Critical Stages (Dec 2020)
Not Here, Not Now? Liveness Revisited
Abstract
Taking as its point of departure two video projects created by Polish theatre artists at the time of the COVID-19 crisis and presented on YouTube, my article intends to revisit the concept of digital liveness, presented by Philip Auslander in 2012. Both projects explicitly take up an important issue of liveness as supposedly characteristic of theatre performances as such. Referring also to such recent performance-installations as Rimini Protokoll’s Situation Rooms and Nachlass/Pièces sans personnes, as well as Mapa Teatro’s Of Lunatics, or Those Lacking Sanity, the article claims that the COVID-19 crisis has not so much jeopardized the ontology of theatre as a communal form of art but rather put in question the notion of co-presence of performers and their audience “here and now” as the core of this art.
