Covid-19: theatre goes digital – provocations

One day, it happened; widespread restrictions across the globe meant that most citizens were instructed to ‘stay at home, save lives’¹. We were advised we must not travel to school or work, let alone see family and friends, visit restaurants, or attend theatres and live venues. Our world shrunk overnight. Our lives became enclosed in small intimate spaces, and our social exchanges became mediated. Every aspect of our social life, from work to entertainment, moved online. Life on the Screen (Turkle 1996) as we have never experienced it before.

The impact of Covid-19 on live events cannot be underestimated. Theatres and performance venues around the world closed, some for prolonged periods of time. Venues that had presented live performance for centuries suddenly stopped; the theatre and performance world took stock of the new ‘normal’. Though the situation differs around the globe, theatre and live performance across the world has taken a mighty hit and will continue to suffer for the foreseeable future, as conditions continue to be fragile almost two years after the original restrictions came into play in 2020.

Data analysis shows that, in the EU, arts and recreation was the 2nd worst hit sector by Covid restrictions based on people employed and hours worked (European Parliament, Policy Department for Structural and Cohesion Policies 2021, 26). In the UK, more than 15,000 theatrical performances were cancelled over the first twelve weeks of lockdown, resulting in a loss of more than £303 million in box office revenue. (GOV.UK 2021) According to a study undertaken by Rurale et al. (2020, 5) the Covid pandemic reduced live performances by an average of 56.12% in venues across Italy, France, Germany, Spain, UK and USA in 2020 compared to the year before, and revenues dropped by a comparative 51.32% at the same time. The EU Parliament reports even more alarming statistics in some European countries, with an estimated 72% drop on annual turnover for the performing arts sector in France in 2020 compared to 2019 (2021, 32).

Despite the devastating impact of the pandemic, people and communities around the world have found creative ways to respond to our ‘unprecedented’ (one of the most used words of 2020)² circumstances, so as to carve out some positive outcomes. An article by McCaleb (2020) discussed the speedily growing number of performers and venues who responded to the crisis by ‘going digital’ suggesting that, ‘for performers in lockdown, online is becoming the new live’. McCaleb concluded that this catastrophic global crisis has, inadvertently, provided an opportunity for artists to develop new ways of working with audiences, which might become ‘an enduring part of a new reality’ (2020). McCaleb is not alone in thinking that Covid-19 offers new opportunities for live performance using digital technologies; other scholars, practitioners and journalists have written along similar lines (Aebischer and Nicholas 2020; Jacobson 2020; Jamjoom 2020; Mastrominico and Dean 2020; Nicholls 2020). The UK Government’s ‘Boundless Creativity Report’ (2021), reaches the same conclusion, arguing that:

[a]s a consequence, [of lockdown restrictions] digital content production boomed during the pandemic as traditionally physical modes of production shifted in response to restrictions. Digital content production can broadly be categorised into three types:

• Pre-recorded content being streamed, either through bespoke platforms or existing streaming services;

• Live intra-media performances making use of new popular technology like Zoom and occasionally including interactive elements;

• Live streaming entirely new content, either free to view or to paying audiences.

Though Covid-19 restrictions on physical gatherings increased the production of digital content and pushed theatre and performance makers (as well as musicians, museums and galleries, and so on) towards digital technologies, the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, and the scholars and practitioners involved in its community, have been experimenting and reflecting on the intersections between live performance and digital technologies since the turn of the Century – long before theatre was forced to ‘go digital’ by a global pandemic. This Special Issue seeks to harness the experience and expertise of the journal’s communities alongside the significant shifts brought to the theatre and performance scene since 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, to reflect on the future of live performance. Our contributors’ insights and knowledge offer a unique perspective on live performance’s entanglements with digital technologies during this particular point in time and present opportunities for the sector’s future survival – perhaps, optimistically, even growth.

Through this Special Issue we pose the burning question: What is the future of live theatre and performance as we know it? Moreover, we seek to explore how Covid-19 will transform the industry going forward. The shift to making and sharing live performance online that occurred due to Covid-19 restrictions transformed ‘digital performances’ from niche, experimental practices to mainstream activity, with which both established and cutting-edge, public and private, commercial and not-for-profit venues and practitioners have engaged since March 2020. Through the contributions received, we can observe the digital performance strategies which have proved useful to pandemic-era performance makers. The practices and approaches presented offer some indication of the impact this ‘digital turn’ might have on performance, both for artists and makers that have been experimenting at the intersections of live work and digital technologies for some time, and for theatre and performance makers who turned to the digital for the first time as an avenue to continuing their work amidst imposed restrictions. Digital practices, which used to belong to the fringes of performance experimentation, seeped into the mainstream, informing the very nature of theatre and performance as we know it.

How will this, on some occasions ‘forced’ marriage between performance and technology, inform and alter dominant theatre practices in future? What can this mean for digital aesthetics as well as existing dramaturgical and theoretical approaches? What lessons from the past history of digital media scholarship might help us unpack and make sense of current events? How might we apply theories to these endeavours that have been debated in this field for years (such as Baudrillard and ‘simulation’ or Auslander and ‘liveness’), and what do these theories have to say to the current state of digital media? As performance, education, commerce, professional and interpersonal communications have had to move largely online, how have inequalities manifested in new and old (but perhaps newly visible) ways? One’s ability to participate in virtual forms of assembly, performance, and education is deeply influenced by intersecting aspects of one’s identity, including economic class, race, gender, religion, sexuality, nationality, and citizenship status. In what ways have these considerations been further brought to light by the pandemic?

The turn towards the rapid improvisation of performance on digital platforms such as Zoom has re-foregrounded old questions about professional roles and status. Making performance while in lockdown at home for transmission via a video conference service brings a range of practical and conceptual challenges for performers, directors and writers, but is arguably even more problematic for designers, makers, technicians and managers. ‘Costumes’ must come from the performers’ own clothes, ‘scenery’ from their domestic environment, and lighting from combinations of interior daylight and desk-lamps. It is not that such poverty of means is inherently negative in its impact (scenographic practises have long explored the extremes of the spectrum from minimalism to excess); rather, a new process must be developed. This process is entirely dependent on the engagement of the performer to realise design ideas, and the designer must therefore forge new collaborative relationships through the unconducive medium of the video call. Thus, while scenographic theory is given the opportunity to re-read the scenography of the screen in this new context, scenographic practice is presented with a challenge not just to re-invent the role of scenography as part of the expressive combinatoire, but to re-do the historic work of establishing its place within the creative process. Zoom theatre performance tends to re-centre text and actor at the expense of the scenographic, reversing a long and gradual trend (at least in many western contexts).

The pandemic has had an impact not just on production personnel, but also on the theatre and live entertainment industry’s substantial hinterland of service providers such as lighting hire companies, caterers, security and scenic workshops. Across all the backstage and off-stage disciplines, the largely freelance workforce was compelled to seek alternative employment, and many have made the decision – some more and some less willingly – not to return to the industry. Others have moved from the theatre and live entertainment sector into film and television production, which was able to restart earlier than live production. As a result, there is a skills shortage especially of lighting, sound, video and stage technicians. As well as opening up opportunities for new entrants into the sector, who are likely to see accelerated career paths, we are observing greater movement of production personnel between the live and mediated performance sectors. In terms of this journal’s focus, then, we can perhaps anticipate the hybridity that is well established in some experimental, avant garde and small-scale work becoming more prevalent in the large-scale commercial sector, driven in part by a cross-fertilisation of technical and creative skills, processes and sensibilities.

Overview of articles and documents

The responses received approach the topic of ‘Theatre Goes Digital’ in a variety of ways. Some focus on specific technological paradigms, offering new ways of making work that challenge the technical and dramaturgical restrictions imposed by popular technological platforms such as Zoom, seeking to enrich and diversify the experience of performing and consuming work online. For example, António Baía Reis and Mark Ashmore discuss virtual reality (VR) social platforms as technologies that enable profoundly interactive experiences. In a conversational piece, they explore live theatre experiences developed in VR by the UK Royal Shakespeare Company, USA/France-based Double Eye Productions and Spanish collective La Cuarta Pared VR, aiming to present a gateway for a conceptual framework that defines live theatre and performance in VR. Likewise, co-authors Neill O’Dwyer, Gareth Young and Aljosa Smolic explore the role of technologies such as volumetric video, social VR and photogrammetry in simulating site-specific theatre, ‘assessing the potential of these content creation techniques to support future remote performative events,’ and report on the case study of developing XR Ulysses, a ‘real-world’ site specific performance for VR. Co-authors Paul Sermon, Steve Dixon, Sita Popat Taylor, Randall Packer and Satinder Gill, imagine new ways of performing theatre in online and telematic environments using video chromakey and compositing techniques to co-locate performers in three dimensional environments, freeing them from the ‘boxes’ of Zoom Theatre. Their report on the UKRI-funded ‘Covid-19 Rapid Response’ project draws from case studies from the project’s eight residencies with professional performance groups, to discuss how existing techniques can be adapted for different levels of technical expertise and new ways of working can be introduced.

Several pieces in this issue are dedicated to practice-led explorations of the digital archive. Those are framed, to some extent, by Joanne Scott’s proposition of a ‘datalogical’ mode of reading online performance. Drawing on discussions of data and the datalogical, as well as practices of surveillance capitalism, Scott studies the performance audience/participant as a data-subject identified through the ways data pass in and out of one’s body. She brings together the underlying computational happenings of digital performances with their more visible dramaturgical practices to argue that, combining the two, offers a richer perspective of online performance practices, opening up relationships between their seen and unseen elements. From a practice-led perspective, Tasos Angelopoulos and Panayiota Konstantinakou of the Greek Papalangki theatre company, writing with Christina Papagiannouli, present their use of Instagram as a ‘cyberstage’ for UBUmaterial – a performative archive following the theatre company's rehearsals of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi at home due to the pandemic. Instead of trying to apply traditional rehearsal methods in this digital context, Papalangki theatre company used the features of Instagram to develop a digital ‘modelbook’. In a similar move, co-authors Ramona Mosse, Christian Stein and Nina Tecklenburg discuss the living archive of Viral Theatres artistic research project, which ‘documents the radical changes in theatre aesthetics and infrastructure during the Covid-19 pandemic’ through interviews, video documentaries and case studies. The co-authors present five exemplary case studies to demonstrate that tools and practices of theatre have shifted significantly during the pandemic, suggesting a need to reconceptualise the idea of theatre per se.

Other contributions to this issue analyze the effects of the pandemic on both the production and reception of contemporary theatre events that are moved to an online space. Some find that sometimes what is lost in the move is returned in the form of new creative possibilities. Sometimes when we come up against what seem to be immovable obstacles, those same restrictions can inspire us to create new ways to achieve our objectives. For example, Danai Liodaki and Giorgos Velegrakis, confronting ‘contemporary theatrical reality’, analyze five plays that were presented as online events during 2020. They explore both what goes missing in the move of live performance work online, but also what emerges or transforms as a result of this same shift. Alexandra Simou writes about the performance of Elias Adam’s play We’re in the Army Now, whose creators reacted imaginatively to the restrictions of the pandemic, ‘cross-dressing’ the physical into the virtual in a thoughtful, playful application of queer theory to digital scholarship. Meanwhile, Benedetta Piccio, Ingi Helgason, Chris Elsden and Melissa Terras use a trajectories paradigm to study the perspectives of participants in the 2020 Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2020, for which live events were cancelled and moved online, finding that sometimes when you are served a hefty dose of lemons, the only choice you are left with is to make lemonade.

In all of the above, there is an underlying concern with our ability to productively frame the Covid-19 pandemic so as to understand and process the impact of this ‘profound crisis’ on both society and theatre and performance. Contributors are still in the process of unpicking the implications of a global ‘mass migration’ of theatre and performance from real world contexts to online, digital environments, and we can only speculate about the impact this radical but relatively short-term shift will have on the future of theatre and performance ‘as we know it’. Joseph Dunne-Howrie argues that the pandemic ‘is creating the conditions for a new telos of globalisation to emerge in humanity’s historical consciousness’. Using three case studies of works by Dead Centre, Forced Entertainment, and Javaad Alipoor Company, he aims to demonstrate ‘how today’s informational environment augments perceptions of the real in performance through the convergence of media formats, including the fleshy human’.

What also emerges very clearly from the various contributions to this Special Issue, is a stubborn desire that ‘the show must go on’ whatever the circumstances. Contributors never question the value or efficacy of theatre and performance’s mass migration to online, digital environments, even if they regret – and wish to challenge – the dominance of Zoom as a platform during the pandemic, in favour of more sophisticated environments (such as social VR) that can facilitate richer, interactive, and more nuanced experiences. Overall, contributors have approached this shift as temporary, seeing it as an (enforced) opportunity to refresh perspective through experimenting with new technologies and the different creative processes, means of engaging with publics and audiences, and ways of documenting performance that these can afford. And even within the context of a global pandemic, not all are convinced that theatre and performance are, indeed, in crisis – or that crisis is anything new to these practices – and provoke us to reimagine what is vital in performance. Johannes Birringer writes:

The theatre in crisis? Theatre makers always proclaim a crisis, and then continue to produce theatre. Theatre in crisis is a sustainable theatre and always has been. […] it is obvious we have to re-imagine breathing together, enlarging what is possible, adventuring landscapes that are autobiographical. The breath in dancing, theatre, and music making is absolutely vital.

The vitality of theatre and performance contributes to its persistence in the face of any crisis, adapting as a medium just as humans have, in attempting to bring about the endemic stage of Covid-19. The contributions collected here demonstrate how technology filled in the spaces between our breaths and between us during the Covid-19 pandemic. When our physical presence became a worrisome condition of theatrical performance, digital media was embraced by artists and their audiences as an alternative means of co-presence and togetherness. This quick adoption of new media forms may have the largest impact on the discipline of live performance overall. What have we learned from this global crisis that should persist into its afterlife? Does the centrality of digital media in pandemic life force performance experiences towards massive evolution when we can finally all breathe together, whether online, in real space, or indeed in novel and hybrid environments that do away with old oppositional dialectics between physical and digital to engage with sophisticated, nuanced and multifaceted practices that bring together different ways of being, exploiting their divergent and, often, complementary affordances? While we are all eager to be back in real space with our colleagues, audiences and communities, the sudden gaps between us that technologies bridged, quite profoundly, through performance during the pandemic must give us pause – for breath.

Notes

1 See the UK Government’s public campaign by the Department of Health and Social Care (2021).

2 The word ‘unprecedented’ was the people’s choice for 2020 word of the year by Dictionary.com. See: Eubank (2020).