Theatre Journal

What Were Digital Performances Doing?

My research team documented forty-nine digital performances between the onset of social distancing and May 26, 2020. Initially, each team member simply selected performances to which they were drawn, and we coordinated our efforts to document as diverse an array of projects as possible: virtual cabaret, experimental Zoom opera, Instagram Live talk shows, archival streams of regional theatre productions, podcast plays, participatory procedurally authored performances. We quickly realized that we could not map the entire emerging field of pandemic-era digital performance and focused our attention on digital-born performances created within the context of the pandemic that overtly engaged with the circumstances of the present moment. Like Marcela Fuentes, we were often more interested in relationships between on- and off-line action than in longstanding debates between mediation and liveness, recognizing the ways in which the two are deeply entwined in contemporary life.¹³ We conducted process coding on our emerging qualitative data set, analyzing what artists' goals for performances appeared to be and what performances appeared to be doing to their audiences, identifying overlapping categories: promoting personal brands, raising money to support COVID-19 response charities, providing escapist distraction, supporting mindful wellbeing, inciting activism or critical thinking, and creating a feeling of [End Page 4] connection through shared experience.¹⁴ We could only find one performance engaging with the experiences of people who were not sheltering in place: Home Maker Sound Walks—specifically "Covid Bayanihan," a soundwalk designed to guide an audience member through an immersive experience of a Tesco supermarket in Battersea Park from the perspective of a Filipino-migrant domestic worker.¹⁵ We found that people with access to time and technology and artistic skills to create digital performances focused on the uncanny, friction-laden lived experience of quarantined isolation, developing digital performances overtly or implicitly constructing audience members as participants in a "we" that was similarly sheltering in place.

Materially, 69 percent of the performances we documented operated as economic aid to artists whose livelihoods had been disrupted by the pandemic by means of commissions, ticket sales, advertising revenue, or donation solicitation. This was important in a moment in which most performing artists found themselves abruptly out of work. Even performances that did not generate direct revenue for artists in this way looked to generate clicks and views attesting to the value of the work within the context of the attention economy, in which the onslaught of information made available by the internet leads attention to be a scarce and valuable resource; such attention holds the possibility of generating later opportunities for the artists.¹⁶ Ancient and How Are We function in both of these ways, providing immediate financial support for artists, as well as platforms drawing attention to and culturally legitimating their work. In addition to the immediate income from the commission for How Are We, the sixteen artists it features worked with a programmer and a lawyer to upload the twenty-fiveminute-long video onto the blockchain "as an immutable digital 'object' that can be bought, sold, or traded," co-owned through a "smart contract" ensuring transparent and equal distribution of wealth among the artists, programmer, and lawyer.¹⁷ Should wealth be later made from the sale of How Are We on the art market, this stipulation ensures that the artists will be equitably compensated for their labor.¹⁸

The Indexical Force of the Body in Virtual Spaces of Appearance

Butler understands that when people physically assemble to protest precarious living conditions, their bodies take on an indexical quality.¹⁹ The body, to borrow from Susan [End Page 5] Leigh Foster, is a "vast reservoir of signs and symbols."²⁰ The physical relationships the body displays to the protested living condition are not interchangeable. Differently racialized bodies of protesters are marked by distinctive relationships to marginalization and racialized violence. An assembly of bodies at a protest represents the real people who are physically in attendance while simultaneously signifying all of the other people who are similar to the protesters, in that they live under precarious conditions or stand in solidarity with the people who live under precarious conditions. Each member of the assembly is both performer and spectator, simultaneously signifying and making meaning of the presence and actions of the other assembly members within their field of vision. Acting in concert draws bodies together into a collective we, an alliance that Hannah Arendt described as "the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be."²¹ Butler emphasizes that such action "is invariably bodily, even . . . in its virtual forms."²² To be political, such action must take place somewhere that it can be seen and heard, in a space of appearance, in which people intentionally make themselves seen.

Spaces of appearance do not exclusively rely upon embodied co-presence. For example, an impromptu memorial was erected in late May 2020 at the site where George Floyd was killed by police officer Derek Chauvin. The assembly this memorial performs indexes, but does not rely upon, co-present bodies. Although the Minneapolis intersection now known as George Floyd Square has frequently been a space in which embodied protestors gather, it is dominated by a durational performance centering nonhuman objects, with a sculpture of a Black Power fist, protest signs, flowers, and ephemera indexing the bodies of Black victims of police brutality and the bodies of an assembly of mourners. Even when people do not gather at this site in organized protest, people engage with these objects in ways that bring them comfort, give comfort to others, and energize a movement-in-process. To borrow from Jill Lane, this memorial is "the vital theatre that our times immediately required—reclaiming public space for social solidarity in the face of radical loss and new fears."²³ This public space for social solidarity developed as collective comfort in response to collective trauma, following Ann Cvetkovich's definition of trauma as "a social and cultural discourse that emerges in response to the demands of grappling with the psychic consequences of historical events."²⁴ The memorial operates as a public assembly in a space of appearance—that is, it arose out of people acting together for a shared purpose seen and heard in a way that shaped social and cultural discourse.

Between March and May 2020, with much of the world under shelter-in-place orders, spaces of appearance were mostly virtual. Humans in quarantined isolation saw and heard people outside their own households almost exclusively through technological means. As Fintan Walsh describes, screens became "the means by which we continued [End Page 6] everyday tasks or attended theatre . . . central to how we navigated love and loss, intimacy and separation."²⁵ Bay-Cheng, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, and David Saltz remind me to attend to the spectatorial implications of this rapidly shifting relationship between engaged participants and the effects of technology distributed throughout culture.²⁶ Videoconferencing software became ubiquitous, its entanglement with our lives modifying our relationships; the human form represented within the suddenly ubiquitous Zoom grid quickly began to feel, to borrow from Matthew Causey, "less uncanny and more familiar."²⁷ The digital performances I describe in this essay center metaphoric action, but they do so within the same aesthetic frame as interpersonal communications that eight weeks earlier would have been live and co-present. In the spring 2020, spaces of appearance were mediated and intimate, offering hyper-realistic close-up views of domestic life. Luna Dozeal describes how telepresence facilitates a "sense of proximity and contact despite the physical or geographical distance between us."²⁸ Through telepresence, we shared the corporeal experience of both household isolation within our domestic spaces and entanglement with the videoconferencing software. This interaction produces what I call "telepresent intercorporeality," as we perceive one anothers' actions, grasp their intentions, and produce embodied responses to those actions while also producing embodied responses to the technology facilitating our engagement and to the actions of human and nonhuman actors within our separate physical environments.²⁹ This is an embodied process requiring energy and focus. Adjusting to it produced a sense of intersubjectivity, as people watched one another (and often watched ourselves onscreen) navigate similar embodied experiences of quarantined isolation.

Artists making digital performances forwarding discourses that "we're all in this together" leaned into this intersubjectivity, employing a rhetoric of common experience focused on the practice of staying at home. There is an indexical quality to the artists appearing in "in-this-together" performances—they represent themselves, actual humans who are really sheltering in place, and also symbolically stand in for other humans who are similar to them in some way and also sheltering in place. Humans are social beings; we need to feel like we belong to groups, and we take pleasure in group belonging. Communities are comprised of diverse individuals with disparate interests, needs, and values who agree to bind themselves together as a group around a common aspect of their identity.³⁰ These performances situate the act of sheltering in place as the shared facet of community belonging, implicitly encouraging audience members to participate in this community and maintain quarantined isolation. [End Page 7]

Ancient

Mike Sears and Lisa Berger's Ancient kicked off La Jolla Playhouse's WOW Festival; the run was announced to be from May 14 to June 7, 2020, but the digital performance remained available to stream after the end of the initial run. Instructions to audience members direct that the performance is intended to be viewed "alone in a dark, quiet space where you can relax," and that viewers should turn off their cell phones, suggesting that the intended audience has a degree of control over their environment, a space in which they can be alone, and digital access to stream video on a device that is not a cell phone.³¹ The performance features text from Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Go to the Limits of Your Longing" set to a score composed by Shawn Rohlf. One at a time, images of people engaged in repetitive everyday tasks appear onscreen. A middle-aged Asian man (Daniel Yin) does tai chi in front of a red barn under a bright blue sky. A white woman in her thirties (Temi Hason) plays the cello in front of windows looking out at the lights of a city at night. A middle-aged Indian American woman in a wheelchair (Bhavna Mehta) shucks peas in her kitchen. An Asian woman in her forties (Jennifer Chang) rocks a toddler in a rocking chair. A white man in his forties (Rohlf) plays the guitar in a basement studio. A man in his twenties, who looks as though he might be of Latinx or Indigenous descent (Joey Prete), washes dishes in his kitchen. A young Black woman (Bibi Mama) folds laundry while sitting on the bed in her bedroom. A white woman in her forties (Caitie Grady) plays the piano. An older white man with tattoos (Sears) plants seedlings in front of a garage containing a motorcycle. (See figure 1.) As each is introduced, they appear in a large box in the center of the screen to establish their action; their boxes then shrink and shift away from the center until all of the performers are in a grid of boxes filing the screen. Each performs their own old-as-time action in their own domestic space, separated by thin black lines. At some moments, they all make the same gesture, echoing a shape from tai chi with simultaneous movement in their own spaces incorporated (sometimes seamlessly, often not) into their own actions. At one moment, the music fades and the sounds of domestic activity can be heard: the clank of silverware, the rhythmic click of a rocking chair on hardwood, the rattle of soil hitting the inside of a pot. Fifteen minutes into the twenty-minute-long performance, they all stop and look at the camera, breaking the fourth wall and including us all in the experience.

Throughout, the musicians sing, "Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. / Just keep going, No feeling is final. / Don't let yourself lose me."³² The lyrics ask audience members to let it in emotionally—the beauty and the terror—and to find the beauty in these quiet moments of repetitive caretaking action. They remind audience members that feelings pass. The performance does not incorporate the full text of Rilke's poem, which frames this imperative as the word of God, imploring God's human audience—you—to experience fully everything life has to offer, and in so doing, "embody" the divine: "God speaks to each of us as he makes us / then walks with us silently out of the night."³³ This source material invokes a divine spirit infusing human experience, supporting humans through moments of pain and struggle. This [End Page 8] directive insists that to get mired in the terror of a moment, to forget that such feelings and experiences are temporary, is to lose touch with God. Ancient takes these three lines of Rilke's poem out of context, and in so doing removes any religious reference. It directs itself to you, its singular and plural remote audience, but does not identify the me offering such advice. This lyric is set to a repetitive, almost dirge-like melody. The final directive "don't let yourself lose me," when sung, elongates the word me and modulates its pitch through multiple harmonic chords, making it sound like the word meaning. This sonic slipperiness reinforces Ancient's charge to make mindful meaning from the journey through the frightening, mundane, uncanny experience of sheltering in place.

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Figure 1.

Moving left to right across the rows, beginning with top left: Caitie Grady, Bhavna Mehta, Bibi Mama, Mike Sears, Daniel Yin, Shawn Rohlf, Temi Hason, Joey Prete, and Jennifer Chang in Ancient.

(Photo: Courtesy of La Jolla Playhouse.)

Ancient argues for a practice to manage grief through participation in an imagined collective. Looking at it from a place of critical generosity, it represents inclusive practices into which viewers are invited to write themselves, offering a range of healthy mechanisms for tolerating and enduring the pain of sheltering in place. It is free and online, and so accessible to anyone with sufficient internet access and a device that can stream video, presenting people of diverse races, abilities, and ages in environments representing class positions ranging from lower middle to upper middle class, doing domestic activities that cost little-to-no money, including chores (cooking, laundry, washing dishes) that need to be done regularly in most households of any size, configuration, and social class. It fits into the tradition of American theatre that Jacob Gallagher-Ross describes as focused on "mundane subject matter" dedicated to "transforming spectators' conceptions of what constitutes importance, both on and offstage."³⁴ Ancient's central argument is that humans have been doing such activities for thousands of years, and this pandemic is not the first through which humans have [End Page 9] cooked, cleaned, taken care of children, grown things, exercised, meditated, and played music. By attending to the aesthetic qualities of mundane action, it asks audience members to "truly see the ordinary world around us, to pay homage to the worlds of experience that arrive and disappear in every sensate moment."³⁵

Ancient represents the experiences of people of diverse races, genders, ages, and abilities as fundamentally similar, obscuring the material and psychic ways in which its subjects' relationships to hierarchical systems of power render them different. Aesthetically, the performers are all given the same amount of visual weight or emphasis performing separate actions at the same slow, steady tempo. The only voices we hear are those of the musicians, and so while we see the images of a diverse array of people, the only voices we hear are the voices of able-bodied people in their thirties and forties who either are white or can pass for white, singing text written by an early twentieth-century Austro-Hungarian poet. Jermaine Singleton asks: "How does performance create the very conditions of racial visibility (for people of color) and invisibility (for white subjects) through which the ghosts of American racialization travel across time and social space discreetly? How do these ghosts forge and fortify racial identity in the process?"³⁶ Giving Eurocentric voice to a diverse ensemble activates legacies of colonial cultural erasure and fortifies color-blind discourse. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva describes how such discourse negates the social reality of race, supporting white supremacy by cloaking racial inequalities in myths that racialized differences do not exist. Color-blind frameworks imagine that people of different races do not have different experiences of the world, rendering the mechanisms reproducing racial inequality invisible and implicitly rationalizing inequality as attributable to individual failings.³⁷ Ancient asks audience members to view the experiences it represents as fundamentally similar to one another and to their own lived experiences of quarantine. It relies upon the capacity of performers' diverse bodies to fulfill an indexical function and facilitate a process in which audience members read themselves into the imagined community. The intent behind this heterogeneity is clearly inclusion; the diverse bodies give a wide array of audience members a performer who shares a salient facet of their identity. An unintended byproduct, however, is that in so doing, it reproduces colorblind discourses, obscuring real differences in people's experiences of the onset of the pandemic.

How Are We

How Are We, by Emily Mast and Yehuda Duenyas, is a twenty-five-minute film featuring movement-based works by Barnett Cohen, Constance Hockaday and Faye Driscoll, Darrian O'Reilly, David Adrian Freeland Jr., Dorothy Dubrule, Emily Mast and Yehuda Duenyas, Hana van der Kolk, Heyward Bracey Jay Carlon, Jessica Emmanuel, Jennie MaryTai Liu, Mireya Lucio, Shannon Hafez, Stacy Dawson Stearns, and Terrence Luke Johnson. It was commissioned by the Onassis Foundation's ENTER project and created within a 120-hour time frame in May 2020 under conditions of quarantined isolation. The title How Are We binds sixteen separate, diverse artists in distinct domestic or outdoor spaces into a collective "we" dancing through the depths [End Page 10] of lockdown. Each piece is a ninety-second-long snapshot of lived experience, and each experience receives equal weight within the full piece. "We" are diverse: young and old, white, Black, Latinx, and Asian, women, men, and people whose gender I cannot identify from the performance, and dogs. Each is in their own distinct space, each in their own block of time, with moments separated by artists' names and title blocks. Each performance fills the whole screen; figures and images can be viewed as easily on the small screen of a phone as on the larger screen of a tablet or laptop. The tempo of the piece as a whole is steady, with those title blocks functioning as a kind of metronome beating out the slow, steady rhythm of quarantine, creating what Andy Horowitz (2020) calls a "collection of juxtaposed interiorities."³⁸

These interiorities vary wildly. A young nonbinary person (Shannon Hafez) creates space to play, dancing with their dog on a rug under a tree in what appears to be a Los Angeles backyard; their play is underscored with Percy Faith and His Orchestra's light, sweet instrumental "Theme from 'A Summer Place,'" composed by Max Steiner for the 1959 movie starring Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee. The performance bursts with innocent joy, echoing with nostalgia for the imagined ease of a sunny day in May in any non-pandemic year. In another snapshot, a woman's body (Jennie MaryTai Liu) slowly moves under a blanket on a bed. The birds chirp outside; the voices of young children can be heard through a baby monitor. She hides from family, buried under the needs of others. In another snapshot, a Filipino man in his thirties (Jay Carlon) hits a tennis ball against a wall under a bright blue sky with palm trees; sirens wail nearby. He wears a mask; his breath grows heavy with exertion as he tries to work the fear and rage out of his body through physical exertion. In yet another snapshot, a young Black man (David Adrian Freeland Jr.) sits in a chair, physicalizing a wide range of emotional states: neutral, collapsed, burying his face in his hands and opening them up to show he is putting on a happy face, screaming silently in rage or fear, regaining composure, looking at the camera and laughing with the audience. He externalizes and makes visible a process of burying negative emotions to put on a composed, charming, and positive face. In the snapshot authored by Mast and Duenyas, a white woman wearing white clothes spins, falls, rolls, and runs through empty public and industrial spaces in Los Angeles. She rolls down a flight of stairs, laying collapsed at the bottom. She runs down a dark street, in which she looks as though she feels she may be in danger. In this empty landscape she is utterly alone; ordinary spaces feel postapocalyptic. The camera rises up far above her, and looking down on her figure she appears very, very small in this empty world.

In the closing moment of How Are We, text calls forth a stabilizing message to the fragmented narrative:

Yes to intimacyYes to magicYes to furyYes to imperfectionYes to transcendenceYes to virtuosityYes to slapstickYes to a moment repeated [End Page 11] Yes to a surpriseYes to stillness.³⁹

This message is similar to the message of Ancient, encouraging audience members to accept all the feelings of this strange moment of quarantine with as little judgment as possible. How Are We is a more complex work than Ancient, representing a wider range of feelings and experiences and created using a more diverse array of artistic techniques. Its "we" is polyvocal; each ninety-second piece is authored by a different artist, representing a distinct quarantine experience. A young nonbinary person playing in their yard with their dog is not the same as a woman who cannot get out of bed to attend to a house full of small children, and is not the same as a Black man bottling rage and fear to put on a composed and pleasant face. The indexical qualities of diverse artists' bodies highlight the ways in which, to borrow from Butler, "[i]t is this body, or these bodies, or bodies like this body or these bodies, that live the condition" represented in the performance.⁴⁰ The differences across these experiences talk to one another, highlighting the ways in which structural systems of power interact with lived experiences of sheltering in place.

Empathetic Identification and Its Discontents

Bodies hold variable meaning based on audience members' perceptions and lived experiences. Their indexical quality relies upon audience members recognizing represented bodies as like me in some significant way. This comes with its own difficulties, as an over-identification of similarities can mask real differences in lived experiences. Lindsay Cummings suggests that

[w]e have to unlearn the method of empathizing by identifying similarities or making analogies and pursue, in its place, a method of empathizing by engaging the other, imagining his or her situation, and seeking verification of one's interpretations through dialogue and feedback. To empathize in this way means that, rather than latching on to what strikes us as similar in the other, we remain as receptive as possible to our sense of both similarities and differences.⁴¹

Both Ancient and How Are We implicitly ask audience members to identify and empathize with a diverse array of performers. However, they do this in different ways. Ancient invites audience members to imagine themselves part of a community that is fundamentally similar; How Are We emphasizes the variety of experiences and feeling states experienced by different people within a community participating in quarantine. The latter aesthetic strategy aesthetically supports Cummings's dialogic empathy in productive ways.

Both of these performances include representations of the experiences of sheltering in place as the mother of a small child or children. I empathized with these women as I watched these performances; as I indicate earlier in this essay, I sheltered in place as a working parent of a 5-year-old, and my experience was fraught with friction. That friction sharpened my focus on that aspect of my identity, and with motherhood in the [End Page 12] forefront of my mind, I interpreted frazzled mothers of small children of any race as avatars of my lived experience during that historic moment. Cummings warns of the limitations and dangers of empathy, of a "rush to 'achieve' it or to possess some part of another's experience without heeding warnings that our understanding is flawed or our empathy unwelcome."⁴² As a financially secure, partnered, able-bodied white mother of one white child, my lived experience of working from homeschool was miserable but not universal. When I read my experience into all representations of motherhood in quarantine, I lose the opportunity to better understand how oppressive power structures that largely support my safety and stability exacerbated the pressures that this moment placed on other mothers.

Ancient includes one scenario of an Asian woman in her early forties (Jennifer Chang) rocking a small child with a look of dead-eyed exhaustion on her face. She sits in a room in a middle-class-looking home with a framed newspaper cover on the wall trumpeting the election of Barack Obama. In the window behind her, the sun either rises or sets. Is it dawn or dusk? It does not really matter; she is so very tired. I read my own experience of dead-eyed exhaustion into this image. However, to focus on her "mother-ness" as like me is to ignore the ways in which the actual person represented might not experience the world in some of the ways that I do. Discourses positing COVID-19 as the "China Flu" in spring 2020 led to an uptick in anti-Asian racism.⁴³ This increase in violence may have heaped additional stress upon the mother in Ancient. My family's white privilege buffers us from racial discrimination; my experience is not the same as her experience. The naturalistic representational aesthetics of Ancient, coupled with the piece's central message focused on the similarities running across quarantine experiences, supports my over-identification.

Jennie MaryTai Liu's piece in How Are We represents the experience of a parent who either cannot or really does not want to get out of bed. It tells the story through the slow movement of unidentifiable body parts under the blanket in a bright bedroom, the sound of a baby's cry and children's voices heard through a baby monitor. The body under the blanket does not offer details revealing its age, race, ability, or gender. The soundscape clearly identifies the household as one with small children, and I focus on that detail as I interpret the piece, reading into it my own experiences of pretending to be asleep when my daughter calls "MOMMEEEEE" at 5:30 in the morning in the hope that my partner will get up to attend to her needs and let me avoid the beginning of another very long day of working from homeschool. I understand the body in Liu's piece to index people living under the condition of sheltering in place with small children. Another viewer might select different details to guide their interpretation, identifying the body as unable to get out of bed and indexing people living under conditions of clinical depression or chronic pain. The formally experimental aesthetic use of hyper-realism disconnects the details of the parent's identity from the structure of feeling represented in the piece, opening up the indexical capacity of the body. [End Page 13]

Precarity and Pain

There is a public health utility to defining the act of sheltering in place as a salient facet of shared experience around which a community coalesces; the human desire to belong encourages people to stay in their homes in order to participate correctly in this newly defined we. Victor Turner highlights how "the concept of threat or danger to the group . . . is one of the chief ingredients in the production of existential communitas."⁴⁴ The shared threat of COVID-19 bound this we in communitas; crisis temporarily dissolves the usual structures and hierarchies in order to form the affective structure of a collective bond. But such affective structures do not alter material inequalities; temporary feelings of togetherness can fulfill a social role similar to the Bakhtinian carnival, functioning as a release valve facilitating and sustaining the status quo of hierarchical power structures.⁴⁵ Feelings of commonality and solidarity did not alleviate the disproportionate burden the pandemic placed on the most vulnerable members of society. The center held on this fragile we for only a few months, until it refractured in response to the murder of George Floyd in late May 2020.

But in the weeks leading up to that rupture, this community-building praxis had an unintended consequence within the context of deeply antagonistic, partisan divisions in the United States. The act of taking the public health risk seriously was politicized, and a camp coalesced in opposition to the community bound by the shared experience of sheltering in place. Through April and May 2020, activists from this camp staged embodied protests to reopen the economy. Their activist performatives created temporary spaces in which embodied co-presence was possible and the danger of disease felt imaginary, calling forth a world in which we could be together in person. From the perspective of the community sheltering in place, those activist performances were asinine, dangerous, and baffling, representing stupidity, ignorance, and selfishness. Digital performances oriented toward those sheltering in place largely ignored the perspectives of the people who chose to place themselves outside of the community of people complying with the quarantine. Of the forty-nine digital performances my research team documented and analyzed between March and May 2020, we looked for and could not find any acknowledging the existence of this resistant camp.

The people protesting social-distancing measures did so in response to feelings of pain stemming from economic precarity, but their pain was not socially legible to people outside of their discursive community. Popular discourses valorized the essential workers whose embodied labor was required to care for the sick and facilitate access to necessities such as food and medicine. However, little attention was paid to the economic conditions of precarity driving low-paid service workers to place themselves in harm's way. Economic precarity links the people who would not stay at home and many of those who could not stay at home. Their pain and loss did not count as socially legible to the people sheltering in place. This situation exacerbated existing social fissures in a society marked by deep inequalities. [End Page 14]

That is not to say that everyone sheltering in place did so from a place of financial security. Employers leveraged the symbolic "we" as they delivered news of pay cuts, furloughs, and layoffs, protecting institutions by shifting the economic burdens of the epidemic onto individual workers.⁴⁶ Yet, many people who felt the pain of pandemic-induced economic precarity did not choose to protest social-distancing measures. They bound themselves as part of the community of people sheltering in place, as baffled by the actions of the protesters as people who pivoted to remote-work arrangements that left their livelihoods largely intact. People who prioritized physical health over economic health believed the science and the scientists determining embodied copresent activities to be dangerous. This belief system became a defining feature of the community observing quarantine. Communities are defined by their symbolic boundaries; performing an action defining such a boundary binds an individual to a camp, enacts belonging, and calls community into being by drawing a line differentiating our shared values from their distasteful, rejected ideas. If the people who trust science and listen to public health experts to stay at home are in, the people who refuse to are out. This resonates with and raises the immediate stakes of existing political melodramas, to borrow from Sonja Kuftinec and John Fletcher, "masking 'us' and 'them' beneath ready-made black-and-white hats."⁴⁷ Within such a landscape it is near impossible to understand the genuine motivations driving polarizing actions, which might open up spaces of common understanding.

Then, in late May, the fragile community bound by the shared experience of social distancing shattered as the murder of George Floyd forced so many out of digital space and into the streets. Floyd's body indexed all Black bodies, and for many Black people, the potential exposure to the COVID-19 virus was far less dangerous than the white supremacy deeming their lives disposable. Many people of all races stood in solidarity with them, taking to the streets, the seeming stasis of quarantined isolation shattered in racial justice reckoning. I do not want to oversimplify such solidarity, pretending that the presence of diverse protesting bodies offers a pancea for the endemic disposability of Black bodies and Black lives. Longstanding disparities in racialized safety came to the forefront of public attention, the gaps in the "we" who had thought themselves "all in this together" impossible to ignore. Such dehiscence demands that attention be paid to racialized exclusions, highlighting the impossibility of the "we" under conditions of white supremacy. This makes for a messy social configuration, unstable and incomplete, obliterating fantasies of collective unity while simultaneously demanding collective action to resolve racial injustice. [End Page 15]