The lessons we learned from Covid – then forgot

The Covid pandemic was awful – obviously – that’s if we can even talk about it in past tense. The disease continues to circulate, to cause death statistics to rise, to cause long-term health problems.

I look back on its peak as if it’s behind frosted glass. A haze of memories that blur into one. I was lucky not to lose anyone to the disease and my lockdowns were spent soaking up as much sun as I could, adjusting to working from home, having Zoom calls with friends and being pretty bored.

For those of us fortunate enough to escape with little more than boredom, it was mostly just a bit weird. We spent too much time with ourselves. Mental health problems emerged and/or festered. Lack of personal contact led to chat-thread arguments over nothing.

But we also saw the possibilities of a life lived more slowly, with less commuting, less consumption. It teased us with flashes of ways we could reorganise society if we wanted to.

Squeezing every last drop

For the arts, Covid was an interesting teacher. What do we do when the fundamental basis of our existence – performance – is ripped away from us? When we can’t do anything we did before, what do we do? Some amazing answers to those questions were created across the country and now I’m wondering why we put them all back in the box.

What it came down to was squeezing every last drop out of the arts – finding the space in the margins, taking any scrap of creativity and engagement and revenue possible. A few of our web design clients came to us in the very early days of the pandemic with requests to help them sell digital content through their box office. So we spent a good chunk of early 2020 building livestreaming sections on websites, where users could buy tickets and access specific content.

That is a brilliant idea at any time – not just in a lockdown – but now the number of requests for private paid content has fallen off completely. If you’ve got content you’re not doing anything with – be it cast recordings, full show tapings or behind the scenes extras – let people pay for it!

Away from the digital side of things, as restrictions eased, I loved seeing venues get creative with outdoor spaces in an attempt to give people something, anything, to connect to, to engage with. Now I wonder why those spaces are not in use anymore.

New ways of thinking

Covid made some of us think about the world differently. For others, it meant the world was finally starting to consider realities they already faced. For example, Covid made us seriously consider the risks and impacts of chronic illness and disability. It made us realise that serious health conditions with long-lasting effects could strike at any time and that some people are more vulnerable than others.

For a brief period, Covid made us all act in a way that was considerate of immune-compromised people – staying home when ill, wearing masks to protect ourselves and others, even just sanitising our hands regularly. Now, whenever I see an empty hand sanitiser dispenser clinging to a wall in a public space, I think about how we could be doing better.

I loved seeing promoters offer ‘Covid-safe(r)’ events that still require masking, albeit not quite as stringent as the negative Covid test and temperature checks required as lockdowns eased.  Should we be doing more of this? Should socially-distanced and/or masked performances be as common as relaxed performances? Probably!

Remembering Covid

I don’t blame people for wanting to forget about Covid. It was a strange trauma that we – as a world, as a society – have yet to collectively process and heal from. But maybe we should be trying to remember the possibilities it showed us, as the faintest lining of the darkest cloud.

For a short time we thought differently. We slowed down. We tried different things. We acted with more care towards others. I wish we hadn’t needed a global pandemic and a government-mandated lockdown to do that.