Beginning in April 2021, during the pandemic, I began engaging interested members of the Gatherings Project in conversations about their first experiences with performance.
In advance of each conversation, I provided participants with a set of questions to consider, and this invitation:
“This is a time when we cannot easily attend live performance. Although ‘old habits die hard,’ new habits can also take hold. Whether we are practitioners or audience members, we long to be near performance, practising or witnessing. But we can grow away from this habit over time. Certainly as spectators and auditors, we may in fact have some difficulty re-aclimatizing ourselves to being in a crowded public space ‘attending to’ performance.
The Pandemic may be over, but it cast into relief the extent to which the experience of live performance has been diminished, for so many people in our society. This is a destructive path we are taking. It destroys the collective experience of art, and with it the ability to consider how we treat each other. Our experience of the collectives arts teach us ethical behavour. The less we spend time each other in collective creation, the more isolated we become, and the less we think ethically. This, at least, has been my experience….
This is a moment, perhaps, to remember what it was that made us passionate about performance in the first place. With that idea in mind, I have been collecting early experiences of live performance–the experiences that made us want to return, to see more and to perform ourselves.”
Stephen Johnson 