All Dressed Up & Nowhere To Go

Words: Dionne McCulloch

Can a pantomime artist make children laugh on Zoom? How does an acrobat thrill without gasps from the crowd? What does the harpist feel when no one is listening? 

Except for the key workers, we all screeched to a halt in 2020, and for the ones who dress up to entertain, livelihoods have shifted, identities lost. Who are we when we’re alone and how do we cope? 

We were surprised to find most artists and performers haven’t felt sad, lost and alone. 

They’ve slowed down, felt deep gratitude, taken time just to play or invest in buried passions. The cabaret artist took up roller skating, the belly dancer became a climate activist, the magician started a fine arts degree, the toastmaster took on the hedge and the high wire walker kept walking - a foot above his lawn. 

When the audience is gone and the lights go out we can still make the deepest connections, with ourselves. 

Besides a festival in Wiltshire and entertaining the Queen at Windsor, I had a fantastic year planned as one of a trio of comedy acrobats. We do physical stunts, we take risks and, if the audience is amenable, it can get risqué. 

It’s entirely spontaneous and alive. We work the audience so every performance is different. Without the audience’s interaction, there is no show.

Everybody has been fixing up their homes so I was able to find work painting and decorating homes, so the money has kept coming in, but I’ve desperately missed performing. I’ve learned I’m resilient, I can always find purpose, so my mental health has been ok through this time. 

I perform to express myself. Really, I’m a professional dresser-upper, I show my personality through clothes, dance and movement. When I hear people laugh, clap and cheer I feel connected to them—it’s a deep, immediate and rewarding feeling. It propels me.

I started singing lessons during lockdown, it kept me on track; human connection and interaction is the only way to stay sane. And I took up roller-skating, which lets you naturally socially distance while expressing yourself and keeping fit. It’s an absolute joy. 

During this time, I realised I was working too hard and leaving little time for the things that make me happy. I’m going to charge more and work less. It’s scary to grow your own value as a creative. You start out in this field because you love it, then feel guilty asking for a reasonable rate. No more. From now on I recognise my time as being as valuable as any man’s.

Performing has always been my identity, my therapy and my fun. It’s who I am. I’ve lost my old self now, but I’m not sad. Before 2020 I had numerous dance events and festivals planned as well as teaching dance in Glastonbury, yet the sheen had already come off. I had changed.

Dancing is a form of storytelling, and now my stories will change. I joined Extinction Rebellion in 2019 and felt incredibly moved. I knew I needed to dedicate a part of my life to the climate emergency. Lockdown and the loss of my commitments game me the time and space for a deep reckoning. So I’ve trained to be a Forest School Leader, so I can work with children to develop their passion for nature and to pass on Earth Tales, those stories told by indigenous tribes, and part of how I will do that is through dance.

Dancing used to be my all, my every breath, now it can just be frivolous and fun while I pour my deep passion into protecting the planet. We have a big job on our hands, it will take all of us and I’m starting now.

There’s total silence as the crowd realises the gravity of the situation. The music starts, and I step onto the wire. When I do a headstand or hang by my toes, they cheer and clap and it reminds me they are there, and they care. 

This year I would have felt the gaze of several thousand people, suspended in empathy, watching me walk a tightrope from a multi- story car park to the steeple of the church in Newcastle- Under-Lyme. I’ve been a funambulist for 20 years, it’s my only income, it’s my life. 

It’s been a real struggle, but I managed to make something. I gathered five musicians and six circus performers and we made a piece of performance art on zoom that will be part of a documentary to air (on BBC), about the freedom and beauty of our work. But it was also melancholic as there was no audience. 

I will create more space in my life to do the things I love and to feel nourished. To spend more time with family. But I want to get back into the air. The wisdom I find walking the wire, if I can embody even a small percentage of it into my daily life, I’m a better person. 

On a couple’s wedding day, I’m like their personal butler, it’s so intense that when it ends, it feels like saying goodbye to a new best friend. It’s a short and sweet time with a stranger that becomes, in the course of a day, an unforgettable bond. In 2020 I had 70 weddings booked, all cancelled.

I’ve expanded my garden design and landscaping business, and in the early days of lockdown, as many of those clients are elderly, I also kept them company, brought groceries. For quite a few people I was the only person they saw from week to week.

Life is short. I like to encourage my children to squeeze the life out of every day. But more than anything I have deep value and gratitude for human company. We have nothing without each other.

It was devastating to see my industry go dark. Everyone was suffering. People in the creative industry have a certain sensibility. We’re very aware. We’re keyed into emotions, that’s the language we work in, so it was difficult to see jobs disappear and people’s anxiety and distress mount. If ever there was an industry that can adapt creatively to a challenge it’s the theatre, especially comic performances, where I predominantly work, but without an audience to laugh with you and react against, you’re voiceless. 

What can I say? I was lost. I didn’t watch Tiger King, bake banana bread, learn to play the flute or study the rules of chess. Does that mean I’m a failure?

This period has underlined for me how tenuous it can all be. Unless you’re a hugely successful actor, most of us live on a very fragile, job-to-job basis. I will never take anything for granted. I will grab every opportunity. Jobs, loved ones, everything we have in life is incredible fragile. It all must be cherished.

I miss the laughs, more than anything. 

I’ve been a magician for so long that it’s muscle memory, so I don’t need to practice to stay in tune. Performing is never about me, it’s about the audience and their experience and with this knowledge comes a certain freedom. When you share the tension with the audience you become an instant family.

Receiving an unconditional offer from Cheltenham to study fine arts softened the sting of lockdown, though doing work remotely has been challenging. 

I got Covid in a bad way and after weeks of suffering, I started making notes for my son. I thought this was it. My fragile mortality revealed. I walked outside under a full moon and took a deep lungful of cool air, the best breath of my life, and I felt hope. Magic is everywhere.

It’s an incredible feeling to see people genuinely dewy-eyed, dancing and having a great time, and that’s what we see at our Bowie Collective shows. We had 30 planned, our most ambitious productions yet, all cancelled. I love performing but I also love the challenge of working with a team to pull off a show this creatively and technically challenging and to do it better than anyone else in the world.

I’ve realised I’m a massive risk taker, but hopefully I’ve learned on the way and ultimately it’s something I value about myself. Being fearless has given me the opportunity to create something on the scale of my dreams. Since the first lockdown, I’ve built up a studio and practice space in Wiltshire. If we can’t play live we’ll recreate Bowie’s TV appearances from the 70s, and continue recording.

For freelancers and creatives, it’s hard to switch off. This period of forced inactivity has been uncomfortable mentally, but it’s forced me to ask myself some deep questions about why that is. Keeping still can be confusing, even frightening, but ultimately it’s been positive.

It’s not just me, it’s the entire structure around me that’s in danger. Without government help theatres and opera companies and concert halls are looking at disaster.

2020 would have been my biggest year as a singer. I was supposed to sing in Milan at La Scala, in Paris, and then a concert tour across Europe. Everything was cancelled. We need our audience: it’s a profound relationship which can’t be replaced by a camera and a screen. When a concert ends and there’s no applause, only empty seats, it’s heartbreaking.

I cook more now. Spending more time with my children has been a gift. It has been rewarding to record some songs for ‘My Life Films’, a charity that creates films and music  to help people suffering from dementia. I am also planning a recording of one of my favourite pieces, Mahler’s ‘Das Lied von der Erde’. 

But more than anything, I look forward to meeting my audience again.

When a woman says ‘thank you, I feel amazing,’ I feel a deep privilege. I know I’ve made a difference to how a woman sees herself. Lockdown meant losing weddings, by far my most busy and lucrative year since I launched my business. But it’s the creative side of my job that brings me joy and felt most painful to lose.

I’ve realised I can be quite tenacious, that if my dreams are under threat I’ll fight for them. You can surprise yourself with what you can accomplish when you need to survive.

I now acknowledge that I can do anything if I commit to it. My eldest has autism so home schooling has been a real challenge, but I hope that my resilience is a lesson to my kids that you can come together, as a family, and do whatever it takes to get through the hard times.

I’ve been making children laugh at parties, in schools, in hospitals and, just before lockdown, in Thailand… then, in March the laughter stopped. I’ve been a working clown for 50 years, 19 years of those as a clown doctor, providing laughter therapy in hospitals. It’s controlled clowning, it opens up the healing hormones of the body. The endorphins flow. As Mike Meyers said, ‘laughter blows the dust off your soul.’

I’m not a clown who sits around moping. I’ve been sewing costumes for a national museum of clowning we hope to open soon. As clowns die, I get more stuff. I have 20 pairs of clown shoes and 320 eggs. Clowns record their faces onto eggs to copyright their image. 

I only hope to keep making people laugh. Just recently I was watching Mock the Week, laughed, and choked on a lump of peanut butter. I lurched from the bed, stumbled into the hallway as I clawed at my throat. I fell into the wall, broke my glasses on the side of my head but dislodged the peanut butter. I almost died laughing! (laughs uproariously)

Familiar territory suddenly feels unknown. I’ve been a musician my entire life, last summer I was playing bass with Goldfrapp, at festivals and a show at Royal Festival Hall as well as sessions in studios.  For musicians, the work is never guaranteed, but 2020 was the longest I’d gone without performing in my life. This shutdown has gone on so long that now the idea of playing live feels unfamiliar. Will it be different? Will the audiences show up again or will it be like the Roaring 20s, people going crazy for the sake of it?

I’m so grateful to have seen two of my kids use this period to grow creatively as musicians themselves. I also have gratitude for my second passion, riding and fixing up motorcycles and to be able to devote more time to that. Yes, I’m a musician with a Harley, what a cliché!

This period has helped me appreciate what it means to hear silence, no traffic, the beauty of birdsong. It’s been healing through this time to discover the outdoors. My daughter has inspired me that we all need nature to thrive.

I felt like I lost half my life. In 2020 I had just won the award for Best Show for a play I wrote and performed, and myself and the Egg theatre in Bath had an international tour planned across America and Canada, with a further tour to Australia, New Zealand and Ireland—all cancelled. Performing is integral to writing for me, so what I write loses purpose without an audience.

The irony is I never felt so connected. Isolation helped me foster my sense of gratitude, I became aware of what I missed and that longing moved from an intellectual idea to an emotional reality. In the first week of March 2020 I felt almost giddy with the sense of connection to the whole world. Like being part of history. It encouraged me to live on a smaller scale, to focus on what’s to hand and the people who are close.

Lockdown gave me the permission I needed to hang out in ambivalence and ambiguity. To work vaguely. To really explore my ideas without the rushed sense of an end game. One way or another life goes on. I now create for creation’s sake, instead of working towards a goal that may just disappear. I feel free.

The energy I’d feel off a crowd of thousands of happy people is immense. For 20 years, making people dance has been a huge part of my life and I’ve felt it an incredible gift to see people experience that release. At the beginning of 2020 I was preparing for the biggest event of my career so far - our sold-out music festival over a long weekend where I DJ the closing event.

A whole new dimension has opened to how we can entertain and connect. The May 2020 festival sold out at 8,000 tickets, when we knew it couldn’t happen we put the festival on a livestream that 60,000 people from around the world viewed. This isn’t something we’d ever have tried to pull off before lockdown.

I have gratitude for my resilience. I’ve learned how flexible and adaptable I can be. While nothing beats the energy and human connection of a live event, we can still come together. We’re a passionate community and there is always light on the horizon.

I had an entire year of touring planned to promote my second album, everything cancelled. I managed a handful of socially-distanced, outdoor live shows between the lockdowns. People couldn’t sing along; I couldn’t interact with the fans. Because people were so starved for live music and my shows are intimate I still felt close to the crowd, but the online shows I’ve done are difficult. I have no clue how the audience feels.

I used to try to fit in, to be the person I felt others wanted me to be instead of myself. I’ve turned to crystal healing and meditation and felt connected to a higher power in the universe.

I buy myself flowers now. There’s this crazy expectation that someone else should give us the things we love, but why? The best things we give ourselves come from ourselves, like praise and affirmations, so I want to use my platforms to encourage others to celebrate themselves. It’s not selfish to self-love. It’s important to celebrate yourself.

Now I realise how I took it for granted: the connection, the electricity, the idea that you can gather people in crowds and perform to them. I really feel the loss of this magical experience.

I would have been conducting three operas for two Moscow theatres, the Bolshoi and the Stanislavski. Opera houses are very crowded - the orchestra pit is elbow to elbow, the audience is crammed in. The proximity lends the show its atmosphere.  

In March I was in a state of shock; but the weather in Britain was unusually warm and sunny for weeks on end.  Like much of the country, I did a lot of gardening. When that energy ran out, I went to law school.  

Now that I know what it’s like to be silenced, I will always cherish the gift of performing for an audience. Performers go on stage to share, to communicate and to connect. It has been so noticeable that the other party to the transaction, the audience, is no longer in the room.  

As a lion, I understand the need to survive, but to see it happen to the humans in my community - players, staff, and the 3,000 young people from disadvantaged backgrounds that the Bath Rugby Foundation supports - was painful. The reality was scary. We help young people develop life skills and create paths to independence, work that became challenging during lockdown.

It’s okay to be not okay and go through tough periods. Community and a sense of belonging can help us get through the hard times, and I am a part of that in Bath. The pandemic had a devastating impact on the mental and physical health of families on low incomes and disengaged teens, but we also saw our community come together and help one another.

To hear the roar of the crowd in a full stadium makes the hairs of my mane stand on end. Our games during lockdown were fun, but not the same without our supporters. I hope we never have to do that again.

It was surreal. The world went quiet, our business dark. The worst was not being able to comfort and support our clients. Our job is to take away the worry for them, to have the answers, but suddenly we had nothing. We lost an entire year of big budget, international events and incredible creations. Above all else, we’ve missed being creative, meeting new people and hugging. We had two huge events in Oman planned then BOOM, lockdown. 

I turned to plants. Before now any plants I had would suffer as I was always traveling, but over the past year I’ve learned about their individual behaviours, personalities and needs. I’ve filled my house, given away hundreds to my friends and am now filling my office. I may open a plant shop. 

The emotion of my work will change. I would give my whole life to each client, now I will find balance. This year has taught me that the unexpected can happen at any moment, so I want to be more intelligent about how I work, to be strict on when I’m available and what my boundaries are. I need to treat myself more like a plant.

A few weeks into lockdown I walked into the wardrobe where I keep my costumes and broke down sobbing, realising what I’d lost.

I’m a mix and mingle comedy mind reader, I use theatrical and intuitive talents to entertain people at business conferences and international weddings. In 2020, I was set to travel in Europe and to New York City, to ballrooms of thousands of people where against a backdrop of live music and waiters serving canapes and champagne, I touch the palms of hundreds of strangers and tell them things that make them happy. We laugh; we hug.

All that stopped abruptly. My bookings imploded and funding wasn’t there for freelancers. I reinvented my act and can now entertain from a distance, but to get to this point, I burnt out in exhaustion. Artists and entertainers hold society up in a profound way; it’s important we feel the same support in return.

Some of us musicians do wonder, after all this time, if we’ll lose our nerve. I play around 50 spring and summer weddings each year as well as concerts, and not having an audience for so long has been hard. 

I’m used to being surrounded by people buzzing, celebrating and happy, but I’ve been alone. I play for me, but it’s not the same. There’s little incentive to practice in the same way.

I love playing the harp but have enjoyed the break from lugging it around. When I see my friends now, I’ll always be ready with a hug.

My work and my fun, my entire life, revolves around live events. Live theatre, music gigs, festivals, Christmas shows, Party in the City—everything that earns me money is also my best times, and all of it was cancelled. I’ve been lucky to find work running online events, but it’s not the same. Hearing people laugh, the rustling of sweets, gasps, coughs and the energy from a roomful of people is what makes live performance matter. Without an audience, something irreplaceable is missing.

I’ve been lucky as I’ve been able to work on some online productions, and it’s really opened my eyes to how inaccessible the theatre is. Online worlds have opened up the doors so that almost anyone can now access the work. We can connect to audiences all over the world.

Virtual is here to stay in one form or another, and I think that’s a good thing. We can help make the theatre reach further, and connect with audiences who were excluded from live events. In the ‘new normal’, we have the opportunity to build back better.

I was suffering for missing people. Besides my livelihood and my income, I was hit hard by the shock of isolation. Your brain needs light on the horizon, hope, and at first things just postponed, and we all hoped this period would pass quickly, but when big events cancelled, when it became clear the industry would be closed for a while, it hurt. 

I began selling fish at a market in Kensington and it was like a pub, people would come as much for the fresh fish as the banter and chat. Soon my (adult) sons were working stalls too and it gave us something social as well as a shared experience. I feel so grateful for the deepened relationships I’ve found with my kids.

It’s good to help people, to do what you can to make them feel better.

You can feel an audience’s warmth, you step into their energy and it makes you jump higher, push yourself farther. You feel their support uplifting you so you give back to them. It’s love with strangers.

During lockdown, I didn’t entirely realise what I was missing. I run the Petersfield Dance Festival with over 2,000 dancers performing to an audience. In 2020 I took it online, but it wasn’t until July 2021 when we managed to run the festival again that I realised what was lost. I had fear, anxiety about not being able to perform again. It had all become unknown once more, but coming back was such a relief. So special.

I’ve learned I cope well. My partner and I moved into an ancient house in desperate need of renovation. So we kept busy during lockdown and I’ve come to enjoy a slower pace of life. There are more valuable moments to life than working all the time. The world outside is fantastic, but we should enjoy what we have at home as well.

Sarah: In many ways we’ve felt extremely grateful for the slowdown, the ability to spend time together as a family. It felt like a rare moment, stolen out of time.

We’ve played music all our lives, professionally, at weddings, concerts and live events, with friends and as a family. But of course that’s always been juggled around the rest of life - Stevie runs sound for local live music venue ‘The Bell’ and I captain a river barge - so we’ve taken this time together to play more, increase our repertoire and just have fun.

We all caught Covid early on, which in a way was a blessing because otherwise, living on the canal where foot traffic increased exponentially, would have been stressful. People were jogging, walking and cycling right by our open windows. 

But living on the canal is also a blessing - we still felt we could see people, have chats and feel connected, all from home while in lockdown. It’s been tough, but overall we feel so much gratitude. Family life on a boat has its challenges, but we’ve appreciated what it offers more than ever this year.

A dancer’s job relies on coming together with masses of people in small spaces, partnering one another, lifting, our bodies touching. It’s up close and personal. It’s hours and hours before the performance of collaboration and community, our skin touching each other’s skin. 

We still practiced, of course. Dancers can’t take days off. The whole company had zoom classes every morning throughout 2020, we’d come together from our separate living spaces to train. But it’s simply not the same in a living room, on your own, as it is in a dance studio.

I’ve changed. I’ve managed to disconnect my sense of self-worth from the work I’ve done. I used to put a lot of pressure on myself if I wasn’t working all the time. You have to be so committed to dance to make a living at it, but if you don’t find balance, you can suffer. I’m so much happier now.

Isolation is hard. I’m a people person, which is probably why I work in photography. I come alive in a big crowd and in 2020 I really missed the party, being with friends and having a laugh.

At first I didn’t know what to do. I’ve been a photographer for 30 years and the prospect of being a labourer filled me with dread. I never would have thought I had the fitness or the skills. 

But you can adapt. I’m capable. Learning new things and meeting new people from other walks of life has grown my confidence. I love being outside, digging, working in the fresh air. The freedom isn’t something I want to give up.

I’ve been an actor all my life. I live to work and have done countless Film, Radio, TV and Theatre performances, but 2020 was when everything stopped. Whatever work was available was spread thinly and if it were not for the help of charitable organizations such as Actors’ Children Trust and Equity Charitable Trust, I and other actors and our families would have had a hard time surviving. 

Creativity can atrophy. One has constantly to flex the creative muscle. So, I wrote a novel and worked for free doing script readings via Zoom to stay in touch with fellow creatives, but I missed being part of a company like the Natural Theatre Company in Bath with whom I’ve performed for 45 years. 

Our society relies on stories, TV and the internet is where we all turned for diversion through the lockdowns. So I only hope to see it better supported by our government. We need the entertainers.

I used to get anxious a lot. A few years ago I was having counselling, doing an exercise mapping how I spent my time, and I began to cry. The circle for time doing things just for me was empty. I wanted to do the kind of things my son did - act, dance and sing, just for enjoyment, not to create a finished show. I found nothing, so I started Open Stage Arts, a place for adults. We teach singing and acting for fun, and I also put on a village pantomime.

Lockdown was hard. A lot of people couldn’t or didn’t want to move to classes online so we lost connections. People withdrew; I didn’t know if they were struggling. I sent cards but didn’t get many replies. So I started a podcast and found a new way to connect through sharing other people’s stories. 

I used to think I wasn’t good enough but now I know I’m brave. I’ve done things that used to frighten me. I will be careful with my time now, choose only the things that are best for me, that give me joy.