The pandemic accelerated the radical shift of the theatre and performing arts towards new perspectives in the digital era. What used to be a negligible tendency on the fringe of the field became central and vital for pushing the boundaries of experiencing the theatre while being locked down in one’s own home. Online theatre evolved quickly. After it became clear that the lockdown was not going to be a mere temporary inconvenience, and audiences became dissatisfied with screenings of old recorded productions, a change was inevitable. The virtual environment became a site-specific place par excellence, and technologies allowed us to experiment and experience different levels of contact and interaction among the artist, his work, and the spectator. Creativity evolved from the simple, yet very customizable, concept of one-to-one performative projects (e.g., the Zoom event ‘Nice to meet you’, Google docs performance ‘Someone has shared a document with you’), to the very complex and technologically sophisticated shows like the 3D audio Macbeth or the fully immersive theatre-game Morpheus. The lecture focused on these new ‘immersive’ tendencies and explored the questions of artistic quality as well as the spectator´s experience.
Martina Mašlárová is a theatre critic and theorist. She graduated in theatre studies at the Department of Theatre Studies at the Academy of Performing Arts, where she currently works as a teacher and vice-dean. Her research focuses on the topics of theatre criticism, applied theatre and French literature. She is editor-in-chief of the theatre monthly periodical kød and co-founder of MLOKi, an association of the young generation of theatre critics who publish in the online magazine www.mloki.sk. She writes for various cultural periodicals and regularly participates in theatre festivals as a member of their dramaturgical boards, curator, and a guest of discussion panels. She is also involved in competitive festivals for non-professional theatres as a jury member. She publishes in domestic and foreign periodicals and monographs. She was once one of the curators of the exhibition Theatre Century – Traces and Attitudes, which was organised by the Theatre Institute of Bratislava. She is the co-author of questions for the theatrical board game, the first in Slovakia. She occasionally translates from French and English. Her translation of the book How to Write About Theatre by Mark Fisher was recently published in cooperation with the MLOKi platform.