Telematic Sublime: anti-racist Zoom play in the time of COVID-19

ABSTRACT

In Search of the Sublime (The Sublime) is a telematic play, written and directed by Kara-Lynn Vaeni. Responding to the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Sublime was staged on the videoconferencing platform Zoom. While Zoom presented Vaeni with ethical issues and technical challenges, ultimately the platform allowed for creative approaches to the hybrid live-virtual performance. In inventive ways, Vaeni incorporated anti-racist production practices and utilized Zoom’s functions and affordances to engage the audience. In The Sublime, telematic technologies challenged the static roles of performers and viewers, producing the cast as spectators and the audience as co-creators of the piece.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital media
• telematic theater
• Zoom
• spectatorship
• anti-racism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Troy Anthony and Jerome Ellis’s Passing Notes (2020), Richard Nelson’s What Do We Need to Talk About? (2020), Lord Denney’s Players’ Much A-Zoom About Nothing (2020) among others were staged on Zoom.

2 ‘Pod’ or ‘bubble’ refers to a small group of friends, family, or housemates who agree to limit their in-person social interactions to each other.

3 Unless otherwise specified, all the quotes from the cast and crew used in this article come from this interview.

4 For more, see Holloway (2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yulia Gilich

Yulia Gilich is a media artist, theorist, and community organizer. They received their MFA in Media Arts Production from the State University of New York at Buffalo. They are currently a PhD candidate in Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz.