Performance as City Pandemic Response: Invitations to Innovate

Abstract

Copyright © 2021 The Authors. Covid-19 has underlined the vital role arts practitioners play in identifying and responding to local and city challenges both creatively and at speed. Throughout the pandemic, artists, arts organisations and networks have been responding imaginatively to restrictions, rethinking familiar places and practices, and creating entirely new modes of engagement with local and city communities. In some contexts, this work comprises informal invitations and guidance, in others it involves sustained local leadership to directly address local needs that have not been met. Elsewhere, artistic programming has provided flexible, responsive means through which people can recognise and understand different experiences of Covid- 19, and thereby live with greater knowledge and understanding. The arts are rarely credited as offering a strategic contribution, and yet, internationally, there are established examples where the arts have been directly engaged in precisely this work as pandemic response. What is missing is a means of connecting such crisis-focused strategic arts responses to city emergency and resilience planning measures.