Archiving in Twilight

As the Covid pandemic casts its shadow over the globe for a third year, its impact on theatre—as with everything else—cannot be ignored. Just enough time has passed for the first of many substantial works by theatre practitioners and scholars to emerge and assess the ways in which theatre has thrived and helped us to survive in the process. Barbara Fuchs’s Theater of Lockdown and Caridad Svich’s Toward a Future Theatre are two such projects, casting light on this evolving corpus. The books consider a vast array of theatre-makers as they advanced their works through the ongoing health crisis. New roles for both artist and spectator are taking shape while the nuances of liveness, co-presence, and co-temporality are tested as live artists move online to discover that the digital space can be genuinely live, and distance is not so far away.