Shifts: Reflections on practice in digitised and theatre-making process

Abstract

Theatre-making as an organising frame is conceived as space (staging), where three roles – text, acting, and direction – bring the theatre-making to life. Within virtual theatre-making processes, the roles of those involved in making theatre are shifting due to creating in (re)imagined digitally punctuated spaces of deep listening, embodiment, and aesthetic choices. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the effects towards the 4th Industrial Revolution, forcing many slow transitioning spaces into a race for their positioning within the virtual space. Theatre-making has always been transitional. It has altered its ways of being in and (the use) of space and has already integrated the virtual within the creative practice to elicit alternate ways of thinking and being that offer shifts in how performativity and performance are theorised and understood. Where performativity may be seen as a space for effecting change, in theatre-making the performative is harnessed towards a (re)imagining of theatre in virtual space. Now the shift towards a more dominant virtual process and performance may merely be a further reshuffling or rearrangement of power, relationships, and authoring. This essay grapples with the question of what the new theatre virtual space is, what the new frames include, and which processes it teases out to suggest what the alternate roles, lenses, and tools may look like in virtual theatre-making going forward. Reflections on the possibilities of a new virtual theatre space are discussed here through documenting reflexive practice within an ex post facto research design. Pragmatic lived examples are offered by three diverse performing arts trainers and theatre-makers from their preferred vantage point, evoking ideas of hybridity. Theatre, process, and product(ion) are still the key components, but the new virtually staged space offers alternate ways of being which are vulnerable, expressive and diverse – all components that are pivotal to creativity and theatre-making.