Enduring Sounds: audio performance and the pandemic

With theatre and live performance venues closing at the end of March 2020, uprooting communities of makers and audiences, many were severed from the distinct capacities of performance to provide a space for embodied assembly and convivial experience. At the same time, this huge rupture in the ecology of theatre and performance practice in the UK encouraged performance makers and live artists to explore a range of other mediums for their work – from short films and Zoom performances to durational radio broadcasts and virtual reality. Among the work that emerged over this period, a number of performance makers turned to recorded audio work as a medium through which to create intimate, often ‘one-to-one’ encounters with their audiences.

In Enduring Sounds we explore how audio performance became a means of survival – of intimacy, assembly and embodied, shared experience. On this website you will find four specially commissioned spoken audio pieces by leading UK live artists, reflecting on their use of sound and voice performance during the pandemic. The resulting audio responses by artists are interspersed with short written entries on key concepts that recur and circulate across the different artist’s performances and reflections.