Laura Bissell – författare

This edited collection gathers UK and international artists, academics, practitioners, and researchers in the fields of contemporary performance, dance, and live art to offer creative-critical responses to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their work.Themes addressed in these case studies include the ways in which liveness functions across digital platforms, the new demands on audiences and performance-makers, and the impact on international festivals as the digital removes geographical and locational restrictions. Brought together, these examples capture the creative activity and output that this unexpected cultural moment has provoked. Creative-critical responses interrogate what the global pandemic has taught us about what it is to make live work during lockdown and explore what the future of performance-making in a post-COVID world might look like. For all scholars and performance-makers whose work brings them into the sphere of contemporary art and culture, this is an essential and stimulating account of practice at the beginning of the 2020s.

This edited collection gathers UK and international artists, academics, practitioners, and researchers in the fields of contemporary performance, dance, and live art to offer creative-critical responses to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their work.Themes addressed in these case studies include the ways in which liveness functions across digital platforms, the new demands on audiences and performance-makers, and the impact on international festivals as the digital removes geographical and locational restrictions. Brought together, these examples capture the creative activity and output that this unexpected cultural moment has provoked. Creative-critical responses interrogate what the global pandemic has taught us about what it is to make live work during lockdown and explore what the future of performance-making in a post-COVID world might look like. For all scholars and performance-makers whose work brings them into the sphere of contemporary art and culture, this is an essential and stimulating account of practice at the beginning of the 2020s.

An exploration of what performance can do to expand conventional representations of becoming a mother. Maternal bodies and processes of pregnancy, childbirth and sustenance have historically been depicted in art and literature as variously uncanny, abject, grotesque, monstrous, and hybrid. Societal conventions and myths around what makes a good or bad mother have limited the representations of maternal ambivalence and labour. Lived experiences of matrescence as depicted by mothers themselves have remained almost invisible with little exposure in galleries or mainstream art and media. Challenging complex and disparaging representations, or the erasure and invisibility of experiences of matrescence altogether, contemporary mother/artists working in the field of performance use their live bodies to subvert dominant images of conventional myths of motherhood. Using strategies of mimesis, liveness, embodiment, relationality, and performativity to render their own matrescent bodies, these artists explore historically pejorative theoretical concepts and aesthetics in new, feminist ways. This book frames performance as a site where becoming a mother can be understood as both a becoming and an unbecoming to expand understandings of matrescence.

Bubbles offer a lens through which to view the world, a rainbow-esque diffraction through which whatever is on the other side of them is visible, yet transformed.Bubbles is Laura Bissell’s compelling and honest account of her early experiences of motherhood, a journey that began in September 2018 with the birth of her daughter and which was, just over a year later, interrupted by the onset of coronavirus and the national lockdowns and global devastation that followed.Insightful and personal, Bubbles considers womanhood, motherhood and reflects on what it means to become a mother. Bissell also explores the intimate yet isolating experience of parenting in a ‘bubble’ with a small child during a pandemic, and the challenges for families as family networks and support systems became suddenly inaccessible.Bissell invites us to witness her transformation from non-mother to mother, as well as her perception of the ways in which the world has been and is likely to continue to be transformed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.