Between 2020 and 2022, theatre had to adapt and, in doing so, challenged ideas of what was possible – and what was even ‘theatre’.
Due to the global pandemic, an exceptional and wide range of works were made for, or adapted to, brand new conditions and limitations. While these works are defined by interpandemic conditions in the Anthropocene, they serve as portals to thinking about theatre-making in the future.
Gathered in this collection are pieces adapted or made for podcast theatre, a livestream illusionist interactive performance, an audience-uploaded hybrid performance, one-on-one online interaction, lip-synch opera-theatre, climate crisis activist manifesto film/theatre, spoken word and gaming installation art and multi-location broadcast plays, providing an accessible introduction to ‘Transmedia’ theatre.
Transmedia theatre has been a boundary-breaking and rich area of performance since the 1990s, but the (by necessity) explosion of works that were created during the early years of the pandemic signalled a new, exciting and accessible method by which theatre-makers could share their work and also challenge their own practices.
While these specific works are markers of a specific time in performance history, they also point ways forward, not only in terms of form and function, but in how educators, students and fellow practitioners could conceive of re-staging these works in person and/or on digital platforms.
For a generation that has grown up online, whose vocabularies of expression are as much digitally native as they are IRL, transmedia theatre, and the realm too of VR and AR story and audience design which it borders, holds a firm place in busting open the realm of the possible.
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