Viral Theatre Podcast

Episode 2: Sarah Bay-Cheng presents her paper on „Theatre Without Theatre: Performance Transmission as Translation“. In her talk, she introduces the concept of translation to describe the adaptation of theatre for the digital medium and highlights the essential but often neglected work of the ’translator’ in digital performance. While digitalisation might be essential for theatre’s future, the translation of digital theatre is also characterised by what she referred to as “monstrous loss”: it highlights its own gaps and failures and what ‘gets lost in translation’ but also shows what labour and technology is needed to make it possible. Citing Erika Fischer-Lichte’s blatant rejection of digital theatre, Sarah Bay-Cheng‘s talk also asks two key questions for any study of viral theatre: “What is the relevance of liveness?” and “What are alternative ways and spaces in which liveness can be created?“