Bodies:On:Live – Magdalena:On:Line

On the website of the first online Magdalena festival, the beginning of a quote by Arundhati Roy (2020) reminds us that ‘historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew’ which, in the context of the event, was an acknowledgment of how Covid19 brought many artists to a critical point of change and experimentation in their practice. Bodies:On:Live took place from 24th to 27th June 2021, fulfilling the broader purpose of the Magdalena Project festivals in celebrating the work of women in contemporary theatre and performance, this time with the aim to ‘(re)connect women all over the world via the internet, and to ask: What is the way forward?’ (Bodies:On:Live Magdalena:On:Line 2021). Intersectional and intra-generational, inclusive and non-profit, the festival was a curated, global and cross-cultural online performance gathering run by volunteers, and in many ways it became a ‘world anew’ for practitioners seeking a nurturing space of shared creativity during pandemic times. Invited artists mingled with participants on online platforms such as Zoom, UpStage, Ohyay and gather.town, in an intense succession of performances, works in progress, workshops, panels, artists’ talks, and a virtual exhibition doubling as a place for socialising.

If the ethics of care within the Magdalena network offered support and validation for the sense of loss in artistic identity experienced by many women taking part, the focus of the festival was on experimenting and discussing shifts to online practice caused by the pandemic, while acknowledging the expertise of artists with an established professional background in digital practice, who also facilitated practical understanding of new technologies in a performance context. Amongst the artists, ambivalence and cautiousness towards online adaptations co-existed with a curiosity towards the creative potential of digital platforms. Albeit apparently in conflict, these attitudes allowed for fertile collaborations in rigorously questioning – but also pushing the boundaries of – what liveness and live, embodiment and intimacy might mean online. In the adaptation of her live performance Daughter, Jill Greenhalgh – founding artistic director of the Magdalena Project – re-worked the piece for the online environment with her performers and the technical support of Christina Papagiannouli on the Ohyay platform, which allows users to create customisable and interactive virtual events. Instead of walking between different tables, as in the original in-person version, guest spectators were given the choice of joining different digital ‘rooms’, for one-to-one encounters with women sharing stories about their mothers.

While the spectator’s agency and ability to move between performers was preserved, the online communication on two screens opened the possibility of a more intimate interaction. On the other hand, as a participant, the awareness of being observed by invisible spectators – waiting their turn to appear and interact with the storyteller – created an atmosphere of unintended voyeurism, which could be perceived as being both exciting and intimidating. While it is arguably more challenging to migrate pre-existing live work onto a digital platform than create directly for it, this kind of adaptation showed that repositioning consolidated performance practice from in-person to online or hybrid working modalities has the value of evolving new creative processes, which can potentially refresh and refine the original practice. However, this requires an open stance in searching for and embracing the viscerality of digital performance experiences, which in one of the festival panels Maria Chatzichristodoulou (2021) referred to as a form of ‘corporeality’ through the wires.

In the field of cyberformance – created in 2000 by Helen Varley Jamieson (2008) as a new genre of ‘live performance by remote players using internet technology’ – the festival offered playful experimentation with and creative uses of the internet as a site for performance, through the workshops led by Jamieson, together with Vicky Smith and Papagiannouli, on the Upstage platform. Purpose-built by artists for artists, UpStage is an online venue where cyberformers manipulate customisable avatars, live texts, drawings, sounds and images on a screen-stage, orchestrating a layered, dynamic, and constantly morphing semantic map through digital collage and juxtaposition. During the work in progress for Mobilise/Demobilise – an international collaboration between Upstage, Teater InterAkt and Schaumbad exploring human mobility and the impact of mobile technology through networked performances – participants were given agency to comment on the live chat which appears on the cyberstage, while cyberformers randomly selected, re-cycled and elaborated the audience’s posts into surreal slogans and propaganda. While there is a point of reflection about where the ethical responsibility lies in generating (and interpreting) the ‘text’ through the chat, presenting and developing cyberformance practice within the festival highlighted the level of sophistication and playfulness that creative engagements with new technologies can achieve. The other key notion that emerged was the potential for blurring the positioning between performers and spectators, provoking a risk-taking, constant, and fluid interchange. The UpStage platform was also used for the live sharing of Jeux de Massacre, a cyberformance adaptation of Ionesco’s play conceived by Papagiannouli in collaboration with Jamieson, Smith, Clara Gomes, and Miljana Peric, born of lockdown boredom and the pandemic’s dark statistics. While fully conveying the traumatic essence of the Covid ‘plague’, the lack of the chat and of audience interaction affected participation in that it mirrored the absence of human contact, causing feelings of disconnection and emotional detachment as the performance developed.

Fostering encounters as well as transmitting knowledge and experience through gatherings is a fundamental aim of the Magdalena network. On gather.town, away from the Zoom matrix of the main event, historical contexts, documentation and social connectivity were at the core of the ObservaStory, a digital networking and exhibition space introducing the history of the Magdalena Project, conceived and created by Papagiannouli. Faithful to the legacy of in person Magdalena festivals underlined by the digital exhibition, the programme of Bodies:On:Live aimed at remaining as close as possible to the spirit of the traditional gatherings, reconnecting and exchanging through the internet, without bending decisively towards an exploration of the creative potential of the digital medium. I would suggest though that the online format brought forward new modalities of collaborative creation, training and performance making through screen technology, generating spaces in-between for learning, sharing and doing, which would be interesting to explore further. This indicates that while shifts from in person to online practice within the festival focused mainly on how to generate presence and activate the screen frame through the body, practices concerned with the creative use of new technologies offered a clear example of how the digital medium can become a unique site for engendering performance, in a way which is specific to the platform used. Ultimately, Bodies:On:Live opened rigorous discussions about what is at stake in the current surge of online performance making, and how we can benefit from the pandemic-induced urge of adaptation and curiosity towards new technologies, sparking a timely reflection on what strategies of co-existence between creative in-person work and digital practice might be possible in the future.