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Performing Processions: Premonitions and palimpsests

2023; Routledge; Volume: 28; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13528165.2023.2321062

1469-9990

Laura Bissell,

Posthumanist Ethics and Activism

Aligning historic modes of public performance and participation with anthropological theory that questions the hegemony of Western linear notions of time, this article considers processional performance as a way of looking forwards and back simultaneously through analysis of two case studies of work. Blast Theory's Spit Spreads Death: The Parade (2019), a performance procession including interactive light and sound, took place on the streets of Philadelphia acting as a memorial and celebration of the 20,000 lives that were lost in the city during the Spanish flu epidemic 101 years ago to the day on the 28 September after the Liberty Loan Parade. Six months later, the most deadly virus in living memory, the COVID-19 pandemic, spread around the world and Blast Theory's performance procession seemed to be not only a memorial of the lives lost in the previous epidemic, but a premonition of what was to come.