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.

Choreodramaturg: Paul Sadot Dancers: Nathan Lafayette & Joshua Nash Editor: Paul Sadot Music: 'Blackbird' by ICY Audio Visual

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

Macbeth Projeto #6 (Os Satyros + CIPA) Trailer

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

Made at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown in April 2020. Exploring how we could gather together and move. Using various digital technology to develop choreography remotely and in isolation, and to breathe together as a working ensemble. Choreodramaturg: Paul Sadot DOP: Rob Ashton Baker Dancers: Christina Dionysopoulou Joshua 'Vendetta' Nash Lisa Rowley Connor Scott Kat Collings Riley Wolf Emma Farnell Watson Esmee Orgles Editor: Alice Underwood Films Music: ICY Audio Visual .

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.

‘like a sailing boat that wants to go west, while the wind is blowing from the south and the currents are carrying it towards the east’ (Barba & Barba, 2000: 59). Margate based Choreodramaturg, Researcher, and Movement Director Paul Sadot, explores engaging with Turbulence and Precariousness as methods of creating work. The projects are filmed quickly over a few hours and his team, The CUT Collective, are rapid response artists who assemble via a phone call and film and improvise dance in situ. (dis)integration was filmed on the 15th March 2020 as Coronavirus 'lockdown' was being announced in the UK. The work was, with the kind permission of the owner, filmed in the incredible 'junk shop' arch by Ramsgate Harbour. As a response to that moment in time, the film deliberately sought out 'turbulence' and 'precarity' as a working method to explore prescient themes of isolation and anxiety. The film can be seen as a choreographic document that captures the chaos that the pandemic was to thrust upon an unsuspecting world. ‘To make dance unrecognizable in relation to its expected formations, and therefore make dance truly foreign to itself. Dance's movement of estrangement and derivation, its critical capacity to escape from forms, times, and procedures it is supposed to be confined to and identified with as an aesthetic discipline…’ (Lepecki, 2016: 6).

(dis)integration

Made on the eve of the ‘lockdown’ announcement, a sudden and unplanned gathering of artistic souls who could sense something big was coming to taunt and harass us.

Made in collaboration with Theatre Students at the University of Malta during lockdown. No longer able to perform in theatres or to meet others physically to rehearse, I developed a pedagogical approach to the creation of low-tech DIY theatre online: I named this method DIY Digi-corporeality.