A year (in five months) of living dangerously: hidden intimacies in Zoom exigencies

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article invites a meditation on the hidden intimacies Zoom engenders, even as we are constantly reminded that this is not a platform intended to create intimacy. Rather, it is one intended to create work-place efficacy, balancing the ‘happiness’ of distributed or outsourced employees with what Jonathan Crary (2013) identifies as a 24/7 availability. Though Jon McKenzie cites the three key characteristics of performance to be efficiency, efficacy, and effectiveness in his foundational book Perform Or Else: From Discipline to Performance (2000), efficacy might be the quality most contradictory to the very ephemeral nature of performance itself. Through a close reading of Troy Anthony and Jerome Ellis’s made-for-Zoom performance Passing Notes (2020) as well as a different performance by Ellis, a consideration of how remote teaching informs not just the form of our pedagogy but its content, and an engagement with the personal vulnerabilities and anxieties Zoom meetings and classes and performances present, I argue that Zoom simultaneously creates divergent intimacies and reframed subjective experiences within the theatre and classroom as living spaces, even as, in its very mechanical, technological nature, Zoom makes ever more clear the distance we are all currently experiencing from each other.