Between Past and Future: Indian Theatre and performance in and after Covid19- Dharm Prakash

Between Past and Future: Indian Theatre and performance in and after Covid19

Dharm Prakash

Ph.D. Research Scholar

Theater and Performance Studies

School of Arts and Aesthetics

Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

Mobile No. +91-9654608184

Email: dharmpraakash@mail.com

dpmantoo@gmail.com

Abstract

The COVID-19 Pandemic comes with hardship, and it substantially negatively impacts sociocultural, economic, and artistic expression worldwide. Everything has been shut down globally to prevent citizens do not in contact with Corona Virus. The only medium that keeps connected globally and helps scholars and artists is the web-based digital medium. Digital media provides humans with a systematic way of giving and taking relationships through social media and websites.

It has been observed that the impact of lockdown does not fall equally: the virus seems to discriminate between digital and physical arts. The cinema, photography, music, and video arts keep producing on pre-existing simulations with digital devices and the internet, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, and many other platforms. On the other hand, these intersectional and intergenerational vulnerabilities paint a complex web of interconnections that impact various arts dependent on physical exhibitions such as theater, painting, and installation. The factors like social distancing and lockdown limit their artistic expression and income fluidities. Many theatre-makers, performers, painters, and sculptors do not perform or exhibit their work because of the restricted movement of people. They are still waiting for the complete resume for the social activities. Simultaneously, many theatre-makers, performers, and visual artists are knocking the web-based digital platform (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Mozilla-hub, VRChat, OpenSimulater, Workadvanture, etc.) to exhibit and perform their works.

The paper attempts to explore and understand significant development or crisis that have occurred because of the Pandemic in the last two years. The Pandemic has wiped out or overcome many debates and critics of digital media and new media in contemporary Indian Theatre. The central question was the ‘use of digital technology in theatre’ and the question of ‘live and mediatized.’ These questions almost disappeared from debate because of the significant crisis of Theatre and performance space and audiences due to Covid19. Now we have another set of questions that is much more complex than the previous one, Theatre through digital media. Previously, the question was about the choice and exploration of new visual language, which has become necessary. Theatre makers have only two choices if someone wants to perform; they must come through ‘digital media’ (online) or wait for the normalization of the Covid-19 situation. The paper will also explore the emerging practices during the Covid19 lockdown. Many enthusiasts come forward to create a ‘digital platform’ and exhibition to express their artistic expression. The paper will explore and examine the emerging theatre and performance practices drawing examples and incites from production performed during the complete lockdown. For analysis of the above question, the paper deals with ‘Look here is your machine. Get in!’ exhibited in the ‘Serendipity Art Festival, 2020’ curated by Kai Tuchman and Anuja Ghosalkar on an online platform called ‘Mozilla hub.’ The paper is not seeing this as the only representative of this kind of practice. Many people across the globe are performing online. The paper took this product just because of the researcher’s limitations.

Keywords: digital Theatre, new media, virtual scenography, space, digital humanities.

Research Article

There is no doubt that Covid19 has a massive impact on the cultural industry because of physical distancing and lockdowns across the globe. UNESCO also realized this global crisis, calling it a “cultural emergency” (Coetzee, 2020). Many theatres, installations, and performance artists have not produced a single work in the last two years. This crisis has created a challenge for art practitioners. It was March-April – 2020 when the lockdown was announced in India. All the theatres, performance studios, and auditoriums have been shut down. Many scheduled programs keep postponing. The producers/financing agencies lived their hope from Theatre and started exploring other ways. Many art industries keep producing on web-based platforms even in the lockdown periods with minimal cure. Theatre and performing arts have practices; even makers and spectators believe the central component is a ‘live engagement group of peoples in a particular space.’ The Indian theatre and performance makers indeed strongly believe in ‘live theatre’ (Theatre which performs in a physically shared space). Many Indian theatre-makers have a strong position against ‘mediatized’ performance.

The contemporary world is known as the digital era. It has a vast impact on almost everything and everyone. In today’s world, almost everyone is linked with digitally encoded threads. The digital culture has changed our day-to-day behaviors, ways of interaction, expression, and communication, in terms of John Berger the ‘ways of seeing’ (Burger, 1972). The paper has observed that the established reality and perception has been challenged through digital culture and the construction of a new set of relationship in society. The impact of digital culture falls on social and human behaviors and also on art practices. Contemporary art practices, mainly Theatre and performing arts, create production using theatrical space, spectators, and small and large cures, contaminating their artistic and meaning-making purpose and achieving a creative expression to communicate to their spectators. In Covid19 lockdown, theatre and performance practices have lost two substantial wheels: ‘space’ and ‘audience.’ Without this two-term, theatres and performances cannot be imagined.

Digital media have been seen as a hope to create a new performance space or architecture (soft space and architecture) and agency to bring Theatre to the audience keeping the idea of social distancing. The internet and digital media provide a fantastic opportunity for arts organizations to extend the impact of the arts. A live performance can be significantly complemented by opportunities for further engagement and the ability to communicate with mass through internet-based digital devices. It also can maximize our potential and provide these opportunities equally to everyone (who has internet access). We can reach more people with our work than through a one-time physical show. Hong Kong leading experimental performance group’s director Zuni Icosahedron said regarding this performance that “The pandemic has been a wakeup call making us conscious about how technology affects our life” (Cartledge, 2021), similarly dance choreographer and performer Joseph Lee used zoom as performing site to keep touch with the audience “As we couldn’t perform, we decided to show our rehearsals instead…We put several cameras around our rehearsal space so people could watch us via Zoom. They could choose the angle they wanted, comment on what they saw, and talk to us” (Cartledge, 2021). The most striking this happened during the Pandemic is that many theatres, and performance artists across the globe knocked the digital media platform to show their artworks. The enormous amount of technology has adapted differently. The technological adaptation pushed the theatre and performance practices beyond Philip Auslander and Peggy Phelan’s live and mediatized debate (Auslander, 2008). The German theatre director, writer, and poet Bertolt Brecht also indicated the best collaboration between arts and technology to an artistic communication between art, artist, and spectator; he said that “we and our technology are not natural as yet” (Anuja Ghosalkar, 2020)

In the last two decades, new relationships have emerged because of digital media and internet-based (new media) technology. But in the last two years of the Pandemic, internet-based digital technology has become a lifeline for Theatre. If we look back just before the Pandemic, the practitioners treat digital media and new media technology very differently. For instance, many see new media and digital technology as a threat to Theatre and performance, or they have some fear. Ram Gopal Bajaj, a theatre academician, practitioner, and former director of the National School of Drama (NSD), has criticized the use of digital technology in Theatre in a lecture organized by the NSD on ‘Theatre performance and festivals – An emerging site for contestation and debate’ on February 17, 2020, New Delhi (Drama, 2020).

Similarly, in a panel discussion on ‘New visual language in Theatre, organized by World Theatre Form at NSD, on February 17, 2019. Prasanna is an NSD alumnus, renowned theatre director, and playwright from Karnataka. He asserted his argument very strongly against the ‘new visual language in theatre’ based on economic resources and the availability of resources. He argued that “for me, actors and playwrights are available very easily in my village… set and scenography are much more expansive than actor and script, why new visual language is important in Indian theatre” (World Theatre Forum, 2019), mainly for a country like Indian where Theatre is not in excellent condition. Competing and surviving ninety percent of the practitioner in newly emerging theatre practices is challenging. In his counter replay, Amitesh Grover said, “in respect of the seminar, I am totally against what Prasanna Ji has proposed. I am also a young man and feel discriminated. We are in the moment to historized another moment of history here in the seminar. We do not necessarily have to respect history every time in every seminar… I thank the speakers for doing not having back to the Greek times every time they have to come to the central idea…contemporary is coming from different regions Malayalam, Panjabi, Bangla lots of young people have been mentioned, our young people are working in their town and villages right now with new definitions, new practices, and a new spirit. This is a moment to understand these changes” (World Theatre Forum, 2019).

Prasanna and many theatre personalities such as M. K. Raina, Bansi Kaul, and D. R. Ankur come with an augmentative letter against the celebration of ‘new visual language in theatre’ The role of technology and other digital techniques is also being questioned, especially in light of the digital chasm in India.

(The letter was posted on the Facebook wall of Indian Theatre Guide on February 18, 2019)

The above letter has shown the fear that Indian Theatre might be appropriate by a few creative metropolitan theatre-makers. Alternatively, the future of Indian theatre-going far beyond what they thought of. They wrote, “what worries us most is that the ‘New visual theatre’ is influencing the small-town folk. Their-in lies the danger. Since the small folk cannot do this expensive and technologically driven Theatre, they feel inferior.” (Prasanna, 2019). Many theatre directors are still debating the ‘use of digital media in theatre,’ question of ‘live and mediatized,’ ‘virtual vs. physical scenography’ in ‘physical theatre’ and performance space. These questions will be necessary for people who do not have technological accessibility. Indeed, it is not the debate of just new visual language; it is a generation debate. Prasanna, D. R. Ankur, M. K. Raina, and Bansi Kaul have trained in his advocating medium, but time has changed. Someone can go with anti-digital media practices, but new emerging practices cannot be negated.

The Covid19 crisis partially wipes or blurs the previous discussion’ digital media in Theatre or Theatre without digital media’ and adds a fresh significant angle to the ongoing debates’ Theatre through digital media.

The past year has brought changing situations to the performance scene. The impossibility of rehearsing and accomplishing to live spectators has forced performers to investigate new replacements. This has affected both the aesthetics of performance-making and the professional practices of performance-makers. Changes in formats have created new ways of reaching spectators with ever-increasing engagement with various screen-based technology and digital platforms. The new practices have significantly transformed live performances, adapting to new working methods and resulting in resourceful, imaginative replacements and differences. Recognizing the features of these changes will highlight pioneering directions for the future of live performance. This involves developments in the relationship between Theatre and film, offering digital innovations within liveness that this paper attempts to identify and analyze. The aim is to identify and analyze the transformations and generate new conversations among artists and theoreticians. 

The performing arts are vulnerable for the reason that much of the sector depend on live engagement with groups of people in a central space: performers are nearby when sharing a space, and actors and crew members share backstage areas; dressers, make-up artists, props managers, and stagehands all work together to create a live performance. Some modes of live performance might require one-on-one engagement with an audience member or necessitate a transgression of the boundary between audiences and performers. Sound and lighting booths are generally small, enclosed spaces where social distancing is almost impossible.

Embodied engagements and visceral exchanges that foreground the sensory are central to the performing arts. The kind of attention we pay to a theatre piece and our attention to online viewing content is different. Whether watching a performance or performing, those who share the space are not just in space; their interrelationship shapes the shared space. This shaping of shared space and associated embodied exchanges are at the heart of the challenge to reimagine the performing arts in the context of COVID-19.

Theatre and performances locally and abroad make some pre-recorded content available online at no charge or through paid ticketing. However, it is apparent that recorded performances – no matter how well they are done – remain live shows that were recorded. The “languages” of Theatre and film and digital media are different, and so are the positioning of the audience and experiences of immersion in each medium. Augmented performances, mixed-reality works, and works that use virtual reality are developing exciting languages. Such performances still require bodied interaction and some form of shared physical space between audiences and performers.

The recent decades have evidence of a significant shift from physical to digital in the communications field. The digital medium emerged as a powerful medium with special chartists such as quick, interactive, hypermedium, two-way communication, freedom to excess, shear, easy to reach, etc. The digital medium provides humans a systematic use, excess of digital resources globally. In this practice, the question of space has radically transformed. It has been noticed that the performing or theatrical space has vanished from the practices due to the Covid19 lockdown: this restriction converted personal and private spaces to theatrical or performing spaces. Many theatre and performance makers develop a soft architecture or soft space to execute their works.

The paper will draw fresh insights and examples from the recent work ‘Look here, this is your machine. Get in!’ (2020) in an online Serendipity Festival curated by Kai Tuchman and Anuja Ghosalkar on Mozilla Hub. It will be a good idea to briefly introduce the project and artist before going to the analysis. Kai Tuchman is a German-based director, dramaturge, and academician. The concept of documentary theatre practices strongly influenced his work. He constantly attempts to challenge the concept of documentation. He is working in collaboration with many national and international artists. He performed and exhibited his works in Hong-Cong, China, Paris, New York, etc. In his recent project, ‘Look here is your machine. Get in!’ collaborated with Anuja Ghosalkar and curated in virtual Serendipity Arts Festival 2020. Anuja Ghosalkar is a Bangalore-based actor, writer, and director. She is the originator of the Drama Queen theatre group, which focuses on documentary theatre, personal histories, and archives to extend the idea of Theatre to create audacious work. The company’s debut show, Lady Anandi, was written while she was an artist-in-residence at Art Lab Gnesta, Sweden. In the past, Anuja has worked as a program officer at India Foundation for the Arts. Through a Sarai grant, she documented the oral narratives of her grandfather, the oldest living make-up artist in India. In her recent work as a curator, she curated ‘Look here is your machine. Get in!’ 2020.

The project ‘Look here is your machine. Get in!’ is a part of the Serendipity Arts Festival – 2020. The festival was organized on a digital platform called ‘SA virtuality’, ‘The Mozilla-Hub’, because of the Civid19 Pandemic. Curators Kai and Anuja have created a “software architecture” (Wolf, 1992, p. 42) (soft architecture) according to the demand and concepts of the collaborative artists. The project was based on German theatre activist Bertolt Brecht’s radio play ‘Lindbergh’s Flight.’ The curators invited artists and educators to document the moment we tend to live in by asking them to investigate Brecht’s experience, especially the intersection of society, art, and technology. Their responses may represent a new archive of the 269 days of the Pandemic (from the Annunciation, the first day of containment, to December 16, the day of the project’s primaries) and its effects on the public sphere in general on our culture and our policy.

With this invitation, curators Ghosalkar and Tuchmann continue exploring the theater’s precise relationship with real-world events. The nine works of “Look, here is your car. Enter “are halfway between the discourse of antipathy, pessimism, and the need for transhuman improvement.” Digital technology is only formed as a necessary agent within the fundamental plane to imagine survival. Whatever technologies gain, this imagination is at the heart of all virtuality. The Unique Virtue appears to be tech-hyped, but it is not completely so, so it is on the other side of the screen and eye experiences. It is the way of thinking, associating the angle to our being, that is to say, and has been perpetually in co-evolution with machines and non-human organisms. The Serendipity used a novelty technology called ‘SA Virtual.’ The SA reality extends the foundation’s focus on the recent crisis. It has the potential to explore its digital offering. The idea immerged from recognizing the internet-based media as a common ground for daily interaction (such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, tutor, google-meet, zoom, etc.) in a rapidly changing world. A website called Think Right. Me has written about this development. “However, continuing with the series of digital contributions from Serendipity Arts Foundation, SA Virtual will answer to the internet and its big role in linking people from across the world and combining its offerings that binds us. The SA Virtual will turn to the internet as a site in order to forge meaningful artistic collaborations that are hinged on the innovative integration of the arts and the digital space, aiming to foster an increasingly open and accessible arts community” (Right.Me, 2020). This internet-based virtual platform provides a feature to explore and experiment with different activities such as curated projects, performances, workshops, exhibitions, talks, engagement-based initiatives, and discourse around the arts.

Under the curatorial works of Kai and Anuja, many artists have collaborated, such as technical designers Gavati Wad is, and artist/filmmaker Alisagar Dhariwala. The performance, Theatre, and installation artists are Amitesh Grover, A. Mangai, Ayesha Susan Thomas, Ranjit Kandalgaonkar, Soumyabrata Choudhury, Venket Srinivasan, Yalgaar Saunskrutik Manch, Zhao Chuan, and Zuleikha Chaudhari with their creative works. The project has been exhibited on the platform called Mozilla Hub, and they provide essential information and instruction to navigate the artworks on zoom. Then they guided spectators to the hub. The spectator must create their avatar with a name before interring in the virtual exhibition lobby. The lobby was connected with nine different rooms for every artist. The room was designed according to the nature and demand of the artwork. Outside the room and in the lobby displayed concept notes of the works. Diverse activities were happening simultaneously: virtual exhibition, podcast, virtual performance, and Theatre. Here, the paper only focuses on the theatre ‘The Migrant Walk’ by Dr. Soumyabrata Choudhury. ‘The Migrant Walk’ work was curated in a proper virtual proscenium theatre. There was a flat (two dimensional) 2D screen on the stage. Avatar could go around the screen. Pre-recorded video of the products exhibited in loops on the screen.

Whenever any spectator enters the proscenium (Choudhury’s room), the video starts from the beginning; they have access to control the volume on the screen. Anyone can get the sense of proscenium architecture and the screen perspective of proscenium architecture. The architecture was (three-dimensional) 3D and somehow immersive, but the artworks were simple flat 2D. This creates a kind of contradiction between the artwork and architecture. Alternatively, in other words, the artworks were statics, and the architecture was dynamic. For instance, architecture sims like there was a large screen inside a 3D virtual architecture. For instance, in Ameetesh Grover’s work, from a distance, they have a sense of depth within the character and between the character and the wall. However, when you move near to the character, it is again a 2D flat character.

We have had powerful memory of offline physical Theatre, which always creates a sense of Adolphe Appia and Garden Craig’s idea of “depth and 3D” (Remport, 2020, p. 102) experience. It is also the main characteristic of Theatre, which is distinguished from cinema. Spectators and performers share a common space for performing and watching; the audience has all possibilities to appreciate or decrease the actor/performer while performing. When they enter the theatrical space, they are responsible for behaving like an audience until the show ends, which is a performative character. Sometimes, Theatre triggers our five senses, especially in Dr. Anuradha Kapur and Deepan Sivaraman. In a Kapur play, Virasat (2003), her character cooked rice, vegetable, and many other foods. The smell of cooking was spared in the auditorium after the cooking actors served to the spectator to test the food. The test, smell, and touch are as crucial as senses only activated in physical Theatre.

Similarly, Deepan Sivaraman’s play Ubi Roy () created a concentration camp with spick wire. One’s audience enters the performance space they were not allowed to excite without ending the production. The audience was very close to the performance. In the performance, Sivaraman put fire on stage, and the audience could also feel the heat of the fire. Abhilash Pillai’s production Thulam (…) circus, as the audience able, see a kind scale of vertical and horizontal scenography, which is only possible in the circus tent. Camera lenses are not capable of capturing that scale in such a ratio. Theatre is not just audio-visual arts; it creates a kind of sensory relationship with the audience, which is still lacking in the newly developed online Theatre.

The curatorial work of Kai and Anuja ‘Look here is your machine. Get in!’ much closer to video games instead of Theatre. When I (as an audience) entered Choudhury’s room, ‘The Migrant Walk’, it was like watching a film on a 2D flat screen. It somehow lacks the eeriness of being in the physical presence of the art. It was not immersive as an audience of online theatre/performance/installation because ultimately, the screen and controlling key always reminded me it was a virtual theatre, and I am not with the fellow audience to feel the tangible things when you are in the room. As an audience, you are not anymore a theatre audience; you are a player of a video game you do not have such responsibility to behave like an audience. You have limited programmed freedom (programmers or curators have controlled everything) to roam around the architecture or one room to another.

In the past two years, theatre-making also has changed radically. Many of the actors/performers are performing without a director or co-actor because unavailability of rehearsal space due to Covid19. They are exploring limited resources; they convert personal space into a performance space and use basic or natural lights to explore their aesthetics greed. Directors do not have access to the auditorium and other theatrical equipment. The maximum online ‘live’ Theatre I have seen in the last two years looks very basic in the construction, such as set, light, costume, or overall scenography. I found it interesting that ‘theatre is hanging between past and future’ or digital and physical. They are adopting new media technology, but they also want to save the basic essence of Theatre. The audience is one of the significant elements for the actor; they draw energy from the audience and vice-versa; this is known as the giving and take relationship. The system and other components of Theatre create immersive Theatre. The scenographer’s works shifted to the cinematographer. Now, everything an audience can see is guided by the camera’s perspective.

As a researcher, it is challenging to locate Theatre in Theatre as genera, cinema, video installation, and video game. Sometimes it seems like what Vivan Sundram (a painter, sculptor, and curator) called ‘twinned genre’ (Sundram, 2015) and Something between two or more than two, what Geneva Scully cited ‘Tom Romano’ in the articulation of “multigenre” (Scully, 2008) in his article ‘Considering Alternatives: Multigenre Literature and Multigenre Writing’, Romano defines ‘multigenre’ writing as “composed of many genres and subgenres, each piece self-contained, making a point of its own, yet connected by themes or topic and sometimes by language, image, and contents” (Scully, 2008). Many theatre personalities have claimed that a theatre is a hybrid form of arts; it can adapt to anything. However, I argue that in the maximum case, adopters overcome adoptable, but in this case, it is different. Theatre is not adopting new media technology; besides that, technology is adopting Theatre, which is why the online Theatre does not fit under the framework of ‘theatre.’

It is not denied that online Theatre provides a creative platform for artist collaboration, exploration, and exhibition. It has many great fetchers that could also revolutionize the theatre culture in India and the world. This is the first time many young talents have shown their potential through online platforms because they do not have the higher auditorium, light, sound, or other expenses. Many groups exhibited their works on social media, such as Facebook and YouTube, Mozilla-hub, etc., with ten thousand mobile phone cameras. This economic freedom will challenge the superiority of established directors and actors. Secondly, the online Theatre has the protentional to reach the audience in a private space. Now audience does not have to think about traveling kilometers for a watch and sitting for half an hour in the complete audience mode. It is interesting the National Theatre (London) website disclaimer. In this disclaimer, they are displaying that “Unmissable theatre, whenever you want it…The all-new National Theatre Theater at Home is a streaming service offering unforgettable British theatre available to watch anytime, anywhere” (Theatre, 2021) . Now, an individual could watch a show while traveling, eating, or doing other work, or they can save it for later to watch according to their convenience. The National Theatre, London, and other companies are giving a subscription to their audience, like Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc., monthly and yearly to watch the products globally. This innovative idea has/is replace/ing the previous practices to influence the audience to come auditorium in a particular date and time; now, it is just the opposite, Theatre and auditorium (soft architecture) is reaching an audience without any date and time boundation.

Conclusion:

Online Theatre or digital Theatre has become a significant otherwise ‘theatre’ vanished from the people’s consciousness in the last two years. Through digital technology and theatre-makers, there is no doubt that another artist creates numerous artistic and creative possibilities during the lockdown. The digital Theatre in India is in a very premature stage and has much to explore. The digital Theatre gives a new perspective to thinking Theatre through ‘camera’ or computer-generated 2D, 3D animation. Now theatre directors could adopt the language of cinema in theatre-making, such as intimacy, close-ups, sound clarity, and accessibility. It is challenging for theatre-makers to send Theatre to the audience’s personal space with the claim of ‘theatre,’ not video, film, or game.

Many Over The Top (OTT)^[1] companies emerged and developed intermate-based applications to exhibit theatrical production on screen. The OTT platforms are still easy to access without any hierarchies of cultural capital in booking an auditorium, publicity, and accessibility of other resources such as rehearsal space, light, and sound. The development will vanish the auditorium’s importance very soon, leading to a radical transformation towards a political and ascetical approach to using space. We have observed that the personal space is becoming performing space and the performing space are vanishing drastically, particularly during Covid19 lockdown, for instance, Amitesh Grover’s ‘The Lost Poet’ (2021), Soumyabrta Choudhuri’s ‘The Migrant Walk’ (2020), and other groups and individuals. Suppose we develop Theatre for looking any shape of leisure from our bedrooms. In that case, the opportunity for the appearing theatre physicality to become completely virtual isn’t always as far-fetched as we can also think. With this in mind, now could be an essential time to recall the blessings and drawbacks at the back of each sort of execution to understand that one cannot wipe out the other.

Indian Theatre still has a lot to think about, debate, and create this digital media-oriented new experience, “new aesthetics” (Bridle, 2021) and “audience reception” (Bennett, 2013). There are still many significant and influential people, (which the article has mentioned above) in contemporary Indian Theatre rejecting this emerging form of Theatre in toto. It means not that we want linear Theatre or single voice, but it should be better to reach a common goal, where new development could be part of our curriculum to understand in greater detail. The debate on online Theatre should come strongly to grasp this development.

Besides all this development, I was a spectator who could not accept online Theatre as a genre of ‘theatre’; it could be performance, video installation, video-game-theatre but not Theatre. It means not that using digital media in Theatre is not a part of a new visual language. We know the Theatre is transformative because it links personal narrative with performance, letting spectators connect with moments of individual moments. Everybody deserves to witness such impactful involvements without perturbing about a price tag or distance. Yet, once the Theatre is digitalized and transmission through the internet, the influence, content, and jobs theatres will vanish. So, as we at present spend more time at home, please take advantage of the profusion of Theatre that is accessible but think of sustenance and be there in live Theatre once all the activities are resumed.

Indeed, the online Theatre cannot be equivalent to the involvement that a live theatre with hundreds packed in an auditorium gives; it is imperative to familiarize ourselves with the environments that mount us. Performers, theatre-makers worldwide that make the medium of theatre flourish, have decided to take this challenge head-on. The fact that social and physical collaboration and interaction are the key apparatuses of the ‘genre’ makes this challenging.

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