Theatre - World Theatre Day 2021
What a strange time for theatre. In days a decade ago, colleagues of mine and I were actively trying to sort out live performance, online performance, distributed audiences, disassociative theatre that was still distinctive from broadcast or recorded mediums like television and film.
We were often laughed at by our contemporaries. "It'll never work, the magic is lost, you should just practice film, people will never watch theatre online."
How different the last year has been. Faced with a kind of cruel and casual extinction, the embrace of the medium has had to change. And no one has come to me in the last year saying "It will never work." It simply has to work, or it dies.
And lo has there been ground gained. Stories by people have taken on new mediums, imperfect in their art, but art nonetheless. A kind of rabid desire to express and be expressed to.
I have been 'practicing' roleplay games for years now, and to see the transformative medium change in these pandemic times has been exhilarating and heartbreaking. By almost equal measure.
At the same time, theatre is having this distributed awakening in the wake of Black Lives Matter. In the wake of a year of protests, long and difficult conversations are finally starting to take place. Will there be realized change? I don't know. We've been at this precipice so many times before, and I think of all the shattered lives that have vanished by the wayside in the wake, but a practitioner of theatre somehow must still hold onto a kind of hope.
That this time, things will be different.
