Post-COVID-19 art worlds: viral theatre, precarity and medical humanities

Abstract

In their 2021 article on ‘ viral theatre ’ in the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English that preceded the conference, Liedke and Pietrzak-Franger describe the concept of ‘ viral theatre ’ to entail ‘ fi rst, historical/theoretical notions of contagiousness in theatre, second, 21st-century musings on virality as the condition of postmodern society, and, third, the current digitalization of theatre (due to the pandemic) and its attempts to go online and “ go viral ”‘ (129). These three aspects inspired the programme of ‘ Post-COVID-19 Art Worlds: Viral Theatre, Precarity and Medical Humanities ’ . The goal, as the organisers presented it, was to start an interdisciplinary dialogue between performance studies, cultural studies and medical humanities to fi nd out how we experience and understand viral theatre as audience members, scholars and practitioners. Another endeavour was to high-light innovative practices of online theatre and how these works respond to the issues of physical, economical and artistic precarity. The conference set out to explore these issues within fi ve sections entitled ‘ Medical Knowl-edge and Media ’ , ‘ COVID Precarity and Institutions ’ , ‘ COVID Creativity ’ , ‘ (Post)-COVID Audiences ’ , ‘ On the Edges ’ and a closing discussion on ‘ New Challenges ’ . The fi rst panel presented theatre as potentially healing for people in isolation by improving their physical and mental health. Jane MacNaughton underlined how a health crisis like the pandemic makes us more aware of how entangled culture and our embodied reality are and stressed the responsibility of the medical humanities to trace these developments. Coming from a prac-tical background of drama therapy, Amy Willshire described how, even in the virtual space, the possibility to express themselves creatively through performance gave a sense of self to the young people she worked with during lockdown.