Public Sphere vs. Domestic Sphere in Online Theatre

I have spent a good part of 2020 watching online performances as theatres are closed all over the world. In the a-hundred-or-so pieces of Covid theatre there emerged three sets of spatial relationships that are particularly interesting:

·      - Imaginary space and real space

·      - Virtual space and physical space

·      -  Public space and domestic space

In the previous entries, I attempted to explore the issue of theatrical duality, which mainly deals with the first relation between the imaginary and the real. Digital theatre, however, because of the use of media, is much concerned with the interplay between the virtual and the physical.

Pre-Covid online performances often explore possibilities of theatricality and interactivity in the virtual space. An early practice is Desktop Theatre’s waitingforgodot.com (1997) which ‘stages’ Beckett’s story in a chat room. RSC’s Such Tweet Sorrow (2010), a twitter version of Romeo and Juliet is composed of tweets by actors and comments by fans on the social media. Recently, Fast Familiar’s Smoking Gun (2020), conceived before the pandemic and released during lockdown, required participants to collectively unveil a conspiracy through discussions via bespoken software for text chat.

All these three examples are presented on virtual platforms and the spectator-participant uses text messaging in the form of an avatar to engage with the performance. During the Covid pandemic, however, as many theatres are forced to the digital media, more productions rely on performers’ and audiences’ embodied participation rather than purely as virtual avatars.

Zoom, the most widely used digital platform for theatre and performance during the pandemic, has helped the emergence of a new form of theatre genre: the so-called Zoom theatre[1]. In a typical Zoom theatre piece, the performance is presented in the virtual space of the Internet, while performers and spectators are situated in physical spaces of their homes.

Arnold Aronson has noted what particularly interests him in the Covid digital theatre is ‘the tension between the physical experience of space…and the creation of virtual space’ (2020: 316). Such tension, which has been explored in precursory work of mixed reality theatre such as Blast Theory’s Can You See Me Now?, first shown in 2001, is a ‘game of chase played online and on the streets’[2] , is added by another confronting relation between the public and the domestic.

Theatre is usually considered the most public form of art. Theatre’s foundation in publicness can be traced from its birth, as Christopher Balme has pointed out that ‘in ancient Greece the agora [public space] and the theatre festivals attained the ultimate degree of publicness possible at that time, so that the theatre public and the public sphere were in a sense almost identical’ (2014: 24). However, when the performance takes place and is seen in living rooms and bedrooms, there arises the problem of how the domestic sphere is incorporated into or conflicting with the public event.

This is as complicated for the performance as for audiences’ behaviours. I noticed an interesting detail in an email I received before the Zoom version of Tim Crouch’s I, Cinna (The Poet) in July this year. This email contains technological guidance, e.g. how to register in and download Zoom, troubleshooting, and policy of performance, e.g. no latecoming, age guideline. It also includes safety advice regarding visibility on camera which is unique to online performances involving audience interaction.

When exposed through camera during the play, the spectator’s domestic space as well as the spectator is turned into part of the performance’s symbolic realm. Yet this space at the same time stays private in the material world. It is not likely that a spectator would transform their living room or bedroom decorations for this performance. On the contrary, the audience themselves might change what they wear for this occasion, especially when they attend live performances in theatres. People usually dress formally for operas, for example. This is what Erving Goffman points out in Frame Analysis, what people do is to 'access correctly what the situation ought to be for them and then act accordingly' (1975: 2).

Framed within both domestic AND public performance spheres, the spectator might not get used to this confrontation and unwittingly expose private things and behaviours that are regarded ‘improper’ for public space. I myself had an embarrassing moment when I forgot to turn off my camera during a Zoom performance and saw my disorderly bedroom on the screen.

So there are a lot of questions to be studied regarding confrontation between the public and the private in these digital performances. (To be continued, I hope…)

 

 

REFERENCE 

Aronson, Arnold (2020). ‘Hello, I Must Be Going.’, Theatre and Performance Design, 6:4, 316-320.

Balme, Christopher (2014). The Theatrical Public Sphere. Cambridge University Press.

Goffman, Erving (1975). Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Penguin.

 


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[1] Arifa Akbar, the Guardian’s chief theatre critic, uses this term in her review of a digital play performed via Zoom, in ‘The Boss of It All Review – Whimsical Lars von Trier Workplace Comedy’. The Guardian, 20 Sept. 2020, http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/sep/20/the-boss-of-it-all-review-whimsical-lars-von-trier-workplace-comedy.

[2] ‘Can You See Me Now?’ Blast Theory. https://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/can-you-see-me-now/#:~:text=A%20game%20of%20chase%20played%20online%20and%20on%20the%20streets.&text=Along%20with%20Botfighters%2C%20Can%20You,a%20map%20of%20the%20city.

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