Osun ncc course: Digital theathers

This course addresses how theatre and performance as live embodied practices and forms of communal encounter have permanently changed due to extended lockdowns, social distancing, and pandemic health restrictions. Together we want to investigate the new dispersed digital formats – WhatsApp and instagram performances, VR/AR-experiences, Zoom theatres – that have expanded our idea of theatre. But how do these new networked performance experiences alter common social and cultural functions of theater?

Using case studies from the five exemplary locations of Berlin, Vienna/Budapest, London, Johannesburg and Annandale/New York City, Bogotá. Digital Theatres aims to study how the performing arts have fundamentally altered their reach, audience, institutional structures, and the quality of social encounter by going digital and what that suggests about the future make-up of the performing arts sector. As an OSUN collaborative network course, this seminar highlights that questions about the shifting ethics and aesthetics of cultural production need to be discussed in a global civic context that mirrors how we currently come together: physically distanced but virtually connected.

We will pursue these issues through a mix of theory and practice, combining readings, discussions with practical projects that allow students to try out the tools of digital theatre making. We also invite theatre makers and curators to give workshops as part of the seminar about how they practically have addressed the effects of social distancing and developed alternative bridges of interconnection. Students will be asked to collaborate across campuses to actively document the current cultural moment and reflect the enhanced role of digital media. In doing so, they will participate in our semester-long project of creating a living archive of digital theatre, consisting of video documentations, audio interviews, hybrid performances, and interactive collages.