When The Performing Arts Have To Perform From Home

Faced with the restrictions and the suspension of time during our successive lockdowns, we all found ourselves longing for freedom, for movement. On the other hand, performers have seen their practice met with a brutal pause, a pause that has been prolonged for too long.

Rosas Danst Rosas

The pandemic and its restrictions have touched the essence of Performing Arts. In fact, the notion of communion between the performers and the public is central to performance, just like touch and physical contact are crucial to performers. To attend a performance is an experience, it means sharing the same space and time with a community. All actors reflect each other. Due to its immaterial nature, performance is often perceived as a non-traditional form of art, an art that is alive, ephemeral and inconstant.

The performing arts have been interpreted as means to engage directly with social reality, the specifics of space and the politics of identity, helping us in self-knowledge. Above everything, performance gives a creative voice to a social group that would otherwise be repressed and not a space for understanding and fulfillment. It is crucial for the performing arts to continue to be nurtured and supported, and it is no coincidence that governments try to shut down theatres and performing centres when faced with a revolution or a coup, proving how important performing is to continuously invite thought, comment on the current events and mindsets within a society.

“The worth of performing arts is undoubtedly that of calming, questioning, entertaining, storytelling and allowing us to be a part of a community, and it has been highlighted by the isolation felt during the successive lockdowns.”

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The idea that there is a connection between the performing arts and the psychosocial is not new. There are many signs that audiences have been longing for performances since the first lockdown. 

As a response to restrictions, the dance company Rosas re-launched their project Re:Rosas, publishing videos of the internationally acclaimed Belgian choreographer explaining the “scene of the chairs”, second movement of her piece Rosas danst Rosas. The piece became a reference in the history of dance, still in the company’s repertoire today. All that’s needed is yourself and a chair. 

The aim of the project is to touch a larger younger audience, invite them to learn and understand the mechanisms of the choreography and to play with it, to adapt and reinvent it as they wish. Hundreds of videos of people giving their own interpretation to Rosas danst Rosas have been uploaded on YouTube.

In addition to being a way to give visibility to the cultural sector, this initiative is a unique occasion to understand the choreographic writing of de Keersmaeker. The project strives to make the public consider and understand dance as a language with its own vocabulary, style and grammar.

The success of this initiative can be explained by the simplicity of the gestures. The difficulty comes from the energy, the tension, and the structure but the movements and attitudes are taken from everyday life more than the conventional dance language. It is a dance that feeds itself, a manifest of autonomy. The title itself means Rosas dances Rosas, Rosas dances itself: the dynamic is internal and carried by the repetition and the spiral of energy. This is the essence of the piece and the success of the project: a few simple gestures for infinite possibilities. It is precisely this apparent simplicity, this struggle to find energy and the autonomy of the dance that make the piece resonate to the recent situation and feelings of isolation.

 The most common (and oftentimes the only possible) initiatives taken by performing art centres were to move their programs online. In Canada, the series Grand Acts of Theatre involved 14 theatre companies who created and staged works for live audiences outdoors, recorded them, and then posted the performances online. These types of partnerships combining live performance and online content may well have appreciated long-lasting effects on how performance engages audiences and on how theatre resources can be accessed by more diverse spectators and creators. 

Still, we cannot forget that online experiences are not a replacement for live performances. Closer attention needs to be given to the essential role of the arts in healthy and lively societies and our governments need to be better at prioritising performing arts in post-lockdown re-openings. Arts and entertainment are among the sectors most at risk from the consequences of long-lasting closures and successive lockdowns, as pointed out by the OECD. The downsizing of creative and cultural fields could have a negative impact both on the economic and social aspect of cities and regions but also on the well-being, the vibrancy and the diversity of communities.