Sarah Senk’s paper explores the aesthetics and politics of COVID-19 commemoration, focusing primarily on the work of grassroots organizations who have supported the creation of spontaneous memorials in the United States. In the two years since the pandemic prompted lockdowns across the country, artists and activists have designed a plethora of installations, community art movements, virtual vigils, and platforms to share “COVID grief stories.” While spontaneous memorials and grassroots commemorative practices certainly have a long history, the circumstances of the pandemic have challenged individuals to rethink both conventional and unconventional rituals of mourning. These efforts to conceptualize new grieving rituals are also taking shape at a time when intense political polarization has made public visibility of the pandemic’s impact deeply uneven, hindering widespread governmental support for the creation of national memorials. At a time when our experience of trauma and recovery has been changed forever by new forms of mass communication, this paper will show how artists and activists have attempted to build a coalition of people polarized in this new media landscape.

In exploring the choreographic realm as one of the pandemic spheres, intricately mediated by environments, cine-digitalities, archival memories, and gestures of dance, Marjana Krajac’s paper takes its cue from a June 17, 2020 earthquake that took place while the author was working on Zoom with dance collaborators from Zagreb (Croatia), Berlin (Germany), and Columbus (US). According to her account, as the earthquake hit Zagreb, people halted mid-sentence while jumping away from their notebooks. Throughout, the web cameras were functioning, and the Internet and Zoom didn’t skip a beat. Unsure what to do next, the session participants opted for what they felt would be comforting: to stay online and keep working. The work held together by data became a space of reliance. As suggested by film theorist Siegfried Kracauer, Krajac notes, the camera presses on our material reality by repositioning its components. Following Kracauer’s lead, Krajac argues that Zoomscapes introduce a new cine-material plane while shifting the presence and the present. In her presentation she discusses two choreographic works: A Choreography for Camera and Dancers by Vera Maletić (created for Radio-Television Zagreb in 1968) and Five Dances for Camera, Dance Studio, and a City (created in June in 2020 on Zoom). She also touches upon the question of the archive as dispersed trace and kinetic event, put in motion by the camera's peculiar repository of temporality and intensified by the pandemic.

The panel concludes with Aycan Akcamete’s discussion of one of the most innovative pandemic projects in Turkey. Podacto, defined as “ear theater” by its creators, initially started as a podcast, in a form similar to a radio play. Podacto filmed its play readings for the streaming platform BluTV in 2022. Taking place at a foley studio, the filmed performances expose the sound production; the actors read the scripts as three foley artists perform the sound effects with the help of a variety of objects. This paper examines the aesthetics of two Podacto productions on BluTV. Akcamete argues that the unique form foregrounds the performativity of the sound, the precarious corporeality of the sound-performers, and the physicality of sound creation. This approach, in turn, resists transhumanism and “technocentric thought” (Benjamin Ross [2020]) pivotal to the aesthetics of digital theater that flourished during the pandemic. Additionally, as the foley artists deploy various objects to perform the sound effects, dismissing computerized sound technology, they signify a return to rudimentary sound-making. Ultimately, despite producing digital performances, Podacto foregrounds two core theatrical elements, performance and corporeality, heralding a form that defies the technocentric thought of the pandemic era theater that has been exhausted by technology.