Archiving in Twilight

As the Covid pandemic casts its shadow over the globe for a third year, its impact on theatre—as with everything else—cannot be ignored. Just enough time has passed for the first of many substantial works by theatre practitioners and scholars to emerge and assess the ways in which theatre has thrived and helped us to survive in the process. Barbara Fuchs’s Theater of Lockdown and Caridad Svich’s Toward a Future Theatre are two such projects, casting light on this evolving corpus. The books consider a vast array of theatre-makers as they advanced their works through the ongoing health crisis. New roles for both artist and spectator are taking shape while the nuances of liveness, co-presence, and co-temporality are tested as live artists move online to discover that the digital space can be genuinely live, and distance is not so far away.

The scholarly writing of Philip Auslander, Andy Lavender, Sarah Bay-Cheng, and others who have been pursuing these questions for years is suddenly more prescient than ever. Although the world feels completely changed since 2019, Fuchs and Svich are both quick to point out that in many ways it is simply continuing its trajectory. The countless theatre artists who were pushed to experiment in the virtual realm out of necessity are actually building upon practices that have been around for many years. Similarly, these two writers also understand that the pandemic presents a convergence of escalating crises that, in addition to the virus, includes the climate crisis, democratic instabilities, gendered violence, and white supremacy, which have necessitated organized demonstrations of protest despite the risks of infection. Marco Pustianaz’s Surviving Theatre makes for an interesting companion piece through its challenge to modes of spectatorship with an eye towards building an “affective archive” of the performed event. Pustianaz provides useful tools for engaging Fuchs and Svich’s histories as they commence building the archive for theatre in the era of Covid.

Fuchs examines theatre created in 2020 during the lockdowns, revealing how theatre continues to be live despite the obstacles to co-presence, which had previously been deemed essential to the liveness of theatre. Auslander’s work on liveness as both historical and contingent is key, as is Lavender’s notion of co-temporality and the concept of postdramatic theatre as popularized by Hans-Thies Lehmann. Fuchs observes that digital and in-person, distanced theatre during lockdown were not binaries, but were deeply entwined, given the shared technologies used for both, and since principles of audience engagement and access remained the same for the modalities. She illustrates this reading with deep dives into some of the excellent works produced in 2020, including Elli Papakonstantinou’s Traces of Antigone, The Acme Corporation’s The Institute for Counterfeit Memory, Forced Entertainment’s End Meeting for All, and the viral Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, in addition to several pieces by Joshua William Gelb and Katie Rose McLaughlin’s Theater in Quarantine.

Fuchs provides us with a narrative of the creation of a distinct theatre of lockdown: making sense of the chaos, she outlines a somewhat progressive path of experimentation and discovery as artists shared resources and moved from screening prere-corded performances to testing the limits of Zoom to something hybrid/augmented to something altogether different. Many artists attempted to understand what made their online theatrical performances different from filmmaking, with Fuchs concluding that there was a “need for the audience’s imagination to complete the picture—fundamentally distinguished online theater, whether or not it was recorded, from film.” One of the defining characteristics of Fuchs’s Theater of Lockdown is the concept of simulation, which serves as more than just a form of compensation for a lack of co-presence due to lockdowns. Its deliberate self-awareness becomes a “postdramatic signature” of the unique form taking shape. It may be...