We're All in This Together: Digital Performances and Socially Distanced Spectatorship.

The digital performances forwarding discourses of "we're all in it together" proliferated in the opening months of the COVID-19 pandemic, performing the social legibility of pain and loss within the public sphere. The body takes on an indexical force in such performances, constructing a symbolic community defined by the shared experience of sheltering-in-place. This performs social distancing, culturally acclimating audiences to a world in which we connect virtually but remain apart in our bodies. This has a legitimate public-health utility. That said, such performances can inadvertently construct the "we" in "we are all in it together" in a way that centers the stay-at-home experience while flattening racial and economic divisions. This essay examines two digital performances focusing on the experiences of diverse artists in quarantined isolation: Mike Sears and Lisa Berger's Ancient and Emily Mast and Yehuda Duenyas's How Are We. Both performances situate the act of sheltering-in-place as the shared facet of community belonging, utilizing aesthetic strategies that either obscure or amplify the ways that hierarchical systems of power influenced inequitable lived experiences of quarantined isolation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]