Participation in the Time of Covid, and Looking to the Future
An essay written in response to Covid 19. The implications of arts companies existing under the conditions of a pandemic, and what participation can mean when you can no longer ‘meet’ audiences, and what these changes will bring about in a post pandemic arts community.
The significance of home in the Covid-19 crisis has been far-reaching and profound. As a site of self-isolation and lockdown, the home has been at the forefront of strategies to save lives in the Covid-19 pandemic.
Stay at home, work from home, self isolation at home, shielding at home …..
Almost overnight, our homes became our workplaces, our schools, our hospitals, our yoga studios and gyms and our theatres. A third of people have watched theatre digitally since the lockdown and say they will continue to do so after restrictions are lifted. Similarly, many people now working from home are clear that they will continue to do so in future and hybrid models are likely to emerge both in work, education and entertainment.
This raises the question of what is home? How has our understanding of home changed during the Covid-19 pandemic? In the month leading up to the lockdown of March 23rd 2020, I spent 12 nights out of 31 in my home. As an independent consultant, I travelled a great deal before the pandemic. I was travelling with work so Travelodge often became a temporary home, I spent a long weekend in Lisbon where someone else’s home became my Airbnb for a few nights and I visited friends and family. Yet, almost a year later I have slept in my own bed every single night. My ‘home’ is now mine alone as whilst I have been shielding I have had no staying visitors and I have not entertained for over a year. I wear clothes that pre-pandemic would have been for the weekends, I have not been on a train or in a metro for almost a year and my ‘new normal’ is wrapped in a blanket on my sofa with a book. ‘Home’ has changed. My home is now zoned with different areas for different activities. I have decorated and replaced old utensils and kitchen equipment. I have invested in new bedding. I live in it differently. My new companion is my dog who has her own zones within it. The garden is thriving on the consistent attention.
I have become more embedded in my immediate community. I know the first names of the postman and the delivery drivers and I have found new places and sights on my daily walks. I am familiar with the times of sunrises, sunsets and tides and I have learned which birds come into my garden. I know my neighbours instead of simply recognising them. We support and share and care for one another and my work has become more localised as I have developed new strands to my business in order to stay afloat financially.
But what has this to do with Fevered Sleep? I have been reflecting on the parallels of the touring performance company. Itinerant and peripatetic - many theatre or dance companies are not building based. Working from an office base but hiring other spaces for rehearsal before setting off on tour to someone else’s ‘home’ venue. They have no ‘home’ of their own. When Covid-19 hit this put a stop to touring but left many without a home to stay in.
I have worked with Fevered Sleep now for over 6 years and they have ‘lodged’ in other people’s homes over this time, but have longed for a ‘home’ of their own. On March 4th 2020, just two weeks before the lockdown the company moved into their new home in St Margarets House in Tower Hamlets – a two up, two down house that grounds the company in a community amidst a cluster of community organisations. The house has been painted and decorated, new carpentry has been commissioned and there is to be wallpaper in the hall. It is ‘home’. It provides the company with roots in a locality. “We have become a neighbour” - with neighbours they are able to connect with and get to know. David describes the move as a “pivot point – we arrived somewhere at the end of the secure period of PHF funding. Touring is a cyclical process of constantly reinventing relationships. We are now at the beginning of working out what having a home means for us and for how Fevered Sleep works.”
Fevered Sleep have regularly stated that the company “meets people where they are” – in a care home, in a shopping centre, a school, a theatre or a gallery. This move into their new home and community offered fresh opportunities to explore this in a creative and distinctive way. However, when Covid-19 closed down schools and public venues and people were encouraged to stay home, this notion of meeting people had to change dramatically.
For Fevered Sleep this is an opportunity to recalibrate and reflect. At the onset of the pandemic there was no rush to take work on line. For David and Sam there was a sense that they needed to consider what being an artist meant at this time.
“As artists, like so many of our peers and colleagues, here at Fevered Sleep we’ve struggled to know what to do in the face of an unprecedented global crisis. What is the role of art in such times? What can we offer, alongside the extraordinary efforts made by those working in health and social care? What protection can art give? Can it soothe our wounds? Can it help us remember that there is a future? Can it vaccinate us against fear and hopelessness and despair?
An invisible virus has reminded us just how deeply entangled we are with other species; how connected we are across continents and borders; how enmeshed we are in each other’s lives. Art reminds us to lift our faces and see beyond our everyday, to look to each other, and to the wild world, finding patterns of compassion and community and kinship and kindness.
Art reminds us that in connection there is hope to carry us through (there is a butterfly hibernating in this crack beneath the windowsill, a dormant splash of colour in the flat winter grey). Art reminds us to listen more carefully, to speak more passionately, to breathe more slowly, to look more wisely and to find new ways to touch and to be touched.”
Meeting people on the streets:
“We're creating a Hope Newspaper which will be distributed in our local area, Tower Hamlets, in East London. We spoke to a number of people we met in the street about how 2020 was for them, and what they had to be hopeful about.”
“I think that’s the best way to explain it, it’s just very uncertain these days. You just don’t know where things are heading. It doesn’t look like it's any closer to any sort of light at the end of the tunnel, it’s more like we just have to start getting used to how things are. But in a positive light which I always try to spin you gotta take the good and the bad. I think it’s been very much needed because if I reflect on my life before the pandemic, you just forget small things that you forget to be grateful for. Appreciate certain things you know with the time that we have.”
Nathan de la Cruz
“I think it’s been a year when I’ve had to look in the mirror and not been able to look away and realised all the things that were wrong in my life. Well not wrong, but just things that I wanted to change, and I have done. So in a way it has been a year of hope, even though it has been really hard.”
Carmen
Meeting People in their Homes:
“Covid changed the way we work with people – we have talked about being digital but didn’t really do it. Taking This Grief Thing on line was something that we would not have done had it not been dictated by circumstances. We had misgivings – loss of touch, nuance of conversations – we asked would it translate onto a digital platform. What about intimacy, care, kindness and support? But in some ways it was better on line. You simply had to open up your computer. You are safe in your own home tucked up in a blanket and all cosy. Maybe more aware of what you are saying and when you are speaking. It will change how we think moving forward about ‘meeting’ with people and talking to them.”
Interview with Company Members
Meeting people online:
The creation and launch of the new website in April 2020 was seen as being an ‘online home’ for the company’s work:
“…. how can our website represent the spirit of our work? Can we create a distinctive online home for each of our 30+ (very different) projects? How can we make it as accessible and inclusive as possible? How do we make it feel like Fevered Sleep?”
The website included the important section “What we’re thinking about” which, when the pandemic prevented real interaction afforded the opportunity to connect with young people. The question was asked: The Coronavirus Crisis: What do Young People think?
“We’re always trying to find ways in which we can listen to children and young people and amplify their voices. In the midst of the Coronavirus crisis this feels even more pressing, so we’ve decided to interrupt the schedule of our current question and hand this slot over to children and young people to tell us what they are thinking and doing and feeling in lockdown.”
When our smiles danced - Evie, 11, London
The Responses we profound:
“Fear of Corona has engulfed our lives. To me this is the way Mother Nature is recovering and repairing the damages we have caused. As I am praying, "please give back those days when I could go out to play", Mother Nature also must have been praying "give back my clean air and green forests". As I am also a part of nature, I promise that I will plant trees and create a garden. I and Mother Nature will love each other, always.”
— Vivaan, 9, Kolkata, India
The company have also used on line platforms to connect with associates and to cast new work:
“We’ve … been really aware of how our fellow artists have been faring in the crisis and we’ve held a couple of online meetups just to connect up, offer mutual support, and laugh together. We’ve greeted a few new babies, many new beards and discovered so much more about people through their backgrounds and bookshelves and bedrooms!
The positive aspects of connecting through screens for nearly a year is the greater accessibility it brings to our casting process; we put out an open call for performers for a new project to be revealed later in the year, and received over 350 applications from a truly diverse range of brilliant dancers. This allowed us to ‘meet’ many more potential new performers which is definitely a win for everyone.”
— Email to Mailing List: 26th February 2021
Into the Future:
Future plans for the company have been significantly impacted by these experiences and by the learning that has accrued over the past year. A programme of seasonal events is planned around the themes of belonging and home that will be co-produced with families in the local community of Tower Hamlets; there is a desire to appoint a Neighbourhood Producer to embed local relationships and partnerships and develop local programming to parallel the other work; there will be a focus on child activism and childrens’ voices being heard.
“We are Not Finished” and “The Sky is Filled with Thunder” are both being designed to be deliverable within uncertain resources, constraints and limitations.
“Digital’ has become part of what our artistic work is about and is no longer just about marketing.”
— Company Member
As I approach the end of my journey walking alongside the company exploring the meaning of participation in their work, I find myself reflecting on the ways in which this has changed my understanding of what participation is and what it means for art, artists, participants and organisations. I find myself being grateful for the opportunities Covid-19 has brought to reflect and pause and recalibrate what we do and how we do it. I feel grateful for the generosity of the company in allowing me to shadow them and challenge and reflect back, for the care they bring to all who work with them and for the richness of the conversations, dialogue and challenge.
The end of this particular period of work does not mark the end of the journey of structured discovery and questioning that Fevered Sleep embarked upon in the Autumn of 2016. For as long as the company continue to adopt their distinctive approach to making work, there will always be discoveries, new perspectives and new ways to address the challenges and issues we face as a human condition and as a society. As the company continue to push the boundaries of what participation means and what it does for art, for artists, for the participants, the partners and for the company itself, the journey will continue. In pushing these boundaries there are sector implications for funders and policy makers who must consider what is required to genuinely make work that truly empowers others and that engages them deeply and in meaningful ways. The journey is not finished and never will be. The pandemic may have required a diversion or two but both have taken the company to some interesting places.
As we move forward into 2021 with the glimmers of hope that vaccines bring and the sight of the snowdrops promising a spring awakening, I am aware that life will never be the same, even if we don’t yet know all the ways in which it will be different. What we can say is that the enforced shifts that have taken place have provided a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine everything about how we live our lives, do our jobs, run our companies, interact with others and enjoy our homes.
I end with the words of David and Sam:
“2021 arrived, for most of us, without its usual fanfare, promises of potential and whispers of new things. At FS we decided to conjure up the possible ways of responding creatively to what felt like an increasingly bleak landscape, within the necessarily impossible limits imposed by living and working in a pandemic …….
Of course, there remains a huge sense of uncertainty and fear for so many. Dancers who we’ve spoken and worked with at a distance, many of whom haven’t worked for so long, feel like they’ve forgotten how to do what they do, how to move and feel instinctively in their own bodies. As the crocuses here in the UK push through the surface of the soil with such certainty and boldness of colour, we’re imagining moving through the spaces we know again, remembering who we are, with certainty and joy.”
— Email to Mailing List: 26th February 2021
