A Forum of Questions for Active Viewing, Learning and Creating on Screen(s) During a Global Pandemic

This contribution proposes a forum of questions in order to reflect on the reception, creation, and distribution of dance media online during the global pandemic. It is the result of a collaborative initiative undertaken by a group of five interdisciplinary dance and film scholars and artists based in Europe—specifically France, Germany, Greece, and Italy—who met weekly on Zoom throughout the summer of 2020 to exchange ideas, concerns, and projects related to choreography and screens during lockdown. A shared Google doc allowed all contributors to add their own questions and comments, later discussed live during virtual meetings conducted in English, which for the majority of us is not our native language. Some of us already knew each other, while others had never met. An additional shared document mapping dance-related works made or adapted for the screen1 during Europe’s initial lockdown enabled us to gradually share ideas and exchange different viewpoints. Recognizing our diverse backgrounds, approaches, and geographic locations as a strength, the following forum of questions does not assume that there is any one established definition of screendance or experience of the pandemic. Instead, it seeks to build upon a shared interest in screendance to pose questions that extend to many types of dance media and screen experiences that arose and continue to arise within the context of the pandemic.


Introduction
This contribution proposes a forum of questions in order to reflect on the reception, creation, and distribution of dance media online during the global pandemic. It is the result of a collaborative initiative undertaken by a group of five interdisciplinary dance and film scholars and artists based in Europe-specifically France, Germany, Greece, and Italy-who met weekly on Zoom throughout the summer of 2020 to exchange ideas, concerns, and projects related to choreography and screens during lockdown. A shared Google doc allowed all contributors to add their own questions and comments, later discussed live during virtual meetings conducted in English, which for the majority of us is not our native language. Some of us already knew each other, while others had never met. An additional shared document mapping dance-related works made or adapted for the screen 1 during Europe's initial lockdown enabled us to gradually share ideas and exchange different viewpoints. Recognizing our diverse backgrounds, approaches, and geographic locations as a strength, the following forum of questions does not assume that there is any one established definition of screendance or experience of the pandemic. Instead, it seeks to build upon a shared interest in screendance to pose questions that extend to many types of dance media and screen experiences that arose and continue to arise within the context of the pandemic.
The decision to use questions as a structure for this contribution was key. While recalling and orienting the topic of discussion as our shared methodology, questions inspire autonomous reflection and do not seek to impose a single response. They provide a wide girth for different points of view and considerations of complex issues, which vary according to many factors, including geographic location, economic disparities, subjectivity and personal tastes, technological access and more. Currently, the forum of questions is structured in large groups according to topic and numbered sequentially in each of these categories. However, this structure does not suggest a hierarchy, but instead proposes a way to navigate the document and follow the cross-references that appear in multiple points of the hypertext. This proposes a horizontal approach to reading the text-a web of sorts-as opposed to reading in a linear fashion. The order of the categories is random, but does tend to follow a logic that proceeds from the personal to the collective. The partial use of the first person is an intentional choice in order to underscore subjectivity, as well as to provide a phenomenological way of reading.
The importance of pre-existing screendance scholarship, which has already drawn on the exponential rise of screens and electronic media in our daily lives, became a recurring topic during our exchanges. In contrast to certain specificities that arose during the ongoing pandemic, the following general introductory questions seek to underscore the relevance of established dialogues in the screendance community to further enhance discussions of screen-based work at the present time.
-How does dance mediated via a screen convey a singularity of the moment? -How are diverse uses of screens embodied in narrative production and configured in collaborative approaches for knowledge building and sharing?
-To what extent can we speak of a community 2 born from the screen?
-What happens when the codes of live art are introduced to online space-more specifically, when the aesthetics of disappearance 3 that make online content ephemeral on social media networks (Instagram, Facebook stories, etc.) were intensified during the first lockdown in Europe?
-Have the limits of screendance been reached ten years after the claim that "Screendance has not yet been invented "? 4 Following this brief introductory set of questions, the remainder of the forum is dedicated to questions that specifically emerged during the pandemic as a result of viewing, making, or sharing screen-based choreography online. Our references are nonexhaustive, and based on personal experiences in our respective locations. They predominantly cover the timespan that dates from the first lockdown in Europe through the second pandemic wave (approximately March 2020-October 2020). It is our hope that these questions will serve as a tool to generate open and diverse perspectives on the experience of screens and dance media during this time and in the future. 6. Did the role of low-tech personal equipment (such as webcams) become more commonplace in screendance production during the pandemic and thereby impact the appearance of images, sounds, etc.?
7. Does the broadly/widely accessed use of technology redefine the distinction between amateurism and professionalism during quarantine?
8. What is the role of live-streaming and editing for screendance production during the pandemic?
9. Do the aesthetics of television reality shows affect the image that the audience receives during the live streaming of dance performances-especially during the second wave of the pandemic?
10. What happens when the gaze of the filmmaker is absent or filtered by Zoom/Skype? 11. Did ecological considerations shift the look and creation of screendance projects that emerged during the pandemic, as questions of environmental security, our relationship to animals, and climate change were often underlined in relation to the pandemic?
12. Can the extended online circulation of screendance during the lockdown serve as a tool to embrace diversity of gender, race, and class? 5. How does monetization work online and to whose advantage?
6. When pre-recorded performances become available online, how do the rules of distribution change?
7. How do we create a fair and sustainable framework for screening fees online given the specificity of the virtual context (all access at any moment for at least a set period of time-as opposed to a single screening) and the international disparity between cultural budgets and incomes?
8. How do we create feasible, organized, temporary and long-term structures for screendance productions during this time? How is it possible to proceed with equitable actions? 9. Have professional and human relationships changed within audiovisual production, and as a result, in screendance production? What changes have affected the creative process, both in pre-production and during production? (link with LABOUR/Q4)

After-Question(s)
This forum of questions was produced in order to encourage reflections regarding the acts of viewing, creating and sharing choreography on screen. We hope that it has contributed in some small way to the democratization of active viewing, as well as to the consideration of the ethics associated with responsible distribution and sharing. Throughout the global pandemic, the screen remains a means of perceiving and reimagining the body and its environment. It continues to be a potential site for knowledge-making, telling a story, empathizing, connecting with others, as well as protesting or raising socio-political awareness. In this respect, is there something that has shifted? True to the structure of this forum, we would like to conclude with one further question regarding what may be a common yet unconscious experience. As we grow further accustomed to connecting, engaging, creating, and looking at the world from home: Is there such a thing as a pandemic gaze?

Biographies
Elisa Frasson is an Italian researcher interested in dance and sound ecosystems. With extensive experience in the organizational context of screendance events, dance in urban spaces, and in mentoring students in creating their own projects, she is a freelance dance event curator and educator for independent and institutional projects between Italy and the UK. 2 And practices of "performative commons"-as suggested by Bench (2020).
3 In using this term, we recall Virilio's seminal text The Aesthetics of Disappearance (1991) acknowledging the fact that it is a term that emerged in the 1980s, a long time before Instagram (IG) and Facebook (FB) applications appeared. During our discussions, the words "aesthetics of disappearance" came to us instinctually. It is only later during our research that we (re)encountered Virilio's definition. Noteworthy to us is the resemblance to Baldwin's use of Virilio to indicate the "metaphoric potential of media technology, blurring materiality into engines of appearance and delirium" (Baldwin,137). We connect this with the uses of IG and FB stories seen during spring 2020, especially in the dance and movement field. Witnessing this phenomenon, with thousands of short videos, fragments, TikTok entries appearing and disappearing on our screens, we recalled the logic of acceleration applied by Virilio to technological advancement and each of them as clearly analyzed by Ginette Verstraete for Snapchat, presupposing a different interaction on the part of the audience (IG/FB) or those of the message sender/receiver (Snapchat).
experiences, from New York in the late 1980s and Melbourne in the middle 2000s, arriving at a Swedish project for a rest home. Almost at the end of her contribution, to trace the sum total of her experience, she further highlighted how much the present pandemic has shown the extent to which dance needs to remain a local practice and location-in the sense that the first location is the dancer's body-and how much screens took charge of becoming places to be. After the pandemic, she aims for dance production systems to return to "localness," meaning  10 The notion of unproductivity as part of the critique of modernism had gained currency well before the pandemic with significant examples that include, among others, the notion of "unproductive expenditure" as found in the writings of French philosopher Georges Bataille and to a certain degree, the immobility and the non-performance as analyzed in Exhausting Dance and "The Non-time of Lived Experience" by performance scholar André Lepecki. Furthermore, performance and moving-image artist-scholar Claudia Kappenberg in referring to her performance practice often deploys the notion of uselessness "as an antidote and as an attempt to challenge the ubiquitous imperative to work and to always be useful" (643). Through this lens, uselessness and unproductivity should not be confused with laziness. In addition, they should be further differentiated between, on one hand, the forced and involuntarily unproductivity that has been imposed by governmental measures to inhibit the spread of the pandemic and on the other hand, the notion of unproductivity that has been put forward as a choice and as an act of resistance. The former caused artistic production, especially in the field of performing arts, to cease or slow down in parts of the world that underwent a lockdown. The latter concerns a proposal against the spirit of neoliberalism and the mechanisms of the goal-driven society, as well as the progress-based and productevaluated economy that all impose a boundless availability for work. Regarding the second option, Jamila Johnson-Small's contribution during the online discussion Performing Solidarity, Ethics and Responsibility that took place during summer 2020 resonates. In this framework and in a call for solidarity, Johnson-Small during the Q&A suggests a well-embraced proposal by the discussion participants by stating: "What if, we as artists, stop making art for a while? What then? An artists' global, one month, no hour or something. What would we find? What would we come up with, if we would speak to each other in different ways?" This is a provocation that expresses protest and aims to reveal the benefits of art through its temporary absence and withdrawal from everyday life.