Action’, focuses on ideas of social practice. The Tate website (2017) defines social practice as ‘any artform which involves people and communities in debate, collaboration or social interaction’. For me, this work is always about co-creation. How can we open up our practices to include the voices of those least likely to be heard, the bodies least likely to be seen? How can we co-create the discourse and the art as an everyday process of learning and growing?

This is the term when students’ work is split between two projects: Choreography: People and place where students, led by a director, create a choreographic work in a found space and attempt to involve people who have a relationship to that space in the co-creation of the artwork, and Short Courses where students work in pairs to design and deliver six weekend Process Drama classes for groups of young people.

However, this delivery had to be different. COVID-19 did not simply mean that we had to meet the challenges of translating live classes to the digital classroom or reimagine performance works that necessitate human connection into small Zoom boxes while trying to maintain that ‘liveness’. It also meant that individual learners, artists in development, were anxious about this emerging dystopian reality. Some moved home to be with their parents; many were living in their gardenless flats, grappling with their lives and this new way of being. Many of these students have come to study performance because they consider themselves to be alternative learners, active learners, and now they found themselves in front of the screen for most of the day.

What became apparent is that this weekly two- hour session was not time to add more content to already saturated life experiences or engage in more complex theories of art making at a time when the world of theatre (at least as we know it) is all but dead. It was a time to listen. It was time to talk. It was time for students to process complicated experiences and share them with one another and offer mutual support. It was time to discuss what was and was not working with our adjusted curriculum and put proposals on the table for how problems could be overcome. It was essentially a collective and collaborative think tank for sharing our human stories in this complex time, as well as analysing the quality of our learning. What kind of artists do we want to be in this world? What is our art going to do?

‘Scenographic Assemblage’ by Margot Conde Arena. Photo courtesy of artist

Pedagogically, this was also very effective. Not only was I able to offer pastoral support to those who needed it, I was also able to share my own experiences and challenges and meet the students where I was at as a practicing artist and teacher. It also provided a welcome space for camaraderie, the sharing of difficult experiences and a dialogical space for pedagogical analysis and curriculum design, which, in fact, achieved the original ambition of having nuanced conversations about art, learning and the world that we want to co-create together.

PERFORMANCE AS A HOLDER FOR CARE: REFLECTIONS BY SARAH HOPFINGER

For third-year students, the final module of the academic year – Performance Writing – went entirely online. For this module students develop their understanding of themselves as researching artists through exploring different approaches to performance writing and experimenting with text as a material and form in contemporary performance practices. Students construct their own enquiry: through weekly supervision sessions, group classes, sharing of work-in-progress performances with tutor and peer feedback they apply and develop performance writing methodologies that further their enquiry. The six-week module culminates in the presentation of a final artwork. Students explored a wide range of enquiries, including Internet identities, loneliness, queer identity, relationship to landscape, protest and ritual, where their live and filmed performances were presented in diverse spaces including a bathroom, over the phone, a live chatroom and experimental uses of Zoom. Student work engaged directly and indirectly with the current context of digital communication, isolation and wider crises, with multiple works focusing on the complexities of our online identities and other works attempting to create spaces of reflection. I would like to focus on this latter trend in the work, as I think it points to what performance might be able to uniquely offer at this current time of crises: namely, spaces for connecting with ourselves and others, for mourning loss, and sitting simultaneously with difficulty and possibility. The following creative text is a personal reflection written by me – Sarah Hopfinger, a tutor on the module – about a performance called Here and Here and Here devised by third-year student Althea Young during this module. Experiencing Althea Young’s excellent and affecting work enabled me to reflect on the possibilities of what live performance can offer at this time of crisis: my reflections on her work offers an insight into how performance might uniquely enable audience members to connect with qualities of care and softness.

I dial a number into my phone – an act that feels nostalgic as I rarely type a number to call someone anymore. A young woman answers, immediately putting me at ease: she says I will not need to speak; I can simply listen. My body relaxes slightly, softening into sitting and looking out the window. Knowing I neither need to navigate the potential awkwardness of phone conversation nor that I need to appear more OK than I am (as is often the case with onscreen conversations at this time of COVID-19 and online meetings), is a welcome invitation. I am more in need of being a listener than I realized. She speaks slowly with a direct yet gentle tone that lets me travel into the images of open space she begins to speak of. I see our presence – her voice, my listening – meeting somewhere around the world in an open ocean, in the middle of a city, then flying across land and water. I think of the Zoom conversations I have recently had with friends – the beautiful moments of connection in among the dissatisfying disembodied attempts at meaningful talk. This intimate phone performance is letting me feel the loss of being physically with people. I am relieved to feel this loss: rather than trying to ‘find the positive’ and keep connected online (which can so often come with the pressure and pretence of being OK), I am being asked to sit with myself and how I am. I feel held, like her voice is permitting me to be, well, me – perhaps this is because I am tasked with nothing but listening and being present. She is now singing, creating more closeness. I settle even more into my sitting: this physical relaxing into myself is a relaxing into my (unwelcome) feelings of isolation, hardship and confusion. Now she has gone, just like that. I am still looking out the window, aware of where I am but strongly feeling the beyond of here: I have travelled around the world and simultaneously sunk ever more deeply into where and how I am. I find that I am smiling. I did not realize how much I needed to settle into my sense of how hard things are, my feelings of confusion and loss. This performance has been a holder for me to be more honest with myself about how I am, and it is from this place that I begin to sense the possibilities and hope of this time.

In the student performance I reflect on above, I felt that I was implicitly asked to be more honest with myself through the act of listening and being present with a voice on the telephone. At the beginning of this module, I envisaged students creating a lot of explicitly political work, engaging directly with issues and problems of the pandemic, but what seemed to emerge more strongly and urgently was a body of work that enacts a kind of softness and care, which are qualities and atmospheres that I often find are missing at this time of crises.

GRADUATING INTO PRECARITY: REFLECTIONS BY LAURA BISSELL

The fourth-year cohort were feeling the precarity of this final term of study more than most. As final year students it was only this last term between them embarking on a professional career in the arts: a daunting landscape to be facing in the current context. Each student undertook an artist commission in Directing, Site Specific Practice or Arts in Inclusive Practice: Prisons. At the outset of the modules they expressed their disappointment and grief at the loss of this final term and the way they had imagined it. However, at the end of the module many felt as though they were equipped to enter this new digital world of performance having developed a piece of work – one went on to be programmed at a festival of digital performance. In undertaking these processes in an educational context, they were at the vanguard of experimental practice into creating live work over digital mediums. As the cultural landscape they were graduating into was transformed, so too were their practices as hybrid, filmic, digital, and most importantly, responsive in terms of form and content to this current context.

CONCLUSION: IMAGINING THE FUTURE

Social distancing, wearing of face-coverings, hand-washing, one-way systems within the buildings and enhanced risk assessments framed the way in which we approached academic year 20–21. Our curriculum delivery has been blended, incorporating both online classes and some live sessions which have been captured for digital audiences. While we have been able to work live for time-critical performance assessments, this work has been shaped by the measures in place, providing practical (and creative) parameters on the work.

Perhaps making art in an emergency is necessarily as much about creating the kinds of spaces and experiences that we need as it is about directly engaging with the politics, issues and wider ideas of crises. Olivia Laing asks ‘Can art do anything, especially during periods of crisis?’ (2020: 2). Mentoring students and experiencing their work as audience members, has led us to realize that our current times need – more urgently than ever – spaces of care, softness, openness and sharing, where we are invited to sink more deeply into how we really are. As Laing says: ‘What art does is provide material with which to think: new registers, new spaces’ (ibid.). What performance can offer us at this time is a creative holder for us to experience connection through being honest about disconnection, hardship and even pain. Referring to ecological catastrophes and environmental degradation, Donna Haraway proposes the need for us to ‘stay with the trouble’ of our ‘damaged’ and ‘wounded world’ (2016: 150, 1). For us, what the current disruption to the ‘norm’ can offer is a more urgent and immediate sense of the kinds of atmospheres and experiences that allow us to, as it were, stay with the trouble of our current feelings and experiences. Haraway implies that it is only by ‘staying with the trouble’ that we are able to meaningfully respond to crises. Perhaps performance practice at this time may usefully offer us a space to be present enough with ourselves in order to be with the loss, isolation, confusion, grief and other (unwelcome) feelings we are currently experiencing. In doing so, we may more successfully be able to connect with how we can, want and need to engage and respond to crises.

Notes

1 This project has taken place in various locations including Glasgow Sculpture Studios gallery space, Glasgow Forth and Clyde Canal, and this year was to be our second residency at The RCS’s Archive collection in collaboration with archivist Stuart Harris-Logan.