Organised by Ramona Mosse, Research Area 2: "Travelling Matters".

Viral Theatres invites you to a day of public online workshops to investigate the changes to theatre infrastructures and aesthetics during the pandemic. In our three sessions, we are exploring how the shift to digital forms has affected how liveness becomes constituted, what constitutes participation and how we might document the current moment. With this workshop day of exchanges and collaborative discussions with a series of international guests, we launch a series of practical laboratories with XR and digital participatory technologies that seek to capture the forms of attention we bring to digital theatre and aims at creating a Living Archive of post/pandemic performance practices.

Viral Theatres is a practice-based research project and a collaboration between EXC 2020, Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt Universität Berlin, and Bard College Berlin. It is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

2pm - 3:45pm: Input Session 2 - Digital Forms of Participation
The theatre as a building, institution and event is full of rituals: rituals of going to and being at the theatre; rituals of rehearsing and performing; rituals of practicing collectivity, of becoming a public. In this session, we want to explore how this participation in and partaking of ritual changes in the digital public sphere and how these processes and encounters can be translated into or rendered in alternate ways in the virtual realm.
Input talks by:
Kai Padberg (EXC 2020, Freie Universität Berlin)
Sarah Reimann (Hebbel am Ufer Theater Berlin)
Stefanie Sobelle (Decameron Row)

3:45pm - 4pm: Break

4pm - 6pm: SESSION: What is Digital/Hybrid Liveness?
If the experience of bodies in one space is no longer the agreed core of theatre, how does liveness come about in the digital sphere? How does one create live performance for a geographically dispersed audience while still building forms of connection and collective experience? In this session, we will talk about alternative ways through which liveness becomes inscribed into digital media through social movements of going viral, through measurement, and through interactive dramaturgies.
Input talks by:
Miriam Felton Dansky (Bard College Annandale)
Prof. Daniel C. Richardson (University College London)
Mario Simon (Akademie für Theater und Digitalität)
Birgit Lengers (Junges DT, Deutsches Theater Berlin)

6 - 6:30pm: Break

6:30pm - 8pm: SESSION 3 - Pandemic Archiving
How does one document closure and pause in cultural production? We want to explore this question of creative forms of archiving both as a way of tracing the exceptionalism of the present moment and as an approach to understand the lasting transformation of the arts sector currently under way. How can the global dimension of these pandemic arts practices be captured? Can experience rather than objects and materials be documented? Documenting turns into a collaborative act and a space of coping with the present as much as sketching alternatives to the pressures of the now.
Input talks by:
Sara Örtel (Archive, Akademie der Künste Berlin)
Joseph Dunne-Howrie (DocPerform / City, University of London)
Kai van Eikels (Ruhr Universität Bochum / Fonds Darstellende Künste)