PANDEMIC PANIC: A VICTIM OF LOCKDOWN

After a whirwind of two days, drenching ourselves with the artistic energy of New York City, Lisa Naugle returned to California on March 10, as the virus that Fauci claimed was "not a threat" appeared to spiral out of control. All business and activity in New York City came to a halt, and within days a lockdown was in effect. All that artistic energy vanished as though it never was.

From the confines of my apartment I would venture out every 10 to 12 days to buy supplies from the market.

At first, I thought this was a wonderful time to get work done, and for a while I was able to convince myself that this was not much different from my life as a loner.  But I was discovering that I had so many friends that I could see, have dinner or brunch with, or go to a coffee house to write in the presence of very creative people who were using places like Reggio's as a haven for creative work and stimulating discussions...or pop into the Morgan Library, the Whitney, The Russian Tea Room, or see a show or opera almost spontaneously when I needed a boost to my perspective on life.

That creative milieu was removed overnight, and it appeared that no one had calculated the consequences of such an unprecedented, catastrophic compromise.

I began to understand that I was in a state of shock, withdrawal, and depression. The day lost its shape, and I lost all sense of day and night. I could not sleep. All sense of a sleep cycle was lost. I was becoming more and more depressed because all this luxury of time on my hands was not being converted into any productive activity. I was starting to lose it...

I was in LOCKDOWN... I was in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, UNDER HOUSE ARREST, with all these talking heads on television who seemed to bicker back and forth on nothing of consequence whatsoever, except to remind us of what we could NOT do... that we were being watched... KEEP YOUR DISTANCE... WEAR YOUR FACEMASK! STAY INSIDE!... THEY seemed to be making "lists of whose naughty and nice" ... but it wasn't Santa... it was Governors and Mayors and bureaucrats who believed they had the power to make laws and conduct invasive surveillance without our consent... and then there emerged a sense of despair of media in collusion with so-called government... so that it seemed there was no end in sight... there appeared to be some perverted delight that lockdown was essential and must continue for "because it's good for you."

April tumbled end-over-end, out of control... my lack of sleep had filled my brain with the fog of despair. Easter loomed and passed as a non-event. Early spring days were filled with sunlight, with passing storms and sometimes very strong winds, even a tornado warning for NYC.

As May approached, my lack of sleep had become alarming. I was a victim of LOCKDOWN. And I knew I was not alone. Every email and message proclaimed everything was OK... and so did I also put on an air of survival mode mentality. But we all knew and know that everything was not well. The globe has entered an unprecedented era, far worse than the GREAT DEPRESSION...Worse because it has been a government-imposed shutdown based on faulty data and flawed projections.

Night and day merged without distinctive boundaries. With all this personal freedom of time on my hands, nothing was being accomplished. The end of April fizzled into May and I experienced PANDEMIC PANIC--- the LOCKDOWN has become an insurmountable hurdle... all imposed from within through the destructive energy of isolation.

I had nowhere to go. "Don't bother us unless you have COV-19--- we can't be distracted unless you are essential... " You see, some some of us are essential, but the rest are not, so those lives don't really matter.  "Since you're not essential, don't bother us until we say it's okay to come out."

I realized that I had begun to see myself as a victim, and there appeared to be no way out. I needed to find THE WAY.... and I thought of Neil Diamond's song THE WAY... and his plaintiff face out: "I need to find...I need to find...I need to find..."
                                                            FADE OUT

PRE-PANDEMIA: RESEARCH AS LIVED EXPERIENCE

My collaborateur, Lisa Naugle of UCI Irvine, had heard of a virus that was beginning to insinuate itself in people's lives in early March (2020), and had been planning to visit me so that we might use a couple of days to research venues to stimulate our thinking and discussions about future collaborative work. We have worked together, collaborating for many years as we toured Europe each spring with Maestro Dinu Ghezzo, the mentor of us all.

Lisa called to ask if I was uncomfortable with her coming since there were these rumors of a serious outbreak of a new virus. Yet, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the CDC had recently commented it was not something to be too concerned about---"not a major threat"--- and Nancy Pelosi was encouraging everyone to go to China Town. I remember several viruses from the past, including the Pandemic of 1968 which peaked in 1969 during the Woodstock Festival, so I was not worried that things were so serious that Lisa should change her plans to visit.

On the day she was scheduled to arrive, March 9th, the NYU School of Psychology was hosting Ted Coons' 90 Year Festschrift and I was scheduled to present. As I entered NYU's King Juan Carlos Center, the venue that was hosting Dr. Coons' Festschrift, I detected an air of concern among those who had traveled to be present to honor this great scholar, researcher, and educator.  Participants declined to shake hands and bumped elbows instead, although Ted, unfazed, continue to shake hands and hug former students and colleagues.

West Side Story (Spring 2020) Projection Amplifies Dramatic Tension

Lisa arrived during the evening of the Festchrift celebration, and we talked about our plans for using New York City as the backdrop for our researching performance resources to uncover new  ideas for collaboration. Of particular interest was the new multimedia production of West Side Story that had just opened. The production utilized techniques that we had explored ten years earlier, using media and projections to create an array of theatre effects in the NYU multimedia workshop IMPACT.  As a researcher pursuing phenomenology as my major mode of inquiry, I had proposed to Lisa that her visit would model Researching Lived Experience, the epic text by Max van Manen. My thought was that we might use her time in New York as a canvas to sketch ideas from our explorations that could lead to collaborative projects.

IMPACT Production: Image Echoes stretch sense of space

We were curious that techniques we had been exploring for more than ten years since 2007 were now finding their way to Broadway, including live video projection to intensify dramatic action and amplify the performance presence, adding a dimension of immediacy.  I had invented a term, "MoviOp" describing an opera using technology spontaneously to combine live and prepared projections, increasing the immediacy of the performance. This idea reaches back to Richard Wagner's gesamtkunstwerk.
Were Wagner alive today, he would undoubtedly be a film director in order to exert strict control over every artistic element.

ROTATION, multimedia opera

IMPACT (Interactive Multimedia Performing Arts Collaborative Technology) was a summer workshop at NYU from 2007-2017 that along with collaborators Tom Beyer, Youngmi Ha, Chianan Yen, and Deborah Damast, I founded to initiate college level students to the emerging technologies that were revolutionizing the arts in ways that underscored collaboration, spontaneity and immediacy. Indeed, I often referred to this new sensibility as the theatre of immediacy. We utilized the concept of Arts Collectives from the 60s-70s to congregate students into collective groups utilizing different disciplines and backgrounds to collaborate by bringing together their unique talents and skills to create and share new work.

Dr. Lisa Naugle became a part of IMPACT as the Director of Dance and Movement not long after the workshop came into being. I had the honor of chairing her dissertation research committee at NYU, and we had begun collaborative projects with other colleagues as early as 1995, when we were using dial-up modems to connect with the Internet.

Tom Beyer, Media and Technical Collaborator

Projection of different angles enhance presence

IF TIME REMEMBERS, prepared video with live projections

A crucial figure in development of projection and sound techniques for this new Theatre of Immediacy and Distance Collaboration was Tom Beyer, Systems Engineer for Music and Performing Arts in NYU's Steinhardt School.  Tom served as one of the founders of IMPACT, but we had been collaborating on projects and productions for a number of years before IMPACT. He has collaborated with many artists over the years, and was one of Dinu Ghezzo's major collaborators on the many tours throughout Europe. I played a role in bringing Dinu Ghezzo to NYU, and when I became the Chair of the Department, I appointed Dinu as the Director of Music Composition. I give this background, because it was this milieu of extraordinary artists that led to many collaborations that were constantly breaking ground and exploring new frontiers, attracting new collaborators that eventually grew into an impressive informal network of individuals coming together to create new expressive forms. Perhaps our greatest weakness was that we were always in the moment, and the pressure of production prevented our pausing to take note of what we had created. My philosophy was to document everything we did to excess. We created so much data that the task of retrieving it and attempt to reflect on our journey was utterly over-whelming. We were always on to the next production, the next experiment.

As artists, we were internalizing and processing our experience: we were the embodiment of our research. Thus each successive year and collaboration built upon the previous experiments and provided the means to leap forward by continually adding to and evolving the previous concepts and techniques into new experiments. Every season of IMPACT was a new experiment,

ROTATION, multimedia opera multiple screens

evolving from the previous year as we discussed the structure and process for the new workshop.

We experimented with the simultaneous running of two independent videos while incorporating live projections of performances, multiple screens, enhanced directional sound, connecting independent spaces in simultaneous distance performances.

During these years, we introduced so many young students from around the world, that we discovered (during our debriefing of their experiences on the final day) that perhaps the most important outcome for the participants in this collaborative process was they had sustained a transformative life-changing experience.

Our creative research as lived experience project of March 7-9 concluded with attending the preview of a stunning new production of Sondheim's classic, COMPANY, that starred Patti Lupone, who brought down the house with "Here's to the Ladies Who Lunch." The production reversed the genders of the original production so that the major premise was of a woman in her 30s who couldn't commit to marriage.  I found this production more exciting and inspiring than the original 1970 production. This new production never happened. Shortly after Lisa returned to California on March 10th, Broadway went dark and the COV-19 PANDEMIC pummeled New York City into a lockdown.