Walking Towards a Post-theatrical Experience: Online Mediation and Digital Immediacy in Pandemic Performance

This article explores some of the new forms of performativity that have emerged during the pandemic. It starts with an overview of the online theatre phenomenon, which has brought together old recordings and genuine intermedial experiences. Focusing on Rimini Protokoll’s app, The Walks, it affirms the idea of post-theatricality as a possible framework for understanding some of the recent developments in the cultural vocabulary of contemporary performance. The conclusion of this piece is that the most radical transformations of the current period have occurred less in the poetics of theatre than in the patterns of its reception. The spectator becomes an actual participant in a post-theatrical venture, to the extent that the prerequisites of this ancient art form are challenged and transformed through a paradoxical mixture of mediation and immediacy. The authenticity of each performance resides in this improbable combination, typical for the sense and sensibility of a new age.