Towards a Post-Pandemics of Sound in Performance

The radical disruption of live performance that began in 2020 and continues in 2021 raises a fundamental question regarding the presence of the present in the time of performance. If sound design for live performance is captured and rendered for technological distribution such as streaming (and can be paused, rewound, fast-forwarded, and re-recorded as necessary) for both real-time and asynchronous audiences (who can likewise pause, rewind, fast-forward, and re-view as necessary), how does this manifest in a ‘liveness' of performance? Performance is constantly in relation to and in constant consideration of its audience – necessarily imagining that audience prior to constitution as Audience. As a sound designer and performance maker, I am confronted with the fragility of both audience and performance: as a constituency of bodies threatened by pandemic disease, as a community of practice threatened by restrictions on gathering together, and as an art form threatened by economic collapse. In this essay, I examine my own sound design and the evolution of a pandemic-restricted solo practice as a site in which a ‘post-pandemics’ of performance might become possible. If 2020 in its upheaval and chaos showed the all-too-narrow limits of our care for others, what is the role of performance design in the recovery of that care? I engage a poetics of care and consent in performance design through notions of Pirate Care, xenofeminist action, and the relation to Other proposed by Jean-Luc Nancy. I reflect on and dissect my own response to pandemic time and space, and the shapes that vulnerability, fear, and uncertainty build in our performed worlds. Deploying this knowledge I look to a way forward for performance design and live performance, real-time and asynchronous, physically distant and present, that can engender this ‘post-pandemics’