Introduction

There are places that I have been that don’t appear on any map . . .

Rose Condo, The Geography of Me

What does theatre look like when it is no longer a physical space but transforms into an ephemeral virtual entity, when it is no longer a location that can be found on a map? This is not the first time this line of enquiry has been pursued. In 2019, Heidi Lucja Liedke already asked what happens when, in the absence of an auditorium and a physical stage, “the dimension of proxemics, that is the relationship of body and space, is eliminated?” (6). Liedke, however, in this instance, was interested in the potentiality of livecasting and audience participation. I want to explore the affordances of digital theatre, specifically digital spoken word theatre, and how it manifests through and is manipulated by gendered bodies on the theatre screen. Here, I am deliberately engaging the term theatre screen to imply the virtual screen of a theatre performance. In a world increasingly mediated by online technologies, it is now imperative to think of the theatre stage and its appropriation of our smart device screens in new ways, to reconcile the two terms in the context of the digital, especially in a world changed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The world of live performance came to a standstill in early 2020 due to social distancing guidelines and lockdown regulations implemented to mitigate the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The cultural sector bore the brunt in the form of cancelled events, lost jobs, and exacerbated precarity. Under such circumstances, the innovative and exciting yet marginalised art form of spoken word theatre had to quickly adapt to the performance conditions of the “new normal” in order to cut its losses. Spoken word theatre emerges from the performance practice of spoken word poetry, where poets present their work in their customary performance style in a long form show blending “theatrical staging with the conversational and intimate delivery of spoken word” (Bearder 56). As COVID-19 spread, practitioners of spoken word theatre in the UK reconfigured their performances to online settings, shifting to conferencing and broadcasting platforms such as Zoom, YouTube, and Crowdcast to retain their gig commitments and livelihoods. This appeared to be in the spirit of keeping with spoken word theatre’s “handyman” approach to performance. Since its inception, the form has been malleable to the surroundings it inhabits, often occupying unconventional venues, counter-cultural public spaces, and makeshift stages. But how did spoken word theatre in the UK adapt itself to the digitally mediated lockdown world of the pandemic? How did the bare stage aesthetic of the form translate to a virtual platform? And, finally, how did practitioners exploit the affordances of digital spoken word theatre to make their gendered bodies visible on the virtual stage? In this article, I answer all of these questions. Firstly, I engage with the expectations of hyper-visibility of performers and its sexed and gendered implications in spoken word theatre. Secondly, I examine the scope of the digital, tracing the way spoken word theatre was reimagined during the pandemic for the virtual stage. Here, I explore four strategies employed by practitioners, specifically women poets, to digitally transmit their shows. I then turn to the case of UK-based Canadian poet Rose Condo’s adaptation of her 2013 on-site show The Geography of Me to a digital version in 2020, analysing the poet’s employment of a recorded performance as well as the merits and discontents of the show’s digital adaptation. Finally, I discuss how the deployment of pre-recorded material negotiates the expectations of hyper-visibility in an online environment.

Sexed/Gendered Visibility and Poetry Performance

Building on Jacques Lacan’s philosophy, Peggy Phelan wrote in 1993: “Visibility is a trap,” further adding, “it summons surveillance and the law; it provokes voyeurism, fetishism, the colonialist/imperial appetite for possession” (6). In an art form that presupposes the poet’s presence on stage as intrinsic to its performance strategy, the politics of visibility come into play rather emphatically, especially in sexed and gendered performances. Further, spoken word poetry, and in turn spoken word theatre, is marked by an expectation of authenticity (Somers-Willett; Ailes), which additionally complicates the way a poet is visibly implicated into the performance of their work. Poets often share poems and anecdotes that are autobiographical, or at least personal, in their performance. The sharing of traumatic experiences is also quite ubiquitous in spoken word poetry. In her 2020 doctoral dissertation on expectations of authenticity in British spoken word poetry, Katie Ailes raises concerns regarding the impact of sharing traumatic experiences on the well-being and mental health of artists (Performance 294, 303). While practitioners and scholars alike believe that spoken word poetry can be therapeutic and transformative (Breckenridge; Chepp), the risks implicated in the practice remain understudied. If sharing personal stories through poetry in spoken word theatre personifies empowerment, how do artists safeguard themselves from overexposing to the audiences? How do they navigate the “trap” of visibility, especially gendered and sexed visibility, in a virtual set-up? “There is an important difference between wilfully failing to appear and never being summoned” (11), Phelan contends while complicating the representational politics of visibility entrenched in performance. Can the theatre screen then be manipulated by practitioners, especially those from the margins of sex and gender, to wilfully fail to appear?

In Theater of Lockdown, Barbara Fuchs sheds light on this wilful failing to appear on screen in her feminist reading of Elli Papakonstantinou’s Traces of Antigone (2020). Fuchs observes how the six women in the play “rarely occupy their boxes in a straightforward fashion. Instead, they disappear behind scrims, wear masks, or offer only part of their body” (51). In this way, the play

hones in on the iterative cultural reflex of voyeurism, returning often to the refrain “Show me your faces,” yet simultaneously obscuring those faces in a paradoxical display of concealment, almost as though exploring the many ways they might be withheld. (51)

Indeed, this example details one strategy for women performers to remain unmarked (partially at the least) in a performance. By demonstrating “the suspension of the female body between the polarities of presence and absence” (Phelan 164) rather literally in the performance, Traces of Antigone successfully embodies Phelan’s vision. However, this strategy is not always feasible for practitioners, especially in spoken word theatre, where the bodily presence of the poet-performer, and especially the reading of their facial communication as they recite their poetic work, is an accepted norm. How then may a poet perform in this in-between category? I will respond to this question by engaging with Rose Condo’s work. By bringing Phelan into a discussion on digital spoken word theatre, my intention is not to revisit the debates on liveness and mediation. Scholars in the field of poetry performance such as Claire Palzer are already investigating the implications of liveness in digital spoken word. I am rather concerned with the affordances of the online model in negotiating the hyper-visibility of a sexed body, a female body, in spoken word theatre – an art form that necessitates said hyper-visibility in its performance.

Spoken Word Theatre, Spatial Adaptability, and Appropriating the Screen

Spoken word theatre appeared on the scene of poetry performance in the UK in the 1990 s. The shows consist of poems presented by the poets themselves. The poems, woven together by a thematic paratext or a narrative thread, are performed with minimal props and stage design. Typically hour-long shows by a single poet (though multi-poet shows, such as those by the Scottish spoken word theatre company In the Works, have also gained traction in recent years), the performances often incorporate art forms other than spoken word poetry, along with digital technologies, thereby demonstrating an intermedial artistic strategy.^[1] Early examples of spoken word theatre include Jonzi D’s Aeroplane Man (1999), Roger Robinson’s Shadow Boxer (2000), and Francesca Beard’s Chinese Whispers (2002). In general, there are two prevalent forms of spoken word theatre in the UK. The first type is the theatrically conceptualised performance, where a theme or plot is conceived before the poems are written to follow a narrative thread. The second type is one where pre-written, already existing poems are woven together by a broad theme, loosely connected by paratext and storytelling. Spoken word theatre is also characterised by a large degree of spatial adaptability. The underlying principle for this malleability is the form’s origin in spoken word poetry in the UK and US that strived to occupy alternative spaces. In keeping with its grassroots ethics and underground, do-it-yourself aesthetic, the form boasts a flexible stage design, where performance material is conceived to adapt to a range of spatial configurations. This dimension of spoken word theatre comes closest to Peter Brook’s idea of an “empty space” and his concept of “The Rough Theatre,” which finds home in non-traditional theatre spaces, as Brook explains in The Empty Space:

Salt, sweat, noise, smell: the theatre that’s not in a theatre, the theatre on carts, on wagons, on trestles, audiences standing, drinking, sitting round tables, audiences joining in, answering back: theatre in back rooms, upstairs rooms, barns; the one-night stands, the torn sheet pinned up across the hall, the battered screen to conceal the quick changes – that one generic term, theatre, covers all this and the sparkling chandeliers too. (65)

Salt, sweat, noise, and smell are very much a part of the spoken word experience, though spoken word theatre productions have also been staged in mainstream cultural institutions and commercial theatre spaces with “the sparkling chandeliers.” Spoken word shows staged at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and its offshoot, the Free Fringe (popularly known as PBH’s Free Fringe after its founder Peter Buckley Hill), demonstrate its spatial adaptability and do-it-yourself impulse. The stage is everywhere – from The Pleasance to cafés, thrift stores, and makeshift stages in courtyards and dingy, underground backrooms of pubs.

Digital technologies have also formed an integral part of spoken word theatre over the years. Even before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, poets and practitioners were incorporating various digital strategies into their long form live on-site performances, exhibiting an intermedial artistic proclivity in their work. From animation, text and image projections to sound manipulation, digital technologies have played a key role in poetry performance experimentation. Within the remit of spoken word theatre, digitally augmented sound poetics features in Hannah Silva’s Total Man (2014), where they use both a looping device and pre-recorded vocal extracts in their performance. Animation has also been an intrinsic part of a few long form shows such as Shame (2013) by John Berkavitch and Outlier (2021) by Malaika Kegode.^[2] Since the COVID-19 pandemic, practitioners’ experimentation with digital technology has expanded to virtual platforms. The rather speedy shift to online modes of performance can be attributed to the spatial adaptability of the art form. Here, I am interested in examining how women practitioners chose to adapt their shows to online spaces, and what it means for them to make their gendered bodies visible on the theatre screen. In my explorations, I have found four ways practitioners adapted their work to online settings, represented by Mel Bradley’s Ms Noir’s Seven Deadly Sins (2020), Kegode’s Outlier, and Condo’s The Geography of Me and The Empathy Experiment 2.0 (2021). The most compelling example for complicating the performance of gendered visibility becomes apparent in Condo’s The Geography of Me, where the whole performance is pre-recorded, and hence this show is closely analysed in the subsequent section.

Derry-based poet Bradley’s Ms Noir’s Seven Deadly Sins is a “one-woman show combining spoken word poetry, storytelling and burlesque” (“Seven Deadly Sins”). The show was first performed in 2016 and reimagined for the virtual stage in 2020. It employed live performances interpolated with pre-recorded interludes, and hence embodies the first type of online adaptation. The fifty-minute show features the character of Ms Noir, a persona adopted by Bradley, narrating seven tales of people involved with or falling prey to the seven deadly sins. The implementation of pre-recorded material in the digital version was supplemented by the inclusion of the character of the Caretaker, played by Denzil Browne. The show was livestreamed on YouTube, where Bradley performed live online from her home, incorporating pre-recorded interludes of the Caretaker, which Browne had sent to the poet earlier. The interludes help maintain the liveness of Bradley’s performance. During these segments, Bradley had the opportunity to switch the handmade, do-it-yourself sets she built into her home and to change costumes. The timing for these transitions was impeccable, so that at the end of each of these segments, Bradley was ready with a new set and/or costume to continue her live performance. The pre-recorded segments from Browne thus helped Bradley to seamlessly navigate the changing stage set-up and deliver a smooth live performance with effortless transitions, maintaining the flow of the narrative.^[3]

Kegode’s Outlier premiered in 2021 amidst lockdown restrictions at Bristol Old Vic and was performed live to a socially distanced audience and simultaneously livestreamed to audiences at home. The recording was then turned into a film and made available to purchase as video on demand on the theatre’s website. This form of hybrid performance encompasses the second type of online adaptation. Creative strategies such as vision mixing, a technique that “enables the operator to select and switch between various sources such as cameras, video players, and computer graphics” (“What Is a Vision Mixer?”), and animation were employed in the livestream to turn the show into an immersive experience for audiences at home. A vision mixer is “used in video production to combine multiple video sources into a single output [. . .]. The output of the vision mixer can be recorded, broadcasted, or displayed on a screen for a live audience” (“What Is a Vision Mixer?”). Multiple cameras offered various angles and perspectives simultaneously during the broadcast. In the course of the performance, Kegode even acknowledged the audience at home, making eye contact with the camera, joking that she sees them, and asking them to put their phones down. The projection of animation on the background screen in the live performance was also broadcast on livestream using the vision mixer. The strategic use of such digital technologies heralds the possibility for hybrid spoken word theatre productions to have a lasting presence even in a postpandemic world and for hybridity to become a standard artistic practice in the long run.

Condo’s The Empathy Experiment 2.0 is an online reconceptualisation and revision of the poet’s 2019 on-site show, The Empathy Experiment. This rendition was wholly performed live to a virtual audience in 2021 and incorporates metacommentary on the merits and affordances of Internet technologies. Condo is an award-winning poet, who studied theatre at the University of Winnipeg and the University of Leeds. She is currently the Head of Community for Arts Emergency, “an award-winning charity and national support network for young people who don’t have influential contacts of their own” (Condo, “About”). The poet has been consistent in her adoption of online platforms for performing spoken word theatre in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Empathy Experiment 2.0 was performed by Condo as part of Saboteur Awards 2021 on Zoom to a virtual audience. In the show, Condo deployed online activities to engage the audience, thereby experimenting with new modes of participation in performance. She shared her screen and organised a virtual collaborative exercise on the interactive website Mentimeter. She undertook a live digital survey giving the audience the choice to participate or sit back. The audience responded with words or phrases that popped up on the screen, thereby collaborating with the poet in her performance. In her digital artistic design, Condo exploits various tools of online communication to interact with her audiences, whether it be through regular chat features or third-party websites such as Mentimeter.

Condo’s earlier online show, The Geography of Me, was part of the 2020 Yorkshire Festival of Story and was recorded beforehand. While the three shows discussed above implicate the virtual live presence of the poet in their performances, even in Ms Noir’s Seven Deadly Sins where the pre-recorded parts are only afforded to the male character, The Geography of Me navigates the hyper-visibility of the female body by negotiating the terms of such visibility. In my analysis in the following section, I discuss how this show skilfully complicates the live online presence of the female body, situating it between presence and absence.

Navigating Digital Performance with The Geography of Me

The Geography of Me is an hour-long solo spoken word theatre show, developed with creative support from Chol Theatre and the Lawrence Batley Theatre in 2013. It toured in the UK and internationally and inhabited a wide range of venues from pubs to living rooms to libraries, owing to its uncomplicated do-it-yourself aesthetic and design. In 2020, the show was adapted for digital performance for the Yorkshire Festival of Story, in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic. The site of performance was Condo’s flat in Salford. In this section, I analyse the archival footage of the 2020 Yorkshire Festival of Story’s online broadcast of The Geography of Me in order to investigate the following aspects: 1) the salient features and discontents of its virtual performance and 2) the negotiation of hyper-visibility in the show. An important characteristic of the performance is that it was pre-recorded by the poet in order to facilitate close captioning – a feature not available on Crowdcast, the livestreaming platform used by the festival for the event. The show was broadcast to the audience during its stipulated timeslot at the Yorkshire Festival of Story, where the poet was present virtually, albeit not as an active performer, during the broadcast. Despite the act’s pre-recorded nature, the audience members engaged in the virtual collaborative activity of postcard writing in real time halfway through the performance. The show was followed by a live Q&A session with the poet. Despite its lack of live captioning services, Crowdcast was used to provide an engaging experience to the audience. In the Yorkshire Festival of Story 2020 evaluation report, Kirsty Rose Parker writes:

The main online platform used – Crowdcast helped to achieve a live festival atmosphere for the audience who could use the chat function to talk to one another, could be invited onto the screen during events if they chose and ask questions and vote on questions to be asked of the artists. (7)

Through the medium of spoken word poetry, The Geography of Me stages the poet’s journey, both outward and inward, in the world. It begins with light-hearted anecdotal poetry detailing a transcontinental voyage – the poet’s move from Canada to the UK – and the accompanying cultural differences she navigates. The show then goes on to explore sensitive subjects such as the poet’s struggles with mental health and domestic abuse in the second half of the performance, exploring the deeper recesses of the poet’s inner world. The show opens with an a-cappella song called “Spin” (00:16–02:39), where the screen displays not the figure of the poet but images of various maps. The song revolves around the theme of change and hints, however subtly, at the difficult subjects to follow in the second half of the performance, in excerpts such as:

Someone once sang times are a-changin’ / but change isn’t easy when I’m standing still / I’m like the eye of a storm – the world flies around me / I hope that peace comes, and I know that it will / so spin me towards the next curve of this journey / follow the arc and around I will go / I will face and embrace what lies before me / thankful for all of the blessings I know. (00:16–01:05)^[4]

In the course of the song, the display takes us through the maps of Newcastle, Manchester, London, Morecambe, and other cities or towns, with the signpost of “You Are Here” marked on each. The maps employed are ones typically found in public places and transport lines to help people navigate streets and locales. Thus, the images include maps of subway lines, bus routes, and other modes of commute (figure 1).

Figure 1

A map denoting the “You Are Here” sign in The Geography of Me. Screenshot.

At the end of the song, Condo appears on the screen and explains the premise of the piece and the whole performance, her love for travelling and maps. The phrase “You Are Here” features prominently in this section and also serves as the title of the first poem. The Geography of Me comprises storytelling, autobiographical anecdotes, a song, as well as eight poems – “You Are Here,” “Queue-Forming Nation,” “Flash Drive,” “True North Confessions,” “Time Management,” “She Sleeps,” “After the Storm,” and “True Likeness” – that are woven into the theme of movement and travelling. The show is split into two halves, where the interval engages the audience through a postcard writing exercise. The first four poems are light-hearted, humorous, charting the poet’s various journeys in life – both geographical and metaphorical – as well as her interactions with different topographies and the people that inhabit them. The subsequent four poems, after the postcard writing activity, are thematically sombre, dealing with serious subjects such as depression and abusive relationships.

Prior to its reconceptualisation as a virtual performance, the on-site show had Condo standing on a red dot, to represent the “You Are Here” pin. Owing to the confines of a virtual platform, where the poet cannot stand on a red dot without creating an awkward distance from the screen and the audience’s gaze, Condo revises her strategy. She fixes a circular red “You Are Here” sticker on the wall. To emphasise the significance of the dot, she brings it closer to the camera first, to facilitate the readability of the sticker. Condo then informs the audience that she carries around the red dot everywhere, in order to ground her when she is lost, both physically and figuratively. For the rest of the performance, the dot remains on the wall. Through the course of her performance, Condo remains on the left side of the screen, making room for specific props. These props, such as a world map with red sticky dots marking all the places the poet has visited, the “You Are Here” sticker on the wall, a set of balloons, and a red bag with a maple leaf motif to represent her Canadian roots (figure 2), are objects of artefactual communication (Novak 168) from the on-site show.

Figure 2

The virtual set-up of The Geography of Me. Screenshot.

The poetry consists of simple rhymes that emphatically accentuate the theme of the poems. The voiced text is marked by variation in pitch and tone, thereby emoting the sentimentality of the poetry. The poetry weaves the personal into its narrative texture from the very beginning:

You see there are places that I have been that don’t appear on any map / Some of my travels leave a geographical gap / Few of these places lie within the borders of any nations / My red dot does not apply to these metaphysical locations / For example / I have cruised along denial / I have sat deep in the blues / I have tried to walk miles in other people’s shoes / I have followed in other’s footsteps / I have walked along the razor’s edge / I have jumped into the deep end / I have gone in way above my head. (05:47–06:26)

Despite its recorded nature, The Geography of Me emulates the features of a live performance through its deployment of an engagement strategy for the audience, as well as the live online presence of the poet in the Crowdcast studio, albeit hidden. The non-visible space occupied by the poet in the virtual studio thus serves as an online backstage area. While it is not clear whether the “Wing” feature of the Crowdcast platform, which serves the function of a backstage, was utilised, the non-visibility of the poet’s live online presence nonetheless makes for a curious case of negotiating presence and absence in the performance. The show thus sidesteps a live performance and yet retains the features of one, with respect to the co-presence of the performer and audience, collaborative action and exchange between them, and the unpredictability of performance conditions due to the technological mediation of the Crowdcast platform. It incorporates a blooper clip at the end, a (former) common practice in pre-recorded televisual media, but the live engagement activity and the Q&A session that follows immediately after also demonstrate elements of liveness within the event. Having presented the basic parameters of the show, I will now proceed to engage with the two strands of inquiry that were outlined earlier in the section.

Salient Features and Discontents

Virtual platforms such as Zoom, YouTube, and Crowdcast, among others, have helped expand spectatorship of theatrical events beyond physical proximity and geographical affinity, opening up proverbial doors to audiences beyond the performers’ locales. For spoken word poets particularly, this has facilitated access to communities beyond their regular poetry performance scenes, thereby widening their reach. The digital has amplified the possibility of attracting international performance opportunities as well. Geographical limitations are not a consideration in the virtual world. In view of this potential, Condo, shortly before performing her final poem, makes an appeal to the audience for more virtual performance gigs and booking possibilities. This rather unusual plug by the poet is inspired by the desire to reach more audiences through digital performances; the likely incentive of such self-promotion is indeed considerable.

From the spectator’s perspective, The Geography of Me, due to its pre-recorded nature, entails accurate captioning of the performance, thereby creating a more inclusive, accessible experience. Whereas closed captioning services are available on Zoom and YouTube, adding a layer of accessibility to virtual performances, Crowdcast does not offer this feature yet. Due to this absence, Condo made the ethical choice of pre-recording the performance. This decision to let go of visible liveness in lieu of creating a more accessible experience for the audience speaks to the performance ethos of the poet. Speaking broadly, a virtual performance also extends attendance opportunities to medically vulnerable audiences or those with mobility concerns. It mitigates the cost of travelling, institutional barriers to on-site venues, and enables international participation. All of these features also find resonance in the broadcast of The Geography of Me.

As previously discussed, the show is marked by a do-it-yourself aesthetic, employing minimal props and stage design, which makes it easier to adapt to a host of different venues and public spaces, and also to a screen. A map, balloons, a red sticker, a bag, and a table to prop it on is all that is required to stage the show anywhere. Therefore, it seems to translate well to an online platform. Even the audience engagement activity of the on-site performance is adapted to a digital one. Here, it is vital to stress that audience engagement is a significant feature of Condo’s performance strategy. In her article “Audience Participation in Spoken Word Performance,” Condo states “three main reasons” for her employment of participatory activities for audiences: “(1) To offer a tactile activity,” “(2) To invite critical engagement and reflection,” and “(3) To challenge [herself] as a performer” (324–325). When The Geography of Me is staged in a physical space, Condo hands audience members postcards to write down their experiences and memories. In the digital adaptation, midway through the performance, audience members are offered time to write their messages on a downloadable version of a postcard, provided to them beforehand, and post it on social media with the hashtag #TheGeographyOfMe. Days after the event, the poet also shared the physical postcards she received after on social media posts (figure 3).

Figure 3

Social media posts by Condo and an audience member following the performance of The Geography of Me at Yorkshire Festival of Story 2020. Screenshots.

These adjustments in engagement strategies evidence the adaptability of Condo’s show to various mediums and stages. Furthermore, for Condo, the format of digital spoken word theatre entails significant relief in terms of logistical, technical, and economic considerations that inform the making of an on-site/in-theatre production, saving her both time and costs required for travel, set-up, and so on. In our interview conducted in 2023, Condo states that owing to her self-funding of the show, The Geography of Me was a financial liability as an on-site performance. This is not the case for the 2020 digital version. While the festival was based in Yorkshire, the poet was able to participate live from the comfort of her home in Greater Manchester, owing to the geographical transcendentality of the digital. As Fuchs succinctly observes, the virtual stage affords practitioners opportunities to “transcend geographic and financial barriers to engage new audiences” (2). The minimal use of props in the stage design entailed fewer adjustments and negligible technical complexities for an online staging. No green screen, no sets, no costume changes, the show was recorded without much technical hassle.

A pre-recorded performance also comes with its discontents. Spontaneity, unpredictability, and the improvisational quality of performance, attributes so substantial to spoken word theatre, are lost. The form warrants interaction with audiences in varying degrees. Call and response is a recurrent artistic strategy, deployed to establish rapport with the audience before and during a show. Light banter, simple questions, and check-ins are not uncommon in spoken word performances, used to create a shared experience, as Tom Kew observes: “This intangible sense of togetherness, of empathy and, ultimately, of shared joy, underpins the art form of performance poetry” (39). The element of shared experience is significantly reduced in a digitally mediated online performance that lacks the physical co-presence of all participants. This problem is further aggravated by the deployment of a pre-recorded performance, as in the case of The Geography of Me.

The assumed accessibility and inclusivity of digital performances must also be problematised here. The Yorkshire Festival of Story in its 2020 promotional material used the tagline “free, online, everywhere” (Yorkshire Festival of Story) to accentuate its expanded reach. Yet this accessibility comes with a caveat, as Maria Chatzichristodoulou et al. remark:

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. (2)

Attending spoken word theatre shows online is intrinsically linked to one’s access to digital technologies. Internet services, a smart device which enables access to the Internet, and a dedicated space where one can participate in or engage with an online performance are privileges that are not afforded to everyone. Further, these conditions may not only serve as a hindrance to audience members, but also to performers. Digital literacy and a substantial know-how of online platforms are requisites for performers endeavouring to adapt their shows to digital platforms. In a 2020 interview with the Yorkshire Festival of Story organiser Charles Tyrer, Condo acknowledges the digital support she received from the festival team to help adapt to online conditions of performance. Such support may not be available to performers all the time.

Time zones, too, are a matter of consideration. The Geography of Me was scheduled at 7 p.m. on 14 August 2020 (Yorkshire Festival of Story) as per the UK time zone (GMT). This implies that attendance from time zones farther from GMT would have been limited. Additionally, the specifically Western cultural paratext may have also acted as a thematic barrier for a wider audience further afield from Europe and North America. The festival’s own geographical specificity exacerbates this impediment to reach international non-Western audiences, which begs the question: who does the label international include and who is left behind? While participation from India, South Africa, Singapore was mentioned in the report, the lack of exact data regarding the make-up of such international audiences renders claims of “everywhere” toothless in such a scenario. These considerations thus complicate notions of accessibility and inclusiveness in digital spoken word theatre in general and the broadcast of The Geography of Me in particular. Furthermore, external factors over which a performer has no control, even in a pre-recorded show, such as lagging Internet connections, software failure, interruptions by audience members, or other disruptions from one’s private surrounding, can impair the performance experience. Liedke and Monika Pietrzak-Franger outline the inherent tensions in the experience of viral theatre as

the optionality of engagement vs distraction and the willingness to accept the workings of a virtual frame that seems both to distance viewers from performers and at the same time to create a platform for intimacy among both viewers and performers and viewers among themselves. (141)

I contend that these tensions are also eminent in spoken word theatre and in the experience of The Geography of Me. Unpleasant attributes for spectators such as distractions, low threshold of commitment to engage, and digital fatigue, which Sarah Bay-Cheng ascribes to “not the ubiquity of presence, but a lack of absence” (16), are impediments that can prevent digital spoken word theatre from being a fully immersive experience, even in a live online performance. In a pre-recorded digital performance, with the poet doubly removed from the audience by way of the two prefixes: pre-recorded and digital, the risk of losing the shared community experience of spoken word theatre is higher.

Negotiating Hyper-Visibility and Difficult Subjects in Digital Spoken Word Theatre

Like most theatre, the visibility of corporeal presence is an intrinsic feature of spoken word theatre. When transmuted to the domain of the virtual, this visibility is still fundamental to performance, albeit through a digitally mediated presence. The dynamic of visibility, however, is out of balance on digital platforms where audiences are not visible at all in a broadcasting set-up, and the performer is exposed to an intensified spectatorship, bordering on voyeurism. How, then, can we negotiate the expectation of persistent visibility, a form of hyper-visibility, in digital spoken word theatre? The Geography of Me navigates the question with the employment of pre-recorded material. While the intent for this use was to augment accessibility of the performance with the aid of captioning, the strategy also serves as an effective exercise in negotiating visibility by controlling factors that influence it. If a woman’s body can be suspended between the polarities of presence and absence, as Phelan remarks of Angelika Festa’s work (164), can a performer not exploit this in-betweenness, this liminality, to one’s advantage? By employing a pre-recorded visibility, Condo offers us her hyper-visible body that is devoid of her liveness and is characterised by her absence. On the other hand, in the moments before her live online attendance in the post-show Q&A session, she is present in the Crowdcast studio but is not visible on the theatre screen. Her live online presence remains, to borrow from Phelan, unmarked, thereby bending the rules of visibility.

Besides the notion of co-presence of performer and audience, discourses on liveness vs mediation are also dominated by the concept of unpredictability of live performances (Phelan; Fischer-Lichte). Digitally mediated performances thus are considered inferior counterparts to on-site live acts for their supposed lack of unpredictability. While it may be true that a mediated theatre performance, and especially a pre-recorded one in Condo’s case, lacks the general unpredictability of a live experience, we must also bring into question the forms of unpredictability that govern both types in the first place. A live theatre experience may generate greater excitement and anticipation due to the risk of imperfection. And yet it is the performance itself which may be unpredictable and not the performance environment (in most cases). In fact, on-site performances take place in highly controlled environments, even when they occupy public spaces. There are measures in place, usually, to mitigate external disruptions. At the same time, in a digitally mediated performance, the environment is increasingly volatile and unpredictable. A performer may not disappear on the theatre stage against their will, but they may on the theatre screen. A digital performance depends on a stable Internet connection, the dependability of the device used for broadcasting, as well as the reliability of the online platform. Indeed, technical mishaps may happen even in live on-site shows, but none so drastic that they may remove the performer altogether from the performance site. This, however, is a risk inherent in digital performance. In such a case, it is reasonable for performers to attempt to control the conditions of their performance, to mitigate the unreliability of the environment through various strategies including the use of pre-recorded material.

Finally, the pre-recorded nature of The Geography of Me also moderates risks concomitant with staging difficult subjects. Considering both the negotiation of hyper-visibility as well as navigating unreliable conditions of online performances, the strategy affords the poet some control, allowing her to perform thematically heavy poems on her own terms. In line with Ailes’s concerns regarding the impact of staging traumatic narratives on poets’ mental health, the strategy shields the poet from adverse effects arising out of performing vulnerability to an invisible audience in an unstable online environment. In poems such as “She Sleeps” (33:10–35:00) and “After the Storm” (36:49–41:25), which deal with depression and domestic abuse respectively, the necessity to regulate the hyper-visibility of the sexed body as well as the uncertainty of the theatre screen and its environment appears as especially significant. The pre-recorded nature of the performance serves as a strategy to undertake this form of regulation.

Conclusion

Since 2020, in the course of the pandemic, live spoken word theatre shows have been reconceptualised for virtual stages to adapt to the conditions of the “new normal.” The affordances of the digital, in this regard, include increased reach and ease of production. For poets who often self-fund their shows, a switch to the online mode also entails a break from financial liabilities pertaining to logistics, technical requirements, and other related costs that manifest while staging live performances. For the spectator, digital spoken word theatre has the potential to create a highly accessible experience. Yet virtual productions demand digital literacy and access to supplementary technologies as a prerequisite, thereby bringing the mode’s widespread appeal and inclusivity into question. Additionally, shared community experience, a characteristic vital to the form, while not completely lost, is significantly reduced in the virtual world. Finally, digital spoken word theatre creates an imbalance in the audience-performer relationship while also creating an unstable performance environment for hyper-visible bodies on the theatre screen. In an online set-up, the audience may be in the same room but invisible to the performer, thereby leading to heightened spectatorship and a voyeuristic gaze. In a practice that incorporates audience interaction as an essential feature, this disparity can lead to discomfort for the poet. The unpredictability of the virtual stage itself creates erratic performance conditions where the performer may lose command of the situation or may as well disappear from the site owing to the ephemerality of virtual presence. Lagging Internet connection, an unreliable broadcasting device, and the failure of the hosting platform are risks looming upon the poet-performer throughout a digital show and may have a negative impact on their psyche when sharing personal or traumatic narratives.

In this article, through the example of Condo’s The Geography of Me, I made a case for the use of pre-recorded material to mitigate all of these risks. I have argued that pre-recorded material helps Condo negotiate the expectations of visibility, especially of a gendered body, on the theatre screen. I have also argued that this strategy affords the poet control over the environment. It enables Condo to shift between a visible non-presence and a non-visible virtual presence, thereby affording her a liminality that complicates the relationship between liveness and visibility itself. The show oscillates between pre-recorded material and live online interaction with the audience and post-show with the poet, thereby straddling the lines of live digital presence. The Geography of Me, along with other examples of online adaptations discussed in the article, thus demonstrates how the digital may be utilised in service of poets’ needs and artistic practice in spoken word theatre in a postpandemic world.