Theatres and arts institutions around the world have closed their doors and shuttered lights, interrupting premieres, runs, and rehearsal processes. Festivals are postponed, seasons suspended. The theatre is closed, yet the theatre keeps performing. Performances work their way out in our private thoughts or distanced conversations, in makeshift configurations across media. We imagine a release, a gathering together, an encounter with the sublime, a small act of repair. So, as communities fragment into socially distant parts, we propose a festival of imagined theatres alive to this state of emergency.<\/p>\n
In putting forth an \u201cemergency\u201d issue of Imagined Theatres<\/em> we name both the occasion of our meeting and a mode of emergent becoming. The Oxford English Dictionary <\/em>offers an obsolete understanding of emergency as \u201cthe process of issuing from concealment, confinement.\u201d So, too, we see this as an ongoing process, reviewing submissions as they arrive and issuing small groups of imaginary performances week by week from our confinement. Around the world people have been ordered to shelter at home, while leaving those without shelter or far removed from home exposed to a virulent atmosphere. Our private spaces, once concealed backstage, now appear as backdrops to remote conferences and classrooms, to virtual happy hours and dinner parties.<\/p>\n We find ourselves, as the dictionary tells us a little further down, at \u201ca juncture that arises or \u2018turns up\u2019;\u00a0esp.<\/em>\u00a0a state of things unexpectedly arising, and urgently demanding immediate action.\u201d Donald Trump may falsely claim that \u201cno one could have expected this\u201d though experts have long imagined the possibility of a pandemic, even rehearsing its course in simulations. But the lived experience of these conditions is another matter. What actions are available to us on these narrowed stages? What kinds of immediacy might we find in our newly hyper-mediated exchanges? Who gets to be live in \u201creal time\u201d when clogged networks decompose streaming videos, classrooms, conversations into pixelated clouds? Perhaps we cluster nightly on Netflix or Hulu waiting for the wheel to stop spinning, the movie to start playing again. Perhaps we watch performances online, as theatres and institutions open their archives to the public, or construct novel versions of live radio drama, concerts, dances, dramas. Perhaps we struggle to find a signal, sitting in library parking lots or holding our phones just so that we might connect to a public server. And, as if we needed reminding, the OED <\/em>closes by defining emergency as a \u201cpolitical term, to describe a condition approximating to that of war [sic];\u00a0occasionally<\/em>\u00a0as a synonym or euphemism for war; also\u00a0state of emergency<\/em>, wherein the normal constitution is suspended.\u201d<\/p>\n Imagined Theatres <\/em>began as a platform for artists and thinkers of the stage to explore acts that resources, conventions, or the contours of reality deemed impossible or impractical; that landscape has shifted drastically over the last months. Imagined Theatres<\/em> also originated out of a need to experience performance while living far from the people who make it; we are all living in that place now.<\/p>\n We will keep reviewing and publishing submissions in waves as long as the emergency remains in force, adding to this archive in biweekly iterations during our collective confinement. Join our mailing list for news of each release and send us word of your own performances. Together, let us explore what theatre can do in this moment and what it will emerge to become.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Theatres and arts institutions around the world have closed their doors and shuttered lights, interrupting premieres, runs, and rehearsal processes. Festivals are postponed, seasons suspended. The theatre is closed, yet the theatre keeps performing. Performances work their way out in our private thoughts or distanced conversations, in makeshift configurations across media. We imagine a release, […]","protected":false},"template":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.imaginedtheatres.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/issues\/643"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.imaginedtheatres.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/issues"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.imaginedtheatres.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/issue"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.imaginedtheatres.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}