A Shift Towards Digital and Participatory Performance Practice Post-Pandemic

Abstract

This perspective analyses and reflects upon the experience of conceiving, curating and participating in Bodies:On:Live - Magdalena:On:Line, the first online multi-platform Magdalena festival. The festival brings together digitally competent artists with creative roots in the immateriality of the internet. In dialogue with current shifts in performance making, performers, writers, and directors declare their uneasiness towards online adaptations of live work. As part of the global reaction to the standstill brought about by the Covid pandemic, we argue that shifts in practice for women in contemporary theatre associated with the Magdalena network - whether as an attempt for immediate artistic survival or a conscious experimental choice - were not exclusively determined by the available sharing of technical knowledge. Neither were they determined by the need to increase awareness of the digital medium in order to gain experience of different working modalities, but rather served as a participatory and social purpose. These conditions were surfacing due to the digital space manifesting as a specific format of gathering through the Zoom windows and other platforms, which framed the encounters within a democratic performance arena, making the boundaries between participation and spectatorship porous. Therefore, the shift provoked by the festival not only pertains to the aesthetic sphere, but it is also dynamically and organically geared towards the recognition of new working contexts arising from the unsettling experience of 'disembodiment'. This experience - as an ontological paradox of the original in-person Magdalena festival - embedded arguments of the creative use of new technologies for a more sustainable and accessible future of performance making with both live and digital.