We're All in This Together: Digital Performances and Socially Distanced Spectatorship

ABSTRACT

The digital performances forwarding discourses of "we're all in it together" proliferated in the opening months of the COVID-19 pandemic, performing the social legibility of pain and loss within the public sphere. The body takes on an indexical force in such performances, constructing a symbolic community defined by the shared experience of sheltering-in-place. This performs social distancing, culturally acclimating audiences to a world in which we connect virtually but remain apart in our bodies. This has a legitimate public-health utility. That said, such performances can inadvertently construct the "we" in "we are all in it together" in a way that centers the stay-at-home experience while flattening racial and economic divisions. This essay examines two digital performances focusing on the experiences of diverse artists in quarantined isolation Mike Sears and Lisa Berger's Ancient and Emily Mast and Yehuda Duenyas's How Are We. Both performances situate the act of sheltering-in-place as the shared facet of community belonging, utilizing aesthetic strategies that either obscure or amplify the ways that hierarchical systems of power influenced inequitable lived experiences of quarantined isolation.