Theatre in the Digital Age: Concepts, Perspectives, Developments

“Welcome to the Conference of the Absent. So nice to see you here!” – this is how a pre-recorded voice welcomes the audience to Rimini Protokoll’s documentary play Conference of the Absent (Konferenz der Abwesenden) (2021). The basic premise of this show is that an international conference is being held but that participants cannot – for political or other reasons – attend themselves. As a result, members of the audience spontaneously need to step in in order to represent and embody the absent delegates on stage, reading out their contributions and thereby giving them a voice. Besides the spectators themselves, there are no other actors on stage, so that the responsibility for the performance resides with spectators, who are helped by technical staff and guided by a voice-over.

Significantly, Conference of the Absent premiered in June 2021 at Staatsschauspiel Dresden, where it was the first production after theatres in Germany had been closed for months during the COVID-19 pandemic. While technological devices such as headphones through which actor-spectators receive instructions as well as a camera and projections, are deployed, the production omits the use of digital transmission platforms like Zoom – tools which were widely used at the time and which also helped theatres survive during the pandemic. The production arguably embraces and celebrates the reopening of theatres as a return to a physical presence on the part of the spectators – a presence that, however, offsets fundamental absences. When we saw the production at the Tiroler Landestheater in Innsbruck, Austria, in November 2024, it struck us that this tension at the heart of the show resonated strongly with the subject of the annual conference of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English (CDE), “Theatre in the Digital Age,” which we had hosted at the University of Innsbruck just a few months prior. Even though – or maybe precisely because – Conference of the Absent eschews the use of digital streaming technologies in favour of using present bodies as channels for the voices represented in the performance, the show raises questions that are highly relevant to the exploration in this volume of how theatre is affected by and has responded to the rapid transformations effected by the rise of digital technologies in the last few decades. How has theatre changed in the course of digital progress? What creative potential does the digital afford? Which contribution can the theatre make to critically engage with digitalisation? Which problems are involved in the use of the digital? The contributions in this special issue address these questions, asking how theatre practitioners have responded to the challenges and the opportunities of the digital before, during, and after the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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“Discussing theatre and the digital is a bit like discussing theatre and electricity,” writes Matt Adams (viii) in his foreword to Bill Blake’s 2014 Theatre & the Digital, pinpointing how in the course of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, computing technologies have become indispensable to virtually all kinds of theatrical production. Still, some plays and productions feature the digital in more obvious ways than others – in Steve Dixon’s widely-quoted definition, what can be seen as “digital performance works” are all those productions “where computer technologies play a key role rather than a subsidiary one in content, techniques, aesthetics, or delivery forms” (6). Of course, this is a very broad understanding of digital theatre that encompasses a wide range of different levels, manifestations, and usages. In the table below, we offer a tentative systematisation of the various possible intersections between theatre and the digital according to Dixon’s formula:

The first dimension encompasses all those plays which tackle digitalisation and its social impact as their subject matter in their action and/or dialogue, like, for example, Jennifer Haley’s The Nether (2013), a play featuring “an all-encompassing virtual universe that is the bloated, grotesque descendant of the internet” (Barnett), or Vlad Butucea’s Glowstick (2019) about robots deployed to care for the elderly.^[1] Concomitantly, a second dimension comprises cases where digital technologies are represented prominently in the stage production, for example (and maybe most obviously), through the use of screens, thus evoking a digital dimension in performance. In this category, we would include cases in which the evocation of the digital is a distinctive addition of a particular production, thus rendering it a mainly theatrical rather than dramatic feature. Pascale Aebischer’s study Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance discusses a whole range of productions of Shakespeare plays centring on such techniques.

Examples of the third dimension would be plays that combine theatrical and dramatic elements in such a way that a particular aspect of the digital that is interrogated on the level of content also becomes a main aspect of the staging. For example, Jasmine Lee-Jones’s seven methods of killing kylie jenner (2019) is a play revolving around the online experiences of young Black women. The playtext and performance are structured around and replicate exchanges on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Seda Ilter has proposed a similar category in what she calls “mediaturgical,” referring to works “whose entire dramaturgical formation process and overall form is based on a specific technology” (171). Ilter includes as one of her main examples David Greig’s The Yes/No Plays (2013–2014), which we would additionally also characterise as representing a fourth dimension, namely that of using digital technologies as the primary channel of dissemination: Greig’s series of short dramatic fragments, originally posted as an ongoing dialogue on Twitter, were only later gathered and brought to the stage for a physical live performance.

It is this fourth dimension of intersection, where performance is no longer necessarily predicated on the physical co-presence of actors and spectators in the same space, that has drawn the most attention and controversy, both in academic criticism and in cultural commentary. Such works have sparked questions of categorisation and of evaluation: should they still be regarded as theatre? Under what conditions and in what ways should theatre practitioners go down the road of “digitalising” their work in this way? The COVID-19 pandemic, when digital transmission was the only option for many theatres and practitioners to keep working at all, accelerated the development in radical ways and gave these questions a new kind of urgency. A growing number of critics responding to the digital transformations of the theatre during the pandemic (for example, Fuchs; Jarvis and Savage; Liedke and Pietrzak-Franger; Timplalexi) have contextualised and situated them as continuing central debates around technological reproduction within performance theory.

Since these are theoretical building blocks that inform a number of the articles in this volume, we will give a brief outline of the main positions in the discussions surrounding liveness and performance in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – one of these insisting that theatrical performance in its essence is characterised by the very absence of mediation through technology, the other complicating the idea that performance and mediatisation can be understood as separate concepts. The first position argues for the intrinsic value and perceived superiority of traditional theatre-making over digitised forms based on “the bodily co-presence of actors and spectators” (Fischer-Lichte 68), which, according to Erika Fischer-Lichte, is a prerequisite for what she refers to as “the autopoietic feedback loop” (68) that characterises the relation between production and reception. Similarly, for Peggy Phelan, another highly influential voice in this debate, the essence of performance – what she calls its “ontology” – is to be located in its ephemeral quality: “Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance” (146). It “implicates the real through the presence of living bodies” (148) and “honours the idea that a limited number of people in a specific time/space frame can have an experience of value which leaves no trace behind” (149). According to such an understanding, then, processes of digitalisation – insofar as they involve processes of recording and transmission – diminish or detract from the theatrical performance. However, that the insistence on physical co-presence and (at least a degree of) ephemerality as such does not necessarily mean thinking of “theatre” and “the digital” in oppositional terms is demonstrated by Nadja Masura’s wide-ranging study Digital Theatre. Masura, like Fischer-Lichte and Phelan, argues that for a performance to merit the description of theatre, it must be “a ‘live’ performance placing at least some performers in the same shared physical space with an audience” (7). She describes digital theatre as “aesthetically incorporating digital media in the processes of artistic questioning”: “the dual presence of the ‘live’ actor and mediated digital elements creates performance events that allow us to better understand, respond to, and shape our changing world” (277).

A contrasting approach to liveness is put forward by Philip Auslander, who developed his theory over decades in different editions of his seminal book Liveness: Performance in a Mediated Culture. Auslander understands liveness as a concept that does not describe “an ontologically defined condition” but a quality that is ascribed to an experience: “what counts culturally as live experience changes over time in relation to technological change” (3). Liveness “does not inhere in a technological artifact or its operations – it results from our engagement with it and our willingness to bring it into full presence for ourselves” (8). What defines liveness for Auslander, then, is its relational quality: whether something is experienced as live depends on spectators’ “engagement with” the technological object. In such an understanding, the difference between “live” or “recorded” (or “mediatised”) is ultimately also a question of custom and perception where, for example, the “same” machine recording of sound is experienced differently when it is presented as being broadcast in real time or with a certain temporal distance. One such line of development central to contemporary experiences of theatre is examined by Heidi Lucja Liedke in her book on the development and status of livecasting – the screening (sometimes, but by no means always, as a livestream) of theatre productions in cinemas. In her fine-grained analysis, especially of the role and response of audiences of these shows, Liedke comes to the conclusion that “the experience of liveness does not need spatio-temporal and/or corporeal co-presence any longer to be considered live – liveness is and can be ‘more real’ when it is mediated” (22).

Digital technologies, seen from such a vantage point, are offering an ever-expanding set of possibilities for enhancing a sense of “full presence” (Auslander 8). As Sarah Bay-Cheng, another central voice in the debate about digital transformations of the theatre, puts it: “it is clear that performance presence was never exclusively about live bodies in physical proximity to one another, but, throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, presence was defined increasingly through digital online interactions” (11). During the COVID-19 pandemic, this process was both fundamentally challenged and sped up exponentially – it made many of us long for a physical proximity that we had taken for granted, but it also fostered the sense that there are many different degrees and ways of being “present,” of experiencing a sense of communion, and that this is true of both virtual and “real life” interactions. The pandemic brought home to us (pun intended) that, on the one hand, as Matthew Causey writes, the digital has indeed become a “pervasive presence [. . .] in everyday life” (431), making it possible for many of us to keep working, communicating, and socialising remotely. On the other hand, at least to our minds, the experience of the pandemic raises the question whether Causey is completely right in postulating that we live in postdigital conditions in the sense of “a social system fully familiarized and embedded in electronic communications and virtual representations, wherein the biological and the mechanical, the virtual and the real, and the organic and the inorganic approach indistinction” (432). Arguably, the yearning that many of us felt for sharing spaces with other organic bodies suggests that even though the process Causey describes may be under way, it is far from being completed. We are not even sure whether “indistinction” is really where we are headed – maybe, taking a leaf out of Auslander’s book, one could rather argue that while the gateposts for what is experienced as “virtual” or “real,” as “organic” or “inorganic,” might be shifting, the distinctions as such remain relevant, possibly even vital.

There is another understanding of the concept of the postdigital that seems more amenable to this view of our current media environment: as a position marked by “disenchantment with digital information systems” (Jarvis and Savage 3). In their examination of evolving practices at the intersection of the theatre and the healthcare sector, this conceptualisation becomes an important critical lens for Liam Jarvis and Karen Savage: “The notion of the postdigital, we propose, encourages an examination of the blind spots of digital culture mid-pandemic: practices that might not be read as ‘digital’ on the surface, but represent displacements in the wake of digital activity that require critical attention” (3).

The sudden jolt with which the lockdowns suspended the possibilities of physical co-presence in theatrical performances and sped up the digitalisation of the theatre has already drawn a fair share of critical attention. Liedke and Monika Pietrzak-Franger see this time as engendering a new form they call “viral theatre,” meaning performances that are mediated by technologies such as Zoom. For them, viral theatre is a transitory phenomenon, mandating that “both performers and spectators are in a state of disruption” (128) and that the spectators are willing to accept (and fund) the online performances as theatrical events. A discussion similarly based on an Auslanderian sense of liveness as a construction on the part of the audience but more wide-ranging and detailed was Barbara Fuchs’s Theater of Lockdown, the first book-length study of the many modes enabling theatrical production under lockdown conditions which “confirm the resilience of its makers” (25) and the theatre in general.

While both Fuchs and Liedke and Pietrzak-Franger stress the transitory nature of lockdown (or viral) modes of theatre, they also see its potential as a catalyst for transformation: “can the lockdown provide an opportunity for theatre to reset its relationship with audiences,” Fuchs wonders (19), also positing that “digital theatre does more than simulate the real: it complicates and remixes it, foregrounding the artifice and conventionality in how we think about production, performance, audience, and theatre itself” (25). A similar sentiment is voiced by Eleni Timplalexi, who already in December 2020 examined the “implications and side effects” (43) of theatre’s migration to online environments. She argues that the widespread willingness on the part of theatre practitioners to make performances accessible online – as livestreams or recordings – signals that “the arbitrary privilege of its ontology over mediated performance, supported by theorists like Phelan, can remain intact neither now nor after the current crisis” (48). While highly critical of the “canned” recordings of performances proliferating online, she sees future potential in hybrid forms that experiment with new combinations of the analogue and the digital.

A particularly extreme evocation of a positive transformation engendered by lockdown is the provocative “Online Theater Manifesto,” published in April 2020 by Chinese theatre director Wang Chong, who celebrates the loss of a theatre predicated on physical co-presence as an opportunity for renewal:

Theater artists only realized that theater is non-essential once the plague was everywhere. In fact, theater became non-essential long ago. [. . .] While most people in the world have access to the internet, theater remains the pretty plaything of the privileged few.

Theater is tourism; theater is consumerism; theater is capitalism. Theater is non-essential, because theater stopped being public forum long ago. It is neither public nor a forum.

Yet the online world is public and a forum. This world has sharing, participation, and billions of people. This world has stages, auditoriums, and open-air squares. This world has bodies, spaces, and beating hearts. This world has energy, light, and zeitgeist. The online world is not a mirror of the world. It is the world.

Online theater is absolutely not a stop-gap measure during this plague. [. . .] Online theater is no death knell for theater, but a prelude to our future.

No doubt this vision will appear like a nightmare to many, and there are good reasons to object to a one-sidedly idealising vision of the public forum offered in the “online world” – a world governed by multi-billion corporations with questionable agendas and ties to oppressive regimes and infused by a consumerist logic that dwarfs the capitalist aspirations of even the most commercial of theatre enterprises. It also seems highly questionable – not least in the light of the multifarious intersections between theatre and the digital presented above – to represent “the theatre” as a monolithic category in opposition to digital tendencies. As some of the contributions in this volume argue (and as our own visit of Rimini Protokoll’s Conference of the Absent also suggests), a turn towards physical co-presence, after the experience of lockdown, could have an innovative potential of its own, rather than just constituting a move “back to normal.” And yet what is resonant about Wang’s provocation is the combination of a belief in the digital with an ethical commitment to the theatre as a community-building forum.

Issues related to community have indeed been urgent for scholarship on digital theatre, not just since the pandemic, but maybe particularly since then. While the digital has arguably made plays more widely available and accessible through digital archives and online streaming services, for example, the question of increased accessibility is a contested one. As Fuchs asks right at the beginning of her study: “Who gets to produce virtual theater, on the one hand, and to experience it, on the other? Where and how has the current crisis lowered the barriers to entry and widespread viewership? What are the possibilities of expanded or, in some cases, reduced access? Whom is digital theater for?” (2). Investigations into the ethical implications of the digital are also tied to the concept of care – a concept that has gained momentum in various fields in recent years, including theatre and performance studies.^[2] As Kate Craddock and Helen Freshwater explain: “Care can be identified as a key component and guiding principle for many contemporary theatre makers creating work today” (161) – a development that is a direct result of the pandemic and “the intense need for greater care and the pressures on those trying to care for others, and for themselves” (160) during this time. As they show in a number of case studies, theatre-makers make use of the digital in an attempt to provide care to audiences. In a similar vein, Jarvis and Savage study the uses of the digital for purposes of social care in performative phenomena and offer a critical perspective on “the mediation of care through, and as, communications technologies” (2): “The pandemic brought into sharp relief that ‘care’ is not something different from technology and its applications [. . .]. And yet care was something that could easily be reduced to mere spectacle for political expediency through the circulation of information online” (4). Many of the contributions in this special issue respond to these questions, critically examining the ethical potential of digital theatre in light of notions of intimacy, care, and accessibility.

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“How can the theatre change the digital?” asks Liedke in the opening article of the volume – an article that continues her earlier forays into viral theatre and charts its possible trajectory in postpandemic times. Liedke emphasises the concept of care in relation to digital performance practices. Drawing on the Care Collective’s Care Manifesto (2020), a call to address a systemic lack of care in social and economic institutions and interpersonal relations, she inquires under which conditions and in what ways integrating (or conversely rejecting) the digital in theatrical practices “can be a form of care.” Her central example is the work of American theatre practitioner and scholar Caridad Svich. Liedke critically examines the potential of the digital in the context of societal discourses on resilience and accessibility and against the background of a re-turn to “anti-digital” forms that embrace liveness, co-presence, and the inevitable disruptions that result from analogue performance.

Discussing the earliest example included in the volume, William C. Boles’s contribution focusses on the role of technology as a key theme in the dramatic works of Mike Bartlett, in particular his 2010 drama Love, Love, Love. Boles reads Bartlett’s works as registering and critically commenting on the profound digital transformations that have shaped life in the twenty-first century. The work discussed in the case study features the first dimension of intersections between theatre and the digital introduced above, reflecting on the social impact of advances in communication technology on the level of content. Boles understands Love, Love, Love as a kind of pre-history to the digitalisation of communication: offering a historical perspective by focussing on the relationship between two characters across a thirty-five-year time span, the play examines the impact of technological advancements on society through the lens of watershed moments in the development of a mediatised society.

An example of a play critically investigating the state of communication technology a good decade later is then introduced by Benjamin Broadribb. The verbatim musical Public Domain (2021), too, comments on technological developments, in particular social media and online culture – bringing together dramatic and theatrical reflection as well as the aspect of medial transmission to the audience. As an example of pandemic performance, the piece premiered as a livestream and functions, as Broadribb argues, as an example of metamodern theatre. While not using Zoom directly, the livestream adopted its aesthetic, showing isolated performers in separate boxes on screen. Reflecting the need for physical distance with a yearning for connection during the pandemic, the show created a “heightened [. . .] sense of affective depth and sincerity.” Exemplifying a shift in theatrical aesthetics away from postmodern sensibilities towards what Timotheus Vermeulen has identified as a metamodern “depthiness,” the play oscillates “between cynicism and earnestness, between grounded reality and heightened emotion, and ultimately between depth and depthlessness.”

The following contribution by Nassim Winnie Balestrini draws on the conceptual framework of inter- and transmediality in order to examine how both digital and analogue media are combined and used as tools of characterisation as well as of communication in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot trilogy, in particular the second play Water by the Spoonful (2011). Balestrini demonstrates how the play engages “with the potential impacts of mediated exchange on one’s self-image and on relationality.” Intermediality is not only a characteristic of the playtexts but also of the stage design – which makes this a good example of the combination of theatrical and dramatic evocations of the digital. In crossing spatial, temporal, and epistemological boundaries, Balestrini argues, Hudes “intertwin[es] geographically separate spaces, the past and the present, as well as the real and the imagined” both “in the diegetic realm” and “in the material space of the stage.” Her plays thus resist any simplistic dichotomisation of the analogue and the digital.

The issue of physical co-presence as a putative hallmark of the theatre is central to both Klára Witzany Hutková’s and Shefali Banerji’s contributions. Hutková reads Marina Carr’s one-woman monologue iGirl – and specifically its original production at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in the autumn of 2021, when theatres were first opening again after a period of lockdown – as reflecting on the experience of isolation at home and a dependence on communication mediated by technology. Where Hutková shows the creative potential inherent in presenting the theatre in contrast to digital mediation, as giving the spectators a renewed or fresh sense of what it means to experience the co-presence of performer and audience in the auditorium, Banerji is interested in the ways in which a particular subset of theatre practitioners, namely those involved in spoken word theatre – a form traditionally characterised by the intimate proximity between performer and audience – responded to the restrictions of lockdown by experimenting with other forms of connecting with their audiences. Using the work of the poet and performer Rose Condo, especially her 2020 digital adaptation of the spoken word show The Geography of Me, as a case study, Banerji reflects on the complexities of the relation between liveness and visibility. They also discuss benefits and drawbacks of the digital with regard to the accessibility of material as well as to the physical and psychological exposure of the artist, thus addressing questions of intimacy and vulnerability.

The question in what sense the forced turn to the digital during the pandemic could be seen as enabling for theatre practitioners also informs the following two contributions of this volume, which both deal with types of lockdown theatre. Janine Hauthal examines evocations and uses of Zoom technology in Richard Nelson’s The Apple Family: A Pandemic Trilogy (2020) and Forced Entertainment’s End Meeting for All (2020) and As the Time Goes (2021). Hauthal shows how the productions experiment with forms of “viral theatre,” more precisely, evoking and experimenting with Zoom in order to remediate theatre performances based on physical co-presence. However, in Hauthal’s reading, the case studies ultimately reveal opposing aesthetic strategies and attitudes towards the digital platform they foreground: where Nelson’s “dramatic” evocation of Zoom follows the conventions of realist theatre and represents the technology’s potential to enable communication, Forced Entertainment’s “postdramatic” work “question[s] Zoom’s efficacy as a communicative tool.” It does so by way of a “highly absurdist metatheatrical reflection of acting and storytelling” and by positioning the spectator as a co-creator.

Christine Schwanecke’s article emphasises community-building efforts on the part of theatre practitioners during lockdown, focussing on the #TinyPlayChallenge put forward by the Dublin-based company Fishamble during the lockdown of 2020. In examining how the company prompted playwrights – both in Ireland and abroad – to submit “tiny” plays with a strict word limit, Schwanecke traces “the ways in which the combination of digitalisation and lockdown theatre engendered new artistic realities at times of enforced individual and institutional restraints.” She is particularly interested in the affordances of the limited form and its resonance with the conditions of lockdown and the community-building potential of the challenge as such, arguing that Fishamble’s use of digital means for networking also provides avenues for the future of the theatre.

Distinctly activist potentials of digitally informed theatre are further explored in the contributions by Hannah Greenstreet and Eva Windberger. In her examination of seven methods of killing kylie jenner, Greenstreet engages with the way in which the play underscores a Black feminist stance with a critical reflection of changing notions of “reality” and “realism” under the impression of digitalisation. Exploring the complex relations between “IRL” and the “Twittersphere” in both playtext and stage production, Greenstreet argues that exploding the “false dichotomy between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’” is a key motor for the play’s critical thrust. Using Brechtian and Black feminist approaches, Greenstreet shows how the play advances an expanded notion of realism that fuels the activist potential of the play.

Against the background of racism and hate crimes against British East and South East Asian (BESEA) communities during the COVID-19 pandemic, Windberger’s contribution centres on the digital performance event WeRNotVirus (2020) as an example of viral theatre that can be understood as a form of digital activism. Analysing “how its digital format, performative aesthetics, and political agenda intersect,” Windberger shows how WeRNotVirus voices critique against racial hate and fosters BESEA group identity. The performances’ “multimodality” and generic hybridity “both [mirror] the diversity and versatility of artistic talent in the BESEA community and [hint] at a conception of BESEA performative arts as cross-referential and inclusive.”

The way in which the digital enables theatrical explorations into posthumanism is the topic of the final cluster of contributions by Susanne Thurow and Alex Watson. Thurow scrutinises examples of theatre and installation art that use digital methodologies such as AI-based 3D visualisation to stage humanity’s enmeshed relationships with terrestrial ecologies. The article draws on Bruno Latour’s concept of the terrestrial and Elizabeth Grosz’s feminist theory of geopower to show how these performative artworks offer a new approach to addressing ecological challenges through digitally augmented aesthetics which are deployed to “disrupt established aesthetic paradigms by reframing concepts of time, space, and agency.” Rather than inviting spectators to observe, these digital aesthetics offer “an immersive exploration of dynamic interactive processes” in ways that “expand our sensorial and cognitive engagement” with the challenges posed by the climate crisis.

Reflecting on questions of representation, Watson focusses on the use of animal cyborgs, defined as “representations of animals made manifest through technology,” in recent anglophone climate crisis theatre: Miranda Rose Hall and Katie Mitchell’s Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction (2023), Complicité and Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2022), and Complicité and Crystal Pite’s Figures in Extinction [1.0] (2022). Based on Una Chaudhuri’s concept of theatre of species, Watson argues that the cyborg offers a vital but, so far, underused tool in contemporary theatre and performance through which “the standardised relationships that have been ossified in an era of climate crisis and species extinction between humans, technology, and animals” can be powerfully interrogated.

The volume is rounded off by an interview on a digital form that has arguably stretched the concept of theatre to its limits and posed the question of co-presence in a new way, namely Virtual Reality (VR) theatre, defined as immersive “performances that are broadcast live to VR audiences and for which VR is a fundamental and transformative part of the experience” (Garson 252). Cyrielle Garson talks to Deirdre V. Lyons and Stephen Butchko, founding members of the VR theatre group Ferryman Collective, about their pioneering work, touching upon questions of its genesis, its relation to the theatre industry, technology, aesthetics, and writing practices.

Across a wide range of case studies and across all the intersections between theatre and the digital that we have identified at the beginning of this introduction, the contributions to this special issue demonstrate that the question of the digital goes far beyond that of the use of technological means. Rather, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the manifold intersections between theatre and the digital prompt a reconsideration of the very foundations of the theatre and its potential as a politically, socially, and ethically potent art form.

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The contributions in this special issue are based on papers given at the 2024 CDE conference, which took place from 2 to 5 May at the University of Innsbruck and was generously funded by the University of Innsbruck and the federal states of Tyrol and Vorarlberg. The editors would like to thank the other members of the conference organising team, Ines Gstrein, Ulrich Pallua, and Christoph Singer. We would also like to thank Ingrid Anderka and Barbara Stöckl for their administrative support. A special thanks goes to Ines Gstrein for stellar editorial assistance and to Francesca Nicotra for invaluable help with administration and research. We are also grateful to the Tiroler Landestheater, where we hosted a roundtable discussion during the conference, and to Ferryman Collective for offering a workshop on VR theatre.