Reflections on bodies in lockdown

This collection of four short essays by four artists/academic/researchers are provocations that invite us to interrogate and reflect on bodies in ‘lockdown’ in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The behaviour changes, regulations and lockdowns made in response to the pandemic have served to re-shape people’s movement, proximity and touch with one another, objects and the environment at an individual level, as well as an institutional, community and national level. Each of the four authors reflects on the significance of this for spatiality and touch in Covid-19 times; drawing on practices from within choreography, dance, film making, and/or performance they engage with the impact on the aesthetics of real and imagined bodies, present and future bodies. While the four essays are stand-alone pieces founded on distinct artistic practices, collectively they extend the notion of the body, touch and the sensorial, and engage in different ways with the body as a site of, and route to, knowing. In addition to being artistic-research in their own right, these reflections provide insights or alternative starting points to multimodal scholars seeking to understand how bodily experiences are being remediated through Covid-19. Alongside a call to imagine the futures of touch, emergent themes across the essays of potential for multimodality include the role of technologies in shaping the freedom and constraints placed on movement and touch; the sociality of modal resources, notably the creation or loss of a sense of presence and connection, and the balance of collective and individual responsibilities and risk; the experiential meaning potentials of cross-modal relationships between touch and/or sound or image; and the tensions realised through the blurring and the boundaries created between human, non-human and environmental touch. Finally, these essays ask us all to engage with, and question the possibilities for modal and sensory rebalancing, recalibration or reconfiguration of modes – notably of spatiality and touch, in the context of Covid-19 and beyond.