Fintan O’Toole: Why 2021 can be Ireland’s great year of cultural recovery

Coronavirus didn’t just shut down live performance, it usurped the artist. The job of art is to break our habits, to knock us out of our stride, to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. The pandemic did all that backwards and in high heels.

It has heightened our perceptions, making us all too aware of both the visible and the invisible realms of the world around us.

Most of the old cultural spaces have been out of bounds for artists, technicians and audiences. This has been brutal for the people who work in them and a deep impoverishment of the shared life of communities and the nation

It has us almost literally dancing to its tune, improvising the new choreographies of social distancing. It stole the mask that has been, for thousands of years, the symbol of performance, and adapted it to its mean purposes.

And so, as we allow ourselves to imagine for 2021 the possibility of life after Covid-19, one of the things we have to think about is how – and indeed whether – live art can reclaim its own territory.

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Some of this need for reclamation is literal. Most of the old cultural spaces – the theatres, the arts centres, the galleries, the concert halls – have been wholly or partly out of bounds, for artists, for technicians and for audiences.

This has been brutal for the people who work in those spaces and a deep impoverishment of the shared life of communities and the nation. While there has been a general (and entirely proper) recognition of the pain of religious believers who have been unable to attend services, the loss of these other collective rituals is no less deeply felt.

But it is not, of course, unprecedented – and if we take the long view, the precedents are not discouraging.

In June 1592, for example, the mayor of London decreed “that there be no plays used in any… usual place where the same are commonly used, nor no other sort of unlawful or forbidden pastimes that draw together the baser sort of people”.

The prohibition, because of riots and then the plague, lasted pretty much through all of 1593 and 1594. It must have been a devastating blow to a young provincial who was making his way as an actor and playwright.

Theatres and concert halls have been shut down many times, by pandemics, wars and religious puritans. They come back. And often they come back with renewed vigour

But William Shakespeare used the time to write the long poems for which he was most famous in his own lifetime, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. And the 20 years that followed were – not just because of him – probably the most productive in the history of the theatre since classical Athens, even though plague shut the playhouses again several times.

Live performance is resilient. Theatres and concert halls have been shut down many times, by pandemics, wars and religious puritans. They come back. And often they come back with renewed vigour.

Will this time be any different? The only reason to think it might be is that the alternative options to live performance are now so available, abundant and seductive. Bingeing on Netflix is habit-forming. Most of us have filled the hole left by physical events by plundering the vast treasure house of streamed music and performance.

So maybe we won’t want to go back. But I doubt it. Non-participatory cultural experiences – reading a book, listening to music with the headphones on – have long been part of our lives. They have never been substitutes for being there.

If anything, absence has surely made the heart grow fonder of presence. For many of us, watching an opera or a musical or a dance piece online isn’t even second best. It’s impossible.

I tried to watch Hamilton on the Disney channel. I lasted about 10 minutes – not because the musical isn't terrific but because, when you wrench it out of its theatrical context, it seems phoney

I know. I tried to watch Hamilton on the Disney channel. I lasted about 10 minutes – not because the musical isn’t terrific but because, when you wrench it out of its theatrical context, it seems phoney.

There’s a paradoxical word for this phenomenon: stagey. It is (rightly) a term of abuse when applied to a film or a performance on screen. But it is also a kind of back-handed compliment: the more “of the stage” a piece is, and thus the more true it is to its own primary nature, the worse it will seem on a screen.

The term implicitly acknowledges that what is happening on a stage is a whole other category of experience. And this in turn might help us think about where live performance might go after the pandemic.

Robert Frost famously said of his own artform that "poetry is what gets lost in translation". We could usefully adapt this to what we have learned from the lockdown: the essence of live performance is what gets lost in the translation from the physical to the virtual.

This is not a simple truth. Some art forms translate better than others. To my own taste, there is a spectrum that goes from opera and dance (awful) to complex theatre (pretty bad) to solo theatrical pieces (often okay), to most kinds of music (pretty good).

It’s also the case that, even before the pandemic, one of the most interesting cultural developments was that odd hybrid: the live streaming of a play or opera or concert to a different live audience gathered in a cinema.

From landscape sculpture to public installations, street performance to site-specific theatre, pushing the boundaries of designated cultural spaces is already a well-established practice

Such hybrids will flourish in the post-Covid world and they will probably develop their own new dynamics. Artists who would not previously have been interested in streaming have had crash courses in its technological and creative possibilities.

The binary of presence and absence has been blurred for both performers and audiences and there is no doubt that this terrain will continue to be explored and expanded.

Virtual reality, for example, is bound to be used in new ways as the technology becomes cheaper and audiences, with their assumptions altered by Covid, become more receptive to different ideas of an artistic experience.

Again, something like this has happened before. To return to Shakespeare, another bout of plague, in 1606, transformed his art. The huge, crowded Globe Theatre shut down. He and his company moved to the much more intimate (and upmarket) indoor space of Blackfriars.

This, in turn, allowed him to create a radically different kind of theatre. There is a straight line from a pandemic to a reconfiguration of performance space to A Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.

The upheavals of 2020 will have similar effects in 2021 and beyond. It is not as if, long before the pandemic, artists and performers were not continually testing the whole idea of what the proper place for performance might be.

From landscape sculpture to public installations, street performance to site-specific theatre, pushing the boundaries of designated cultural spaces is already a well-established practice.

Even within mainstream theatre in Ireland, the tradition of occupying non-theatrical spaces goes very deep, from Anew McMaster performing King Lear in barns, to Druid’s use of pubs and community halls to ANU’s occupation of a deserted Magdalene laundry and a ruined power station.

There is no real fear about the ability of the creative community, once it is allowed to function again, not just to adapt to new ideas of public space, but to be inspired by the challenges they pose

So there is no real fear about the ability of the creative community, once it is allowed to function again, not just to adapt to new ideas of public space, but to be inspired by the challenges they pose.

There is, nevertheless, the more basic question so brilliantly posed by Walter Benjamin in his celebrated 1935 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Benjamin was thinking primarily about painting and what it might mean in an era when every image could be mass-distributed in limitless quantities. But his thoughts have renewed salience as we come out of a period in which almost all performance has been a “mechanical production” through the even more unbounded medium of the internet.

Benjamin suggested that the great urge of reproduction was “to pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura”. He suggested that: “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”

He also pointed out that the great difference between a stage performance and one on screen is integrity: “The artistic performance of a stage actor is definitely presented to the public by the actor in person; that of the screen actor, however, is presented by a camera…The camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral whole.”

Live performers, in other words, make their own decisions, here and now, in this moment. In a filmed performance, the performer loses that power. It belongs to others – the director, the editor.

But this also applies to us as members of the audience. At a live event, we choose where we look and how we listen. In a virtual event, other people are – sometimes heavy-handedly, sometimes subtly – making those choices for us.

I don't just miss "being at" an event. I miss "going to" an event. It's a thing we take for granted – the active choice we are making to move towards a space that is not our own, to get up off our bums and enter another zone

This is what we miss about live performance: the autonomy and integrity of the performer, our freedom to shape our own responses, the sense of our shared presence in space and time.

This is about public and private. The pandemic has privatised cultural experience – we have to make it public again.

I realised, during the long months of deprivation, that I don’t just miss “being at” an event. I miss “going to” an event. It’s a thing we take for granted – the active choice we are making to move towards a space that is not our own, to get up off our bums and enter another zone.

And this is what we need to reclaim. 2021 should not just be about going back into the closed-off spaces. It has to be about going back into the encounter with the unique existence of something “at the place where it happens to be”.

This means, simply, the repossession of what makes live performance necessary, which is that it happens in an enriched space, but also in an enriched time: the feeling of being in a moment that will never exist in precisely this way again.

There is surely a hunger for this experience, and thus a great opportunity to satisfy it. After our mass experiment in sensory deprivation, our senses should be keener and sharper.

What is needed is not spectacle. Spectacle is cold and distant; we stand back and watch in awe. We’ve had enough of cold distance in 2020 to last several lifetimes.

We need, rather, a kind of counter-plague, the pandemic turned upside down. We have had to learn to be risk averse – so give us risky art. We have had to forgo social intimacy – so make performance intimate. Our public spaces have been denuded and impoverished – fill them again with the richness and abundance that only live art can generate.

And maybe, at least for a while, art should not try too consciously to reflect on what we have all been through. The virus did a pretty good job of getting inside our heads. It’s going to be there, like it or not, for a long time.

Whether or not artists choose to allude to it, we will be seeing its traces everywhere. Audiences will bring it with them – artists don’t need to hammer it home. They just need to get back to making the world strange in ways that are not deadly but life-giving.