On False Intimacies and Anti-Cathartic Modalities of Being in the Digital Performances of Crisis (original) (raw)
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Pamiętnik Teatralny
The Covid-19 pandemic plunged many theaters around the world into a temporary crisis and favored the rise of digital theater forms. This article investigates how the reception of theater changes in the digital space and, above all, how audiences as a social dimension of theatrical performances must first be constituted separately there. Based on performance analysis of the digital theater productions Homecoming and Sterben from Germany, the significance of the digital infrastructure for the assembly, performance, and action repertoires of these theater audiences is discussed. The author examines how audiences can be formed into different temporal communities in the digital space. These temporal communities are characterized by hybridity and have the potential to enable intense theatrical encounters across spatial boundaries.
Theatre Dispositif and the Challenge of Covid-19: Mediatisation, Liveness and Audiences
Mediascapes Journal, 2020
The COVID-19 emergency has had a profound impact on the artistic and cultural sectors, and on performing arts in particular. The lockdown required the suspension of all live performances and rehearsals, including the cancellation of seasons and festivals. Because physical proximity is an essential component of live shows, this sector will be on pause longer than the others. Since the early stages of the lockdown, Italian theatre has developed several online initiatives to counterbalance the suspension of its activities. These efforts have aimed at maintaining contact with the remote theatre audiences, by extending the presence of artists, theatres and performances in the online context. However, they have also provided an opportunity to reflect at large on the digital transformations of performing arts. The following contribution reflects on how we are researching the online response of the theatrical sector from the perspective of sociology and media studies. The paper aims to contextualise the phenomenon within the processes of theatre mediatisation and digital transformation of liveness, and to present what we think are the most urgent research questions in this direction. The first part of the article introduces the theoretical premises of the investigation. We present the frame of theatre mediatisation by analysing three interrelated processes: the mediatisation of dramaturgy through the concept of transmedia; the mediatisation of theatrical presence, with the debate on digital liveness, and the mediatisation of the theatrical relationship through social media. The second part will analyse some of the main online initiatives of the theatre sector, observing how they fit into the previously introduced mediatisation processes. The third part will observe how users have responded to the initiatives presented on social media by some of the main Italian theatres. In the conclusions, we will discuss which research questions we consider crucial to connect the analysis of this critical moment to the main themes of sociological and media studies research on performing arts.
Editorial: Presence and Precarity in (Post-)Pandemic Theatre and Performance
Theatre Research International
The outbreak of the COVID- pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on the arts. Deserted theatre venues were one of many signs that the time, as Hamlet would have it, was out of joint. The pandemic struck at the heart of theatre and performancetheir liveness. As many of us followed these developments (mostly) glued to our screens, theatreas institution, concept and practicebegan to undergo another seismic change. Its very presence had to be redefined. Various theatre archives began to open for publics around the world. Streaming services and digital plays made theatre available to new audiences. At an early stage of lockdown, the National Theatre in London, for instance, launched the National Theatre at Home initiative, thus enabling audiences to view performances from the theatre's archive on YouTube for free. In June and July , the Old Vic produced a series of special live performances of their show Lungs, starring Claire Foy and Matt Smith, as part of their newly launched OLD VIC: IN CAMERA series. Other institutions and companies, like the Oxford-based Creation Theatre, produced entirely new shows for Zoom. Of course, such and similar endeavours had been under way even in pre-COVID- times. Over the past decade, we have seen the rise of live-to-cinema broadcasts: the National Theatre, for instance, began the NT Live initiative in and the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford in . 1 Online livestreaming of the performing arts, which audiences typically watch from their homes, 2 has developed in parallel. Livestreaming has also been used by theatre festivals, such as the Berliner Festspiele, which put on Forced Entertainment's Table Top Shakespeare in . During the pandemic, livestreamed and pre-recorded performances, as well as those specifically designed for Zoom, became the standard, and often the only possible, format for putting on a show. Despite the severity of the circumstances that had brought about this change and exacerbated existing precarities in the theatre sector, the pandemic-related restrictions and lockdowns also provided practitioners with the opportunity to experiment with new forms of theatre-making and explore alternatives to in-person theatre. This moment of crisis was, thus, also approached as an incentive to innovation, as a motor for creativity and heightened improvisation, particularly since the theatre industry had to reinvent itself in order to maintain an economically feasible position. It was also a moment that spotlighted theatre's role in (virtual) community-building. In an article
2024
Theatre has seen various crises and reshaped its presentation style throughout world history. Theatre has exhibited remarkable resilience and creativity in the face of these challenging circumstances. The Covid-19 pandemic represents a recent public health crisis for the theatre industry. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the theatre industry adapted by embracing virtual presentations, moving away from its conventional dependence on physical locations. This study examines theatre practices in various crises and explores how the Covid-19 pandemic redefined the concept of "liveness" in theatrical presentations. The research focuses on the intersection of theatre and public health crises. It discusses the survival and adaptation of the theatrical arts during pandemics.
Issues of Participatory Digital Theatre. Reflections on Three Forms Developed during the Pandemic
Itinera, 2021
This article studies three participatory theatre-forms on zoom. It aims at analyzing what kind of participation is possible in the space of video-conferencing, which is both located in a private room and at a distance. These theatres seem able to interpellate the audience on a cognitive as well as a social and even an affective level. Each apparatus focuses on a different dimension, be it imagination, empathy or criticality. Yet the interactions result in an experience that is anchored in the social and sensitive subjectivity. The enable the audience to reflect on an array of issues that are far from limited to the pandemic.
Homo Virtualis, 2020
During the COVID-19 pandemic, theatre groups and companies started massively providing online (filmed) versions of their productions. Theatre performances, live-streamed or recorded, have been shown online before, but mostly as a supplementary strategy, assisting the promotion of a live performance, not as a cultural trend per se, nor to the massive extend it has been happening during the pandemic. However, the consumption of this sort of online content, as this is literally what becomes anything posted on the web’s hypertextual multimedial selves, cannot occur without consideration of the potential implications and side effects. What exactly is it we are watching on our screens, why is it marketed as theatre and performance, and why do we consume it as such? In the paper, the Phelan/Auslander debate is revisited, as this eradication of the distinction between the live and the mediatized may indicate performance’s crucial shift away from independence towards technological, economical and linguistic dependence from mass reproduction. However, before lightheartedly welcoming this hybridity of massively experiencing online performances, which springs out from the collision between live performance (art) and web content (creativity), it is worth considering welcoming first digital performance hybrids emerging within and in between the medial restrictions imposed by the pandemic. These bold, experimental, participatory, ‘transparent’ intermedial forms of expression may prove out to be a source of strength in times of crisis.
Brilli S., Gemini L., Giuliani F., 2023
In each stage of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have witnessed initiatives that, through digital technologies, have attempted to ensure the presence of theatre and to nurture the relationship with audiences. Our research asks which entry barriers to the artistic field have been strengthened or weakened by implementing theatre initiatives for online audiences and how these initiatives have affected the regional performing arts scene. The study consists of three parts. In the first part, analysis of Italian calls for digital performance projects was carried out to investigate the institutional construction of beneficiaries and imagined audiences. In the second part, we analysed the case of the digital-theatre season MPA-Marche Palcoscenico Aperto. The MPA project provided funding for artists from the Marche region in Italy to realize online performances between February and May 2021. Eleven focus groups were conducted with 41 of the 60 participating companies. In the third phase, four in-depth interviews were conducted with the project's organisers. Findings show how the increased dependence of theatre artists on the artistic system imposed by Covid has simultaneously produced an increase in the collective awareness of the artistic class, but also a stronger distinction between professionalism and amateurism.
Emancipating the Spectator? Livecasting, Liveness, and the Feeling I
2019
Recently, the Metropolitan Opera, the National Theatre, and the Royal Shakespeare Company have produced livecasts of their shows that are shown in cinemas worldwide. What impact do livecasting technologies have on the experience of their spectators? Are they manifestations of the Rancierian epoch or do they bring about a new kind of emotional turn? And how do they influence the perceived liveness of the performances? This article investigates these questions by drawing on concepts from adaptation studies, performance philosophy and audience studies. I argue that, on the one hand, livecasting opens up new possibilities of audience participation and fosters a multimodal engagement with the “translated” sources. Livecasts allow their audiences (the feeling of) a key role in determining their shape, and theatres reach out to audiences to engage with their shows on social media. On the other hand, this new paradigm of spectatorship, with its emphasis on “first-person experiences,” may co...
Digital Performance and Its Discontents (or, Problems of Presence in Pandemic Performance)
Theatre Research International
For at least thirty years, scholars have debated the centrality of physical and embodied presence as essential to the experience of theatre and performance. A debate that was perhaps largely academic suddenly became a shared reality when COVID-19 shuttered live venues, closed universities and moved artists of all kinds online. Suddenly, much of the theatre world began acting for the (web)camera. This article considers the changing attitudes toward notions of theatrical presence before and throughout the pandemic and what these changes might mean for the future of live arts. In particular, it posits the intersection of theatre, film and media history as key to understanding digitally enhanced contemporary experiences and expectations of post-pandemic performances.