‘All your disembodied little heads floating on a screen’: Liveness During the Pandemic in Mel Bradley’s <em>Ms Noir’s Seven Deadly Sins</em> (2020)<!--EndFragment-->

The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK and Ireland in 2020 and the subsequent lockdowns caused a radical rupture in the world of live performances. Both theatre and poetry performance events moved online in various formats. One of the central issues that pandemic performance faced was the issue of liveness as audiences and performers could not be in the same space. Drawing on conceptualisations of liveness from theatre and performance studies, as well as the burgeoning field of pandemic performance research, my research asks how poet-performers responded to the lack of traditional liveness in their performances. This article explores the response to the circumstances of the pandemic by examining a digital performance situated at the intersection of poetry performance and theatre, namely Northern Irish spoken word artist Mel Bradley’s show Ms Noir’s Seven Deadly Sins (2020). I investigate how this show adapted to the circumstances of digital performance using livestreamed and prerecorded material, thereby destabilising boundaries between live and mediatised performance and expanding possibilities for creating a sense of liveness in the digital sphere. Moreover, I argue that the unstable co-presence between performers and spectators enhances the themes of punishment, disconnection, and voyeurism that pervade the show, and resonates with the pandemic context in which it was performed.