Ecologies of Care in a Digital Age: What Remains After Viral Theatre?

Introduction, or: How Can Theatre Change the Digital?

We are still recovering from and reflecting on the COVID-19 pandemic, as, for instance, in the German context, the publication and the heated public discussion of the files of the Robert-Koch-Institut show (“Interne Covid-19-Krisenstabsprotokolle”). With regard to theatre, as the former artistic director of London’s Young Vic Kwame Kwei-Armah has put it already in 2020, the pandemic “will be in the DNA, and the subconscious of, an emerging generation of theatre-makers who will remember this time when they couldn’t get into theatres and make their art” (qtd. in Akbar). During the first lockdown from around April to the summer of 2020, the digital crept into theatre and, as many argued, resurrected it from the dead.^[1] While theatres all over the world had to close, theatre found its way onto screens primarily by digital means; performances were given via Zoom, and for groups such as Forced Entertainment it seemed like a logical continuation of the cutting-edge work they had been doing since the 1980 s, to stream their Table Top Shakespeare online, for free (“Complete Works Online”). In the early stages of the pandemic, ensembles like Oxford-based Creation Theatre and Belfast-based Big Telly emerged as especially flexible groups, ready to embrace the changes and swiftly switch to the screen (for reviews, see Liedke, “Tempest”; “Alice”). This phenomenological stance towards the online theatre space as a spatial potentiality stands in a striking analogy to how Max Herrmann in his seminal “The Theatrical Experience of Space” understood the physical space of a theatre as secondary to the shared experience of actors and audiences therein. Christopher Balme has aptly summarized Herrmann’s central three claims about this space:

The first is that theatrical space only comes into being through the act of human movement. Secondly, theatrical space is the result of an aesthetic transformation: the physical space of the stage is never identical with the space on which actors perform. Thirdly, this transformation from one realm (the physical and actual) to the aesthetic or “artificial” can only be described in experiential terms. (Cambridge Introduction 48)

These dynamics have been reinforced during the time of (post)lockdowns with regard to the online theatre space. Crucially, a deliberately non-normative – experiential – understanding of the space of performance and its organizational logic as well as constitutive parts characterised a lot of the work produced during that time: an understanding of the digital space as an availability, not merely a substitute but another/an Other space, as I would call it. This terminological distinction aims at emphasizing a non-normative ordering and an absence of hierarchies and economic restrictions. Understood in this way, the digital space represents a production site for situated knowledges in Donna Haraway’s sense, making possible “connections and unexpected openings” and being about “communities, not about isolated individuals” (590).

The differentiation between objectivity and situatedness is a first crucial distinction that I want to make in order to demarcate my understanding of “the digital” and “digital space.” The digital space is often defined as “concerning digital technologies and how people interact with them and through them. It is about communication with other people” (Benyon 37). Such a definition subordinates the digital space to a neoliberal logic and reduces it to a quantifiable function – a normative logic that, perhaps unwittingly, even neo-Marxist scholars such as David Harvey in his The Condition of Postmodernity cannot completely rid themselves of when defining space generally. When Harvey, for instance, asserts that we experience time and space as forms of natural progression and therefore fail to notice their construction, he presumes normative frameworks of linearity. Space seems predetermined, existing to fulfil specific functions in line with neoliberal productivity, and does not allow for creative engagements with it.

The binary of digital and non-digital, with the digital as the innovative, active, fast-paced, lively, and the non-digital as that which lacks something, is not productive. This was also reflected in the roundtable discussion held during the annual conference of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English (CDE) at the University of Innsbruck on 3 May 2024, which was titled “How the Digital is Changing the Theatre.” In this article-cum-manifesto, I want to start by close-reading this phrase to deconstruct the linearity it seems to suggest and ask instead whether care or caring performance cannot only begin in that moment when theatre – post-Covidian theatre, theatre bearing Odyssean scars after its battle with a plethora of monsters that brought darkness and closures, and Cyclopean reductions and cuts – changes the digital. Should not we as theatre scholars rather ask: “how can theatre change the digital?” Inspired by the urgency perceptible in the Care Collective’s Care Manifesto, I think the necessary answer is: yes, we should. As I want to show in this article, ecologies of care and individual case studies such as Caridad Svich’s How It Ends (2024) can be understood as anti-digital forms of theatre after viral theatre. The pandemic has constructed a lasting link between the digital and caring performances, as the move to the digital has entailed a rethinking of concepts such as accessibility, adaptability, and relationality both within theatre practice and theatre institutions.

New Contact Zones: The Viral and the Analogue since 2020

First, a brief revisiting of how the viral, digital, and analogue have established new contact zones since 2020 is called for. In 2021, Monika Pietrzak-Franger and I summarized the tendencies and developments that occurred in the enforced contact zones between theatre and the digital with the umbrella term “viral theatre.” We argued that this form of theatre manifested itself through an interplay of three aspects: first, the fact that both performers and spectators were in a state of disruption; second, the willingness and expectations on the part of the spectators to become part of these newly emerging events; third, the use of communication technologies but also digital spaces in general. We proposed that the framework of the pandemic enhanced and modified what viral theatre could be and what effect it could have, especially on audiences (131). At the same time, however, as we also highlighted and as many theatre practitioners have rightly criticized, it would have been myopic to celebrate such engagement with technologies and the digital as new: for instance, Jared Mezzocchi and Svich have repeatedly said that performance-makers have been using the digital and especially online spaces for two decades now (Mezzocchi; Svich, Future Theatre).

An engagement with the digital never seems to be over, as its functions and uses keep changing so rapidly. This concerns the private sphere, the ways in which the digital is implemented on the stage, and academic engagements with the topic, which is reflected in several new editions of monographs on the digital: for instance, in October 2024, a revision of Patrick Lonergan’s 2015 Theatre & Social Media was published. Other similar examples of revised publications on the topic include Christiane Paul’s Digital Art (third edition in 2015, fourth edition in 2023), Graham Meikle’s Social Media: The Convergence of Public and Personal Communication (first edition in 2016, second edition in 2024), or Naomi Jacobs and Rachel Cooper’s Living in Digital Worlds: Designing the Digital Public Space (first edition in 2016, second edition in 2024).

The digital, both in the private sphere and in the context of theatre, needs users in order to function. It needs an audience. From a structural perspective, the digital is certainly not as ubiquitous as politicians seem to imply: as a recent study of theatre during the pandemic in the G7-states has shown, in both Germany and the UK digital strategies have become necessary, but are mainly lacking on a structural level (Aebischer et al., “Pandemic Preparedness”). While individual artists or institutions engaged with previously uncommon forms of performing theatre, such as opera on VR glasses from Staatstheater Augsburg or performances streamed with a 360° camera angle by London’s Young Vic (“Best Seat in Your House”), such projects were dependent on individual initiatives and/or endeavours that had been in the making for a while, as in the case of Augsburg’s Digital Theatre Department.

Still, the pandemic has had an impact on how the link between the digital and theatre is regarded. Therefore, expanding on Kwei-Armah’s insistence that the pandemic will be in the DNA of theatre-makers, I now want to reflect on how viral theatre has stayed with audiences and scholars. I explore, first, how the pandemic has changed the way we conceive of the potentials and drawbacks of the digital within performance practices; second, how incorporating (or rejecting) the digital can be a form of care; and, third, what will remain, for audiences and for theatre-makers, after forms of viral theatre have receded into the background.

After providing an overview of recent societal discourses on resilience within the theatre industry especially in the UK but also with reference to Germany, I will use the concept of care, informed by the Care Manifesto, as a cultural framework to engage with performance. This connection is promising not only because of the caring function theatre as an art form was able to provide during the pandemic, but also because of the care networks among its practitioners and audiences. In the final part of the article, I use Svich’s work, contextualised by an interview I conducted with her, as a case study. The American playwright has been producing theatrical work since the 1990 s. She is one of the key practitioners of digital theatre and also a scholar who has critically assessed the role of the digital within a more accessible theatrical space.

This is not an article about COVID-19, but as much as some would like to switch back to normal, I address the ways in which Covidian traces will be seeping through the industry and aesthetics of theatre in the years to come. The traces of the pandemic encompass both an expansion of the digital, but, in a dialectic manner, also a rejection of it. For that reason, I argue that the heightened implementation of the digital in the years 2020 to 2022 has invited a turn to the anti-digital in recent performance, turning instead to the instability of spectatorial presence and a renewed attention to the potential for failure and disruptions that unite both the digital and theatre.

Are We Still There? The Digital as a Form of Resilience

As Kate Craddock and Helen Freshwater write,

Given the human cost of Covid, it is hard (and no doubt impossible for some) to see these events as having any kind of productive or positive outcome. Yet the disruption did provide an opportunity to take stock of what is core to the experience of watching or witnessing performance, and enabled a re-valuation of performance’s place in our lives. It allowed us to identify what we most missed about theatre-going, and what seemed to us most valuable about the experience. In this moment of extremity, the content of performance was reframed, its meaning remade in a world marked by newly shared awareness of our universal precarity and fragility. (1–2)

The scholarly assessments from the last two years indeed oscillate between two poles: on the one hand, there is a focus on the numbers of re-opened theatres or audience attendance (Balme, “Covid and the Theatre”; Mosse). On the other hand, there is a discussion coming from feminist and queer-feminist scholars such as Svich and Craddock and Freshwater, who never lose sight of the human loss(es) and yet attest the theatre the capability to use the disruption as an “opportunity to take stock” (Craddock and Freshwater 1) and also regard theatre as a “vector for healing” (Svich, Future Theatre 3). This healing can take on a variety of forms, and the engagement with the digital can be one of those healing forms. But it is also necessary to consider the political and socioeconomic measures taken in order to heal the sector.

In the research project “Pandemic Preparedness: Lessons to Learn from the Pandemic Across the G7,” which was funded by the British Academy between 2023 and 2024, we found that in the UK, at the start of the pandemic, commercial and subsidised theatres alike struggled with being officially open while audiences were advised not to attend.^[2] Theatre institutions made different experiences with their turn to the digital. What emerged as most successful were instances where institutions had already had prior engagement with digital production and thus had not only the equipment in place but also the necessary skills to use it. As we found, this significantly helped keeping up staff morale. Examples include the National Theatre (NT) at Home initiative for mainstream theatre, the work done by Something to Aim For or HOME Manchester and National Theatre Wales, which provided geographically localised digital platforms for artists or participated in United We Stream. Forms of resilience enabled by a turn to the digital did, therefore, not correlate with the size of the theatre organisations.

Using digital tools and hybrid technologies was not only a sustainable way to produce performances but also helped keep production costs to some extent moderate. As a consequence, the industry learned that incorporating digital means might help with underlying problems regardless of the pandemic. In the UK, the Creative Industries Council was restructured and now includes digital experts who tackle skills to deliver digital content and are concerned with new audiences. What also became visible was a divide between bigger institutions that could rely on their pre-pandemic archival content and smaller institutions that did not have this net to fall back on.

In our research project, we saw that in all G7 countries, despite successful pilot projects and promising initiatives, digital strategies are not implemented sufficiently on a structural level. In the German context, as a study commissioned by the Kulturstiftung der Länder has found, only four federal states have a digital strategy regarding culture. In the recommendations the “Pandemic Preparedness” research teams came up with, which are specifically directed at the UK context, we therefore emphasize the necessity of developing a nationwide strategy that ensures creative organisations, individuals, and their audiences have access to digital infrastructure and skills. Crucially, further ecosystem-mapping research needs to be commissioned which understands the complex entanglements of research funding, audience behaviour, regional and metropolitan theatre, policy makers, and the theatre sector.

Ecologies of Care and the Digital as Care

While the digital, against this background, to a great extent takes on the shape of a saviour and support technology, it seems that audiences have experienced a certain fatigue with the digital and desire for more immediate forms of communitas and care through stories. It is also necessary to point out that theatres are far from being back to “normal” all over the world. One of the main problems that has emerged in the past two years is that audiences are still hesitant about going back to theatres – in the German context, even big state theatres such as the one in Hannover are only back at about fifty per cent of their pre-pandemic capacity (captured in slogans used by theatre journalists such as “50 per cent equals sold out”). In July 2022, as Balme has summed it up, the word Publikumsschwund (“disappearing of audiences”) was a recurring key term in German newspapers and magazines, as audiences stayed away from theatres even though they were open(ing) again (“Covid and the Theatre” 57). In the article “Der Einbruch: Dem Theater fehlen die Zuschauer” (“The Collapse: The Theatre Is Missing Its Spectators”), authors Peter Laudenbach and Egbert Tholl show that many theatres in Germany have lost half of their subscribers between 2020 and 2022 and attest to how fragile (and for many too risky?) the cultural practice of attending theatre has become. As a pilot study called “NEW ALLIANCE” commissioned by the Deutscher Bühnenverein between May 2023 and March 2024 shows, for those who regarded culture and theatre as essential to their lives before the pandemic, this sentiment has not changed; yet going to the theatre, especially for older or vulnerable groups, is now considered to constitute risky behaviour (Deutscher Bühnenverein).^[3]

Thinking about things that went well during the pandemic and that should or even must be kept, what struck me most in my conversations both with representatives from the ministry of culture and theatre-makers in Germany, the UK, and US,^[4] was how the topic of care repeatedly came up: as a feeling of community and togetherness that emerged in their accounts of the conversations and decision-making processes during the crisis, but then also in much of the theatre work that has emerged in the last three years. Crucially, I would argue, these forms of care (togetherness and communal decision-making processes) are often either facilitated by the digital or emerge in response to it. When I use the term facilitate, it is supposed to stress that this is not a relation based on dependencies, especially not of a one-way directionality, where the digital provides an improvement or correction of what theatre alone cannot do otherwise. “The digital” in general can create frameworks of care and, when used in the performance context, enhance both networks of care and an engagement with the topic.

Theorisation developed by care ethicists defines care as incorporating both “practice and value” (Held 29) and, while the concept of care denotes certain affective labours, acts, and gestures, it therefore also incorporates intrinsic values, determining how we ought to act in relation to other people. In her work with Berenice Fisher, Joan C. Tronto defines four “ethical elements of care,” which are useful for an exploration of how care and performance can operate together and that incorporate: “attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness” (Moral Boundaries 127). Pointing to interrelational modes of being, care ethics acknowledge the value of interhuman relationality and dependency, invoking the affective qualities of “attentiveness, sensitivity, and responding to needs” (Held 39).

When placing care in dialogue with performance, some performance work that takes it as a responsibility to care for and support other people enacts a form of resistance to the “care‑lessness” of contemporary life; the recent pandemic has only exacerbated that “carelessness reigns” (Chatzidakis et al. 1). What can also be criticized are practices that instrumentalise participation or that inadvertently predetermine or enforce certain narratives of change and transformation upon unsuspecting communities, who are unaware of their roles yet. The Care Collective (consisting of Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg, and Lynne Segal) has formed in 2017 and represents scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds who want to understand and address the multiple crises of care. In addition to “hands-on care,” enacted, for instance, both by social actors (such as nurses and social workers) and by performers in socially engaged performance projects, they define care also as

a social capacity and activity involving the nurturing of all that is necessary for the welfare and flourishing of life. Above all, to put care centre stage means recognising and embracing our interdependence. In this manifesto we therefore use the term “care” capaciously to embrace familial care, the hands-on care that workers carry out in care homes and hospitals and that teachers do in schools, and the everyday services provided by other essential workers. But it means as well the care of activists in constructing libraries of things, co-operative alternatives and solidarity economies. (Chatzidakis et al. 5)

Especially in neoliberal societies where profit is privileged over togetherness, there are “fewer places for people to congregate, whether for relaxation and enjoyment, or to discuss issues of common concern or participate in collaborative projects,” which leads to “competitive individualism [. . .], loneliness and isolation” (16). To tackle the deficits of care – and the reign of carelessness – is complex, just as caring is multidimensional: Tronto distinguishes between “caring for,” “caring about,” and “caring with” (Caring Democracy 22), the latter describing socially engaged performances. Such performances in contemporary societies are faced with political and ethical challenges and can find themselves co-opted by neoliberal agendas that are determined by the values of autonomy and self-realisation rather than dependency and interrelationality. This resembles the ways in which the digital has been swiftly sucked in by neoliberal structures from being a playground or “window onto the world” to a hyperreal and often also exploitatively structured space.

What has emerged during the pandemic was that, for instance, in the context of performance, audiences as communities could engage in care. Communities need “online and offline public zones in order to flourish” (Chatzidakis et al. 51): the digital post-show space, and the digital as an ecology that enables encounters of an interpersonal and – regarding performance – experiential kind has increasingly facilitated such assemblages. Postpandemic performance which incorporates the digital as merely an additional form of experientiality or discards it altogether, as the example of Svich will show, also cares. As Claire Bishop argues convincingly with regard to the concept of care on a broader scale, in an economy that competes for everyone’s attention, it is worthwhile reconnecting attention with care, as supposedly our attention economy is “rooted in the ethics and politics of care” (26; see also Citton). For her, this is expressed via an ecology of care, which directs its attention not only to what something portends, but also what it is made of and how the others’ attention influences one’s own. Essentially, this is about tweaking the direction(ality) of attention – when it reaches beyond and sideways (leaving the realm of one’s immediate concerns, but also spaces), it can morph into an attitude of care. Art or performance itself cannot care – it can provide an ecology of care, however.

In Das Leben der Kunst: Transversale Linien der Sorge (The Life of Art: Transversal Lines of Care), Bojana Kunst argues that art’s relation to care is inherently paradox, especially regarding works of art that deal with crises, precarity, and suffering. Care does not directly participate in, for instance, criticizing the status quo and the economic production processes of art; rather, it holds a rhetorical and performative power that lets it keep a slight distance to the values it confronts. Care takes on the shape of a relationality, of a positioning towards something. In this light, how can the digital situate forms of care? Importantly, one answer to this question is related to feminist conceptions of the archive. Elin Diamond picks up on Jacques Derrida’s argument that the archive is both an exterior site that houses (forms of) truth in the form of original documents and a site of power and authority. She invites a seemingly impossible analogy between the archive and performance:

The archive sits in its silent vault, but when you and I take hold of it, it becomes a performance site, a materialization of an implied narrative already spatialized and arranged. Like performance, the archive is a site of transformation, its “material substrate” transformed by touch and interpretation into knowledge. Like performance, the archive solicits and interacts with a reader/spectator who, drawn by texts, objects, or perhaps something unlooked for, is seduced into desirous identification with writers, figures, and events. (22)

Diamond playfully deconstructs the binary between the archive as that which is permanent, either reflects or has access to “the truth,” and performance as the impermanent, fleeting, supposedly meaningless. The digital vs performance is a similarly charged binary; so similar, in fact, that we can swap “the archive” for “the digital” in the quoted passage and arrive at a different understanding of the digital – as a vault that needs to be taken hold of and touched. By this, I do not merely mean forms of digital archiving such as media libraries; rather, I mean engaging with and incorporating digital practices in order to create new ways of accessibility or – deconstructing the duality of the analogue and the digital – create a caring aesthetics of the posthuman, where different modalities of the digital and non-digital intersect. Then, the digital is capable of reciprocating this grasp with acts of care: only when we (audiences, artists, scholars) take hold of the digital, can it become a performance site. Both the archive and the digital can be grasped in spatial terms, as sites. They are sites that seduce, but that we can direct into sites of interaction and care.

During the pandemic, when theatres had to shut down and performance(s) were in danger of disappearing, streams from theatres, whether of archived performances as in the case of the NT or of newly devised shows as exemplified by the Old Vic’s In Camera series were forms of care – both for the art form and profession. Some theatres, such as the Young Vic, even managed to uphold their important role within their local community in making projects work despite the pandemic, facilitated by digital tools.

For instance, the project TWENTY TWENTY in collaboration with the organisations Blackfriars Settlement, Certitude, and Thames Reach, which work in Lambeth and Southwark, was supposed to bring out three plays to be staged at the end of 2020. As this became impossible, workshops were transferred to Zoom and get-togethers in pubs took place via messenger. The three plays – Tapestry, Even At Our Age, and Home(body) – were turned into short films that are still available on the Young Vic’s website (“TWENTY TWENTY”). These film plays, according to Lyn Gardner full of “joy and kindness” and endowed with “a ticklish sense of humour,” are doubly concerned with care: in terms of content, they all depict different forms of togetherness and in-depth creative relationships between people from a local community. In terms of form, they are also acts of care: first of all, practically speaking, making it possible for the planned project to go through, but also taking care of the stories they tell. The crucial difference to temporary streams or Zoom performances is the conflation with the purpose of the archive. When used in this more sustainable way, the digital cares; it is a type of care. It “solicits and interacts” (in the words that Diamond uses about the archive) with its audiences, scholars, and students. It comes into being with an awareness of its fragility, and its dependence on audiences and thus is in dialogue with performance and theatre, not an antagonist to it.

Reckoning with Monsters? Theatre in Conversation with the Digital in the Work of Caridad Svich

The American playwright, critic, scholar, theatre translator, and 2024 Guggenheim Fellow reckons with this antagonism in her work and proposes ethically motivated ways to imagine a theatre for the now and the future. Svich has been producing work for three decades now and is known for her political and ethical concern with racial discrimination in the US, the climate crisis, and, both on social media and in her publications, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on societies and individual lives. In Toward a Future Theatre: Conversations During the Pandemic from 2021, Svich speaks to sixty UK and US theatre-makers asking them, among other things, the following question: “In times of crisis and profound multivalent traumas, how can theatre be a vector for healing and heal itself from damages?” Given her vast network, it makes sense to discuss her also as an expert commentator on the connections between the digital and theatre.

Between October 2022 and January 2024, Svich wrote a sestet of plays called The Next One Hundred Years. How It Ends is the fifth in this series of plays, which all focus on the history of stage spaces as conduits for political and spiritual change and the question in what kind of world we will live in the future. How It Ends was performed as part of the Worlds in Play conference at the ASU MIX Center in Mesa, Arizona, in January 2024 and also streamed online. About the play, Svich says:

In the performance piece HOW IT ENDS, a play cannot begin until the actors arrive. But the actors aren’t here. So, today, you will be the actors. You will step into a series of stories that paint a map of a world in crisis seeking modes of repair. There is a technician that will help you. They may be an actor, too. But their part hasn’t been cast. They are used to being backstage, fixing the world out of sight. Today too they will be on stage. In this play we make together, there is a script. It is a technology that will reveal itself to you. It is a very old technology but people still use it. Its material presence holds the stories of others that have played in its ghostly pages. HOW IT ENDS is a play that asks its audience to imagine a world anew while the planet is burning.

In my work as a play-maker/text-builder and poet, my central concerns are to examine the conversation between text and audience through the lens of the climate crisis. I am interested in activating the body politic of spectators during the course of a shared experience (whether it be digital, in person and/or hybrid), and to create environments of theatrical play that are centered on care. (“Artist”)

Notably, all of the plays are ecologically sustainable: they require only one performer while the other parts are given to volunteers in order to create a poetics for and by the audience. In How It Ends, the only props needed are six envelopes of different colours containing notecards, three pieces of cardboard marked with lettering, three bottles of water, two chairs or stools, one or two standing microphones, one black marker, and a simple portable table. As it says in the playwright’s notes, “only re-purposed scenic elements” should be used. Importantly, the play can be performed both in person or adapted to be played as a remote social (online) or hybrid transmedia experience. Thus, from the outset, this play as well as the others in the sestet, are conceived of as flexible, adaptable texts that do not distinguish between being performed for a live audience or transmitted digitally.

As she told me in an interview, for Svich, the here and now is characterized by necropolitics, that is, according to Achille Mbembe, a dominance of structures of racist origin that systematically oppress and racialize people (Mbembe). To critique this, in her plays, Svich wants to collapse hierarchies and create stories that do not normally get told. In How It Ends, she lets the volunteers read stories that try to capture a certain sentiment of the now and the immediate future, the anxieties but also hopes of people who have experienced the recent pandemic, who are worried because of the current state of the world, and who feel over-saturated by the continuous flow of (mis)information on the Internet. Some of the stories are nostalgic: they are about missing trains, things, or states of mind, for instance, missing remembering what it felt like to be born. All stories begin with excuses: the protagonists say they were late to the show because of a bomb scare or a missed train; one person is not even at the performance because they are under house arrest; another took a break because of their mental health, noting that “Everyone seems to be talking about their mental health, and nobody seems to be doing anything about it.”

The play is episodic in structure, characterised by interweaving references to historical crises, such as the deforestation of the rain forest, the fate of migrants stranded on the shores of Italy, and personal biographies such as that of a university lecturer or people working backstage at a theatre, who keep the show going and are “not listed in the credits of any shows.” In addition, the only professional performer – who plays the “technician” – is characterized by an extremely mindful attitude towards the volunteers, thanking them for their contributions, asking them if they need water, anything to make them feel at ease, acknowledging that they are providing voluntary, unpaid labour to keep the show going. Throughout the show, people from the audience are hailed – for example, “person who is good at figuring things out” or “person with glasses” – to read out prepared cards, as the actor who was supposed to do it is not there. In addition, playing with the omnipresence of the digital, throughout the entire play there is a screen at the back of the stage, showing what is happening on stage with a lag of a few seconds. There is, thus, a clash between the seemingly organized technological set-up, the will to record, and the seemingly improvised, messy human actors who, as volunteers, are curious yet nervous. At the same time, there lies a general sense of readiness to create something together in the air: in one scene, which begins with the technician saying “Good. We’re good,” everyone is invited to dance for a few moments to an acoustic reggae song. In the recording that was made of the show on 6 January 2024, when the play was shown for the first time at the Worlds in Play conference, the entire audience chimed in.

Figure 1

Two audience participants and Micha Espinosa as the technician. Photo: Andrew J. Hungerford.

Acts of care in this scene are represented in several ways: by the technician and her attitude towards her audience; by the script, which provides a sense of orientation and safety; by the screen that, with a delay of a few seconds, echoes and shows what is going on on stage, to both display appreciation of the voluntary labour shared by the audience members and make sure that nothing will be lost; and by the audience members among themselves who, for instance, without exception participate in the dance as if not wanting to let anyone – the others? The technician? The performance? – down.

This scene, and the rest of the play, represents a curious mix between the analogue and the digital, encouraging us to intentionally not assess it in terms of this disparateness but in its unkempt, chaotic beauty; to consider what can happen when the analogue and the digital coincide. While the digital provides the facilities for projections and cues (for example, the sound of a parakeet played from a recording), it is a little off and requires fine-tuning by a human operator; the parakeet is too loud. Yet in a sense these kinds of glitches – the lag in the screen projection may also be a glitch, after all – only point to the fragility the digital entails; a fragility which unites it with live performance. There is a sense of risk and failure that makes the performance quite ridiculous without the guidance of human participants – only they could all be superstars, certainly not the screen. Svich moves swiftly and without any judgement between discourses about loss, wars, celebrity culture, the analogue, references to Greek mythology, and present-day social media uses. Her work seems to suggest the necessity to let go of gulfs and to create a sense of community and togetherness so that acts of care are of a quotidian, and therefore comforting, quality. As the technician says:

I used to remember the days before the days / When love meant suffering, / And how it felt to run through open fields / Without a care in the world, / Because no one was looking, / No one was following, / No one wanted to exact any kind of punishment on anyone. / I once knew stories about such days, / And how those stories were said to have fuelled the world, / And made people think about awe and wonder. / And how words like “awe” and “wonder” belonged to everybody.

This is what the digital and theatre, in fact, have in common: they belong – or should belong – to everybody. They both have the capacity to spark awe and wonder and help audiences and users care for one another.

Conclusion: What Remains After Viral Theatre?

The digital does not need to be an antagonist; it is not a saviour; it is not a substitute and neither is it a way of perfecting flawed and imperfect forms of ephemeral performance. The digital is also not an easy remedy for problems of accessibility: in order to become barrier-free, institutions require substantial investments; in order to become truly accessible, performances also need to include closed captioning and audio-descriptions, among other practical things. The use of the digital in recent years and especially during the pandemic has made these problems more visible than ever before, but implementing the digital into these structures does not present an automatic solution to them.

At the same time, during the pandemic, on the one hand, the digital stepped in as a band-aid which explains the many exciting forms of innovations and sources of income it helped generate. On the other hand, the digital has been the necessary condition for some of the most innovative performance work in the past three decades, including Forced Entertainment, Rimini Protokoll, or the Cyprian-Australian performance artist Stelarc, who has been incorporating robotics, VR systems, and the Internet in his work since the 1990 s.

What remains after viral theatre specifically, that is, a Covidian iteration of the “theatre+digital” hybrid, is a sense of chaos and a sense that theatre practitioners, especially at the big theatrical institutions, cannot close their eyes to the changes that are occurring in the world, which is a digital world. For some theatres it may take longer to actually also act on their previous neglect of these developments and the ways in which they have been neglecting younger, disabled, or non-white audiences. A positive example is NT at Home as a timely, truly accessible and caring update of NT Live, representing both an archival form of care which will always bear traces of the pandemic and swiftly adapting to digital forms of streaming content like they have been practiced in other realms of cultural production. But it would be a true form of establishing a caring community, if such “big players” were to share the equipment they already have for such purposes to enable smaller companies to also compile their own digital archives.

Secondly, what remains after viral theatre is a sense of lack and sadness and a yearning for stories in which indeed we, not a virus, are the main protagonists. A sense that we need to prepare for a world in which there will only be us, and actors (representing certainties, scripts, guidance, orientation) will be delayed. As Svich has put it:

When societies are in crisis, theatre can be a place where the monsters are reckoned with, and future stories can be born. [. . .] In theatre, desire wins, and this means that nothing is ever settled and when you leave the theatre, even if it’s just the one in your living room, you are a different person and that thing that was made between you and some people and things is going to be inside you for a long time. And when you are older, and years go by, you will wonder what it is you saw and heard in the theatre, and it will remind you of home. (How It Ends)

Let us use the digital because it is our friend, just another site to be played on. Another space to be transformed by us. But for this feeling of “home,” we need more. We need to embrace stories that are risky, full of failures and imperfections, and for that, we need a caring theatre that encompasses the digital, as much as it encompasses the analogue. We need to use the digital as that which seduces and excites, provides access and archives. This way, what remains after viral theatre is potentially the beginning of ecologies of caring communities that are brought together through collaborative acts of experiencing performance.