For at least thirty years, scholars have debated the centrality of physical and embodied presence as essential to the experience of theatre and performance. A debate that was perhaps largely academic suddenly became a shared reality when COVID-19 shuttered live venues, closed universities and moved artists of all kinds online. Suddenly, much of the theatre world began acting for the (web)camera. This article considers the changing attitudes toward notions of theatrical presence before and throughout the pandemic and what these changes might mean for the future of live arts. In particular, it posits the intersection of theatre, film and media history as key to understanding digitally enhanced contemporary experiences and expectations of post-pandemic performances.

All became data during the pandemic. Lockdowns made manifest what had developed for some time: that theatre has become inextricably entangled with digital cultures, the performing arts being increasingly encountered as a growing stock of multimodal fragments, textual discourses and networked communications. And, it is argued, it is precisely this appearance of theatre as (big) data that might prove to be the game-changer post-pandemic, and that this game-changer might be solely an epistemological one: what is known about theatre, how that knowledge is organized, and who is involved in organizing this knowledge, are rapidly changing. Based on an exemplary analysis of the discourses of legitimation that compensated for the loss of presence in German theatres, and the associated imperative to innovate production, this article estimates the epistemological consequences of theatre returns as data to advocate for a reconceptualization of theatre beyond performance.

This article proposes to address the tension between digital co-presence and embodied spectatorship inaugurated by the pivot to online and hybrid forms of (post-)pandemic performance through the lens of the postdigital. The term is developed as a way of accounting for the complex mediatized co-presence between performer and audience in a representative example of this genre, Dead Centre's To Be a Machine (Version 1.0). As its theoretical framework, the article brings together the concept of ‘postdigital performance’ (Causey) with co-presence as a central element of liveness and spectatorship. It puts forth the hypothesis that To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) constructs a postdigital sense of co-presence that is characterized by a blurring of the lines between embodied and virtual spectatorship, temporal co-presence and real-time interaction with the remote audience, and an increased sense of emotional alignment with the remote audience in lieu of physical proximity.

This article examines Scenes for Survival, a series of short digital artworks co-created by the National Theatre of Scotland, BBC Scotland and Screen Scotland, for its intersecting dimensions of precarity. On the one hand, the series shows how a pandemic's challenges are unevenly distributed. On the other hand, it addresses the expressly precarious position of (post-)pandemic theatre – precarious in that theatre presupposes the co-presence of an audience of some sort. Drawing on Judith Butler's concept of embodied precarity, I explore how select monologues articulate a ‘new bodily ontology’, and what kind of audience is constructed in the process. As I suggest, Scenes for Survival proposes ways in which proximity and physical co-presence must be reconfigured, constructed across space and time. In doing so, the series adds to ongoing discussions of how to conceptualize digital spectatorship, especially in times when physical co-presence is impossible, and thus becomes an issue of vulnerability.

Taking a closer look at the digital monologue series Go mBeire Muid Beo (May We Be Alive [to See Each Other Again]), which was produced by the Belfast-based Irish-language theatre company Aisling Ghéar, this article seeks to document Irish-language theatre produced under coronavirus lockdown measures in Northern Ireland, whilst acknowledging the various issues that continue to haunt the Irish language, and highlighting the particular dangers and potential pitfalls in a context where very limited funding for theatre continues to dwindle. Through an analysis of the monologue series, its content, and the wider sociopolitical context that engulfs Irish-language theatre in Northern Ireland, this article also provides an important snapshot of current and ongoing debates within Irish-language theatre at a critical juncture.

The purpose of this article is to explore different ways of countering the COVID-19 pandemic in Polish theatre that were not only attempts to provide protection against the potentially lethal coronavirus, but also attempts to actively combat other ‘viruses’: the capitalist compulsion for productivity and the exclusion of Others (the disabled, the elderly, women or LGBT+ people). Several Polish artists of the lockdown era (participants in the Quarantine Project, Beyond #quarantine and DIY 2020 Masterclasses, members of Theatre 21, Joanna Szczepkowska and Wojtek Ziemilski) have managed to draw the attention of a wider audience to these problems. During the pandemic, they practised the art of resistance in various ways, including the ‘art of failure’ as a resistance against neo-liberal systems. Therefore their projects can be seen as a dress rehearsal before the emergence of a post-pandemic, post-capitalist, post-growth, more ethically conscious theatre of the future.

The following is a transcript of the Q&A with Zoё Seaton on 2 August 2022.