DISLOCATING PERFORMANCE / DISORGANISING THE GRID: INVENTING A ZOOM DRAMATURGY IN LAURIE ANDERSON’S NORTON LECTURES AND FORCED ENTERTAINMENT’S END MEETING FOR ALL

This paper wonders: What can performance practices do with and within Zoom’s spaces? Can a global software programmed for boosting efficiency and productivity and enhancing the performance of employees accommodate other kinds of performance? In Laurie Anderson’s Norton Lectures for Harvard, Spending the War Without You: Virtual Backgrounds, Anderson reinvents the lecture form as a digressive nesting of stories within stories and transforms Zoom into an uncanny space where dream and memory, foreground and background, body and image interweave and transform one another. By devising a dramaturgy specific to Zoom, Anderson displaces its grid-like environment and the linear logic of the meeting and collaborates with the technology, while at the same time transforming how we think about and inhabit its environments.