On Digital Pivoting, Grief and Insistance

Hi folk. Last week I wrote this on FB about the challenge of the pivot to digital working.
Lots of artists seemed to feel similarly:

So, this week I had a bit of a meltdown. I am preparing to pitch a show for 'the future', a pitch which will be done by Zoom. I had ideas and desires to not ignore the Zoom-ness of the pitch form, to make sure that the form was acknowledged in the content of the pitch. As such, I was planning to make some short video pieces (rather than just show documentation of previous R&D). And I tried. As much as someone who isn't a filmmaker can.
But. I'm not a film-maker. I'm pretty much not a digital artist. These are their own genres. And the show I'm pitching is not a film and it's not a digital work. At least, it isn't conceived as such and like much of my work (and so much of of all of my colleagues' work) it has at its heart assembly - it relies on, is driven by, the audience to audience live relationship as much as the audience to performer one. So why struggle to be a learner digital artist to sell the notion of a future live show?
And the answer comes - because, shweetheart, there ain't likely to be no assembly-ing for no performances. Not this year. And maybe not even next. And I worry that I am a luddite trying to smash up a mechanised loom, or at least - refusing to learn how to work it.
At this point - still fairly early in this whole crisis- I feel I can dig my heels in, shout from the rooftops or on places like this about the special sanctity of live work, about how my belief in it and love for it has formed a life built around it, how I think it is vital, magical, how it makes alchemists of everyone who comes into contact with it and how I don't want to consider any other way.
Perhaps after that comes a grief, and after that a slow sidling up to the mechanised knitting frame, with grumpy bitch-face on, and a quiet request to be taught it, even though in my heart I'll still hold that something is lost in this stitching. But not yet.

Since then I spent some time at the brilliant GIFT Festival, which was hugely inspiring - seeing the different ways communities were being made, assembly was being invited and online forms were stretched and tested. Now I feel the need to insist on live practices, grieve ways of working that are no longer possible, and slowly and carefully think about a translation of ideas to a digital form in ways that are simple, authentic to the enquiry of the work and financially possible.