Category Archives: Allgemein

As an audience researcher specialising in live performance, I’ve spent thousands of hours talking to people about the power and pleasure of being together ‘in the room as it happens’, as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton musical famously put it. In Between Two Silences, Peter Brooks describes this sensation as “the supreme moment of communication – the moment when people normally dividedContinue reading “Kirsty Sedgman: How To Be Together (Even When We’re Apart): Audience Engagement from the Live to the Digital Domain”

The origins of theatre are in morality, healing and community. It was linked to the religious; the worship of Dionysus for the Greeks or the shamanic encounter with the spirit world in parallel traditions practiced in Africa, South America, Asia and Europe. Dramatherapy continues this shamanic heritage to use drama and theatre with a healingContinue reading “Amy Willshire – “Theatre to Heal””

Our paper is concerned with our work on Digital Theatre Transformation: A Case Study and Digital Toolkit, an AHRC/UKRI rapid-response Covid-19 project which involved working with Creation Theatre (Oxford) and Big Telly (Northern Ireland) to explore how, with their Zoom co-production of The Tempest in April 2020, these companies moved online in record time and were able to adaptContinue reading “Pascale Aebischer and Rachael Nicholas: “Creation Theatre and Big Telly’s The Tempest: Digital Theatre and the Performing Audience””

Irish-language theatre is not well known outside of Ireland and Scotland, and even then, after centuries of repression and attrition, it is only accessible to a small number of people. There can be no doubt that Covid-19 poses a variety of threats to theatre, regardless of the language in which it is performed, and yetContinue reading “Richard Huddleson: On the Edge (Again?): Irish-Language Theatre in Covidian Times”

As part of Dublin Theatre Festival 2020, theatre company Dead Centre staged the interactive online performance To Be a Machine (Version 1.0), an adaptation of Mark O’Connell’s eponymous non-fiction book on the topic of transhumanism. Before being able to stream the performance, audience members were asked to record short videos of themselves laughing at aContinue reading “Tamara Radak: “Dying … to connect”: Dead Centre’s To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) (2020)”

Scenes for Survival, a 2020 series of short digital artworks co-created by the National Theatre of Scotland and the BBC, is designed to support the economic and creative survival of Scottish playwrights, actors, directors, and, thus, the theatre industry at large. On one level, the over 50 one- and two-handers, filmed in isolation and thematicallyContinue reading “Marlena Tronicke: Lives under Lockdown: Negotiations of Precarity in the National Theatre of Scotland and the BBC’s Scenes for Survival Series”

Medical humanities has tended first and foremost to be associated with the ways in which the arts and humanities help us to understand health.  However, this is not the only or necessarily the primary aim of our field.  What the COVID pandemic has revealed above all is what the field of critical medical humanities hasContinue reading “Jane Macnaughton: The past, present and future of COVID-19: the role of medical humanities”

What happens when audiences return to the theatre after this time away? How have our feelings about being part of a live audience changed because of the pandemic and what does this tell us about affective encounters in the theatre? Using Travis Alabanza’s Overflow – performed in December 2020 at the Bush Theatre in LondonContinue reading “Isabel Stuart: The Feelings in the Room: Reframing Emotions in (post) COVID-19 Theatre Spectators”

In the twenty-first century, the rise of live-streaming theatre or broadcasting of live theatrical performances in cinemas is one of the signal shifts in or additions to cultural production. The ubiquity of the phenomenon has shifted theatre from being live local to live global. What distinguished it from other cinematic offerings was its liveness andContinue reading “Bernadette Cochrane: Capitalising on the back catalogue: streaming theatre in the age of COVID.”

The coronavirus pandemic acted in Poland like calling the bluff in poker, revealing the imperfections of the theatre system. Actors employed on a full-time basis by state theatres have very low ‘base’ salaries; they are paid for the performances in which they actually participate; freelancers get paid first after the premiere and most of themContinue reading “Anna Burzynska: Rehearsing post-capitalist theatre”