Today, World Theatre Day comes amidst a pandemic, and so we need to ask - what does this mean for theatre? Among the first venues to shut down globally were theatres, big and small. Among the first people to get affected by the city-wide lockdown were performing artists: all upcoming shows got cancelled immediately, rehearsals were called off, grants promised were put on hold. It is easy to shut theatre down because it is not listed under “essential services”, not for the ones whose lives do not depend on it. Social distancing has come as anathema to theatre which requires social intimacy as a necessary condition to come into existence. So far, only one country has announced financial assistance to arts institutions and independent artists who face uncertainty amid restrictions on large gatherings and events. “This situation can cause considerable distress. Artists are not only indispensable, but also vital, especially now…I will not let them down,” the minister of state for culture in Germany, Monika Grütters, said in a statement.
The thought of a minister expressing concern and doing all she can for artists-in-need is enough to bring me to tears. As an artist in India, the most I hope for, and I am not joking, is for the state to not interfere with my work, not censor my work. To allow me to show what I make. “Allow” - a dismally low bar of expectations from a state known to posses no inclination to work for artists. The budget for culture is a measly 0.2 percent of the total state expenditure, and grapevine has it that once during a cabinet reshuffle, the government forgot to assign a minister to the culture portfolio altogether. We in India are not alone in being marooned; performing artists in several nations are among the most vulnerable professionals. They live off shows and projects by the month; they complete one, get paid, move to the next one, and that’s how they keep the stream of money flowing. It is a thin stream, with not a drop more to allow uncertain survival to mistakenly, for a fleeting moment, turn into assurance and certitude in living. I frankly cannot fathom how artists muster up the courage and passion to endure this extreme precarity, but they do. And this I am grateful for.
But, what if this moment is not simply a call for increased state-support, but also a catalyst of change in theatre? Can we find ways to keep making theatre without being ‘in the theatre’? Do we always need to gather in each other’s proximity for theatre to occur? I am aware that these questions will bring a frown upon many a guru who insist, and rightly so, that theatre demands a community formed by social proximity, and needs people to gather somewhere. What if this somewhere is not one physical space but several? What if we summon a community that is physically distant but socially together, theatrically intimate? Experiments in this direction are already underway. The National Theatre (U.K.) is going to stream a free play every Thursday night from now on. The New York Metropolitan Opera will stream its shows for free every night too. Scholars have been interested in knowing how audiences experience live performance and their live-streaming counterparts, and have tried to understand how people, who increasingly inhabit an environment saturated with digital media, respond to contemporary theatre-streaming. Does theatre mean the same thing to an online audience as it does to an audience physically co-present in the same venue? Must it mean the same thing? Independent theatre practitioners have embraced the internet to conduct rehearsals, and also organise spontaneous “story-telling” sessions. I can mention dozens of work from the pre-pandemic past where artists have explored a blend of digital-physical ways to invent new theatrical forms, including a few works which I have developed with others. These experiments occupied the margins in their time, perhaps they can now reshape the contours of what theatre practice can mean in a post-pandemic world.
Theatre is no longer the kind of mass medium it was once imagined to be - take a look at the staggering number of people routinely gathering to watch live streaming, putting the attendance of any popular play to shame. IGTV, Facebook live, YouTube concerts, virtual parties, all are community formations ‘in the live', showing us that theatre is no longer the only place where people flock to ‘be together’. I have come to believe that we obstinately continue with theatre practices we inherited from the age of machines, from the analogue, approaches and techniques bound by peculiar relations of time, space, labour, value, and aesthetics. In the age of hybrid-medium, we need to think of theatres that are dispersed not concentrated, distributed not centralised, de-authored not copyrighted, collective not collecting. We are most likely entering a post-pandemic world with exponentially increased surveillance, stricter border control, confined human agency, and a new normal for freedoms we took for granted so far. How theatre responds to this new paradigm, what new ways of resisting and performing it invents, will decide how vital or dispensable it becomes in times to come.
