Synopsis
Covid-19 has been described as a ‘digital pandemic’. But who might the characterisation of the pandemic as ‘digital’ leave behind? This timely book reconsiders the pandemic as ‘postdigital’, examining tensions between a growing postdigital attitude of disenchantment with digital technologies and the increasing reliance on adapted modes of online practice mid-lockdown in both performance-making and healthcare. What emerged amidst the pandemic restrictions was a theatre that was unable to show its face, instead adapting into a variety of ‘covid-safe’ remote forms of engagement, from ‘Zoom plays’ to self-generating experiences sent by post. This book explores the ways that both performances and healthcare practices found proxies for direct touch and face-to-face encounters, deconstructing the way that care and resilience were spectacularized by political actors online. Liam Jarvis and Karen Savage explore aspects of care in relation to technology, spectacle and facilitation, and how new modes of delivery and the repurposing of theatre spaces that were displaced amidst the mass migration online have been enabling as well as controversial. The variety of case studies assessed includes internet memes, online films, performances of everyday resilience through social media and participatory theatre productions, including Thaddeus Phillips’ Zoom Motel, Coney’s Telephone and Nightcap’s Handle with Care.
About the Authors
Liam Jarvis is a theatre-maker, practitioner-researcher, and Reader in Theatre and Performance at Central School of Speech and Drama, UK.
Karen Savage is Head of Arts, Culture and Heritage for the College of Arts and Professor of Creative and Collaborative Arts at the University of Lincoln, UK. Karen works across film and theatre, creating work that has been screened and performed nationally and internationally. She was co-convenor of the Intermediality in Theatre & Performance Research Working Group at the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) between 2017-2021. She is Co-editor of the Performance and Digital Cultures book series for Methuen Drama. Publications include Avatars, Activism and Postdigital Performance: Precarious Intermedial Identities (2022) (co-edited with Liam Jarvis), 'Performance in the (K)now – Social Raportage and Rapport of Social Media in “Reterritorializing Digital Performance from South to North”', International Journal for Performance and Digital Media, 15 (3) (2019), William W. Lewis and Sonali Pahwa (eds); Economies of Collaboration in Performance: More Than the Sum of the Parts by Karen Savage and Dominic Symonds (2018); 'Deference, Deferred: Rejourn as Practice in Familial War Commemoration' co-authored with Justin Smith in Staging Loss: Performance as Commemoration, Michael Pinchbeck and Andrew Westerside (eds) (2018).
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