'I need to get as much done as possible – I've had cancer': culture during coronavirus
idea of people who have to keep 10 feet apart from one another. But they also express some of the intense emotions we are feeling: being on guard all the time or thinking “oh my God I just stood next to someone for two minutes because I forgot about the situation”. I’m seeking a way to translate these existential thoughts into a visual form.
I have a paranoid sense of needing to get as many works done as I possibly can in case I get the virus. I had Legionnaires’ disease five years ago and when I asked a doctor if I could continue as normal he said: “Oh no, you’ll be a very high-risk candidate.” I also had vocal cord cancer three years ago which puts me on an even higher level of risk. I’m becoming like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator, nothing left but a lightbulb for an eye. At least it’s still blinking!
It can be depressing at times. But I’m trying to find some beauty in it one way or the other. I like to think about Henry David Thoreau and what he wrote in his book Walden: “Find your eternity in each moment”. That’s what we all have to do at this point.
Liza Lou, artist
Like a lot of people, I had been cleaning the house like a maniac! I came across my old comfort blanket on a top shelf in my closet. I was immediately struck by having this tattered thing in my hand and the memory of how that felt as a kid. That was the im
petus for my project – inviting people to use whatever they had at home to make their own comfort blanket. What could people make not just out of their scrap materials but also out of this moment and the limitations it brings?
People have been really creative. One woman whose husband passed away is making her blanket out of his old clothes. I talked to somebody who is a real globetrotter and now he’s suddenly stuck at home – he’s making his blanket from all the tote bags he gets given on his travels.
People have been posting their work at #apartogether_art. The hashtag becomes this living space as people add things and comment on them. Then there’s a website where I’m archiving people’s work. I’m also doing live Instagram stuff every Wednesday at 9am. I’m going to do some virtual studio visits with other artists next.
I want to exhibit all the blankets when this is over. It would be very poignant to have them all together and capture the intensity of what this moment felt like.
Hofesh Shechter, choreographer
I was in the middle of making a new piece for seven dancers. The premiere was supposed to be a month from now at Brighton festival, which has been cancelled, in a double bill with my piece Clowns. Clowns is very violent and nefarious and I wanted to balance that by creating something healing. The conversation in the studio was that the most valuable currency of our time is hope.
Once coronavirus started to happen I thought, it’s really important that we continue this now. I’m normally a sceptical person, but the fact my neighbour is putting a note through my door saying: “If you need any help, I’ll be there”, I can feel the kindness of strangers. I’m writing the music for the piece and some of it is done, and some will come as we complete the choreography. This particular piece is trying to create that brotherhood feeling. The current situation might amplify those emotions once we go back to the theatre. The power of being a thousand people in a venue, experiencing something together on a cellular level, a chemical level – not on a screen but sensing the air. After being isolated I hope we will appreciate what a powerful and special thing it is we do.
Tansy Davies, composer
The human connection to nature has been a strand of my work for as long as I can remember. Now feels like the moment my life has prepared me for; a time to engage even more directly with the huge loss of our spiritual connection to the natural world and to Earth, our home.
The most outlandish future project on my horizon is something I would call a “land opera”: a re-enchantment of the land through song. It would be centred around a community of singers, some professional, some not, and created in collaboration with shamanic practitioners; those who have retained a respect for nature through ancient ritual but recognise that these rituals too need to be remade, so that we all can find a way in to this kind of connection to nature, to Earth and to each other.
I don’t know if this work will ever be made but the impulse to create work about healing and reconnection certainly feels more urgent now.
Stephen Woolley, film-maker
Depending on which TV station, radio show or newspaper I visit I’m either an extra in a George Romero zombie movie, a victim from Soderbergh’s Contagion, or Dickie Attenborough freaking out below deck in In Which We Serve. Nothing feels real. Except stomach clenching paranoia.
I’m working from home with my wife, Elizabeth. The phone calls and Zoom meetings and emails cascade with the promise of future productions. As producers we have had two films preparing to shoot this summer and autumn. Who knows how long they will be delayed. Is there anything less socially distancing than the intimacy of filming drama?
Yet while cinemas did briefly shut at the start of the Blitz, they then remained open throughout the rest of the war. People needed the comfort of their fellow sufferers and they enjoyed laughing and crying together, often remaining rooted to their seats during air raids.
The idea of solidarity was then a human necessity. I think it remains so today. Despite the online community, real comradeship is one of the few ideas that comforts us through these bleak days.
People need to be together and movies have to be about something that creates debate and laughter and sadness in a way that’s both profound and entertaining, to be discussed and shared as a group. If we ever get the privilege to make a film again I hope we are aware of that responsibility of an audience’s need to be liberated from their isolation.
Rachel O’Riordan, artistic director of Lyric Hammersmith
It was four days after press night that we had to close Love, Love, Love [a satirical drama directed by O’Riordan].I’d like to finish its run and convey the message that the show can, and will, go on. We won’t be the same people but I want to convey the message that this was a pause, not an end.
The Lyric was originally a music hall. People went to music halls during the war to laugh. In trauma we need to be together and have a release. And we can’t at the moment. Laughing together again, sitting side by side, will be a very powerful thing.
Antigone [directed by Roy Alexander Weise, and part of the same season of productions] was in its first day of rehearsals when I had to tell the company we were closing. The Sophoclean drama is all about a world that has been decimated and has to start to rebuild itself. We were working on the translation by Seamus Heaney, who lived through the Troubles and was profoundly affected by the suffering he saw.
I feel that when we programme it again, it will be playing to audiences who live in a world that is also trying to rebuild itself, emotionally and economically. It will have added intensity.