Plague-Time Aesthetics

Abstract

‘‘T he people paid and you gotta do something for ’em,” Tessa BarlowOchshorn declares ironically at the top of her performance-for-video work, How to Wake Up!, as part of the 2021 Exponential Festival. It has been impossible amid Covid-19 to tell if pressures to “perform or else” (as Jon McKenzie once wrote) are enforcing productivity within hyper-industrial, supplyand-demand paradigms, or if some other more transcendent or fundamental compulsions to connect or belong are extant through artistic practices. Why must the show go on when people aren’t actually paying, and the specialized skills and dearly held values of artistic communities are being stretched and subverted? Perhaps it is just that theatre people have been working so hard for so long to justify the necessity and urgency of the craft that to quit for any reason would be to break our own suspension of disbelief in ourselves. Barlow-Ochshorn’s work deals directly with this complex set of desires, demands, and despairs; exposing deeper attempts to access (a)liveness as she narrates her process of waking up in the morning, opening her “cold sharp eyes” along with the curtains, and facing what she calls “death as habit.” Throughout the Exponential Festival, various works struggle within both existential and technological conditions to produce plague-time theatre aesthetics and values.