On the first day of April 1649, on the predominantly rural manor of Walton, Surrey, the sight of people preparing land for the plow was unremarkable. To see men up at dawn, dressed for the field in broad-brimmed hats, homespun waistcoats, and short breeches, loosening or breaking up clods with their spades, stooping to toss aside root and rock, was typical. What did raise eyebrows, however, was the sight of such busyness on a Sunday, the Sabbath, and on no less remarkable ground than George Hill, with its “very barren,” sandy soil. When questioned, Gerrard Winstanley reframed this performative break with religious, social, and agricultural norms as he did in his soon to be published manifesto, The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced. To work this land was to “declare . . . by action,” as well as by word, that Winstanley, the self-described “prophet” William Everard, and a small number of others had been sent by the Creator to begin their mission of transforming “the Earth [into] a common Treasury for all, both Rich and Poor.” Rural, religious, and resource poor, the Digger collective has not received substantial attention from performance studies scholars. Even some historians of the seventeenth century have questioned the significance of this small, nonviolent agrarian group in the intensely “charged political atmosphere of the 1640s,” but as a collective whose theatrical social performances raised them from obscurity to national visibility, Diggers are in some ways the epitome of this era.

The crowded marketplace in Thiruvananthapuram (aka Trivandrum) thronged with people in the late nineteenth century. Men and women clad in white mundu teemed about the busy street buying oil and salt, horseshoes and iron farm implements, coarse cloth, coir rope, jaggery, and palm toddy. The men were mostly bare-chested, though some, unmindful of the sweltering heat, wore white long shirts or an upper-body cloth. While a few young women wore printed blouses, many, particularly the older women, wore no upper-body clothes except for large, beaded necklaces made of red-colored stones. Most people, with the exception of the men who clothed their upper body, walked along the sides of the road, leaving the path clear for the occasional bullock cart. These bullock carts, also known as villuvandi, carried young men-about-town, almost exclusively landowning, upper-caste Nairs. Dressed in a spotless white shirt, white mundu, and matching white turban, the Nair riding his villuvandi assumed the haughty air of a master surveying his subjects; out to observe his inferiors as much as be seen as a superior. These Nairs, and other upper-caste men and women, had the exclusive right of way, on bullock cart or on foot, the right to wear clean white clothes, and, of course, the right to ride a villuvandi. These rights were codified through caste-based rules or norms known as jati maryada, which governed all aspects of social behavior.

In early January 2020, when Chinese theatre director Wang Chong (b. 1982) arrived in New York to remount his production of Nick Payne's Constellations for the Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival, he couldn't have predicted that this would be the last time for months that he would watch his actors from the middle of a full house. By the time his work-in-progress solo show, Made in China 2.0, opened at the Asia TOPA Festival in Melbourne, Australia, at the end of that February, it was clear that there would be no live theatre in Wang's hometown of Beijing for some time. All of China was on lockdown as the disease now tragically familiar as COVID-19 swept the country. Then, as Wang returned to Beijing in early March, businesses around the globe were shuttering, theatres were going dark, and theatre artists were confronting an unprecedented challenge to their personal safety, livelihoods, and ability to make meaningful art. In short order, some well-resourced theatre institutions began to stream performance recordings and reconfigure their seasons for online platforms. Only a month after returning home, Wang Chong joined this mass online movement with his production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, streamed live on 5–6 April 2020 as Dengdai Geduo.

In March 2020, Southern Illinois University in Carbondale (SIU) went into lockdown. With the annual Big Muddy New Play Festival about to kick off—two productions entering tech and four full-length staged readings rehearsing—SIU's M.F.A. Playwriting Program had been left in the lurch. COVID-19 and the scramble to move courses online and to graduate our M.F.A.'s canceled the entire festival. A year later, still online, the SIU M.F.A. Playwriting new play festival did not meet this same fate. Based on twelve months of experimentation, the program was able to develop a streaming festival. Our 2021 new play festival on YouTube brought together more than forty artists across eight time zones to collaborate with our five graduate student playwrights. The international ensemble, represented in an interactive map (Fig. 1), showed how open-access software and streaming platforms could help students at our rural university transcend our limited geography.

During the summer of 2020, I intended to make my second visit to Iqaluit, Nunavut, to speak with people involved in performance and climate science practices, engage in “co-performative witnessing” (methodology after Dwight Conquergood), and work to make my doctoral research useful to communities in Nunavut.1 Needless to say, that didn't happen. However, the limitations imposed by COVID-19 have also been opportunities for all of us in performance studies to renew our understandings of what it is we do. The pandemic has forced me to understand my dissertation project differently and to reassess the complex process of respectfully engaging communities to which I do not personally belong.

As collaborators who have been working together virtually since 2017, we have written plays and articles, conducted artist interviews, and are in the process of writing a book about teaching older adults theatre. When the pandemic came, everything else in our lives moved online, and we encountered new challenges with both our teaching and our scholarship. We were tasked with transitioning our theatre students to a virtual environment while conducting research for our book. We knew what was successful for us, as working online had helped our own practice, but would it be effective for students? And was it possible to write a scholarly book without access to academic libraries and archives? Our experiences over the past year reminded us that it shouldn't require a pandemic to rethink best practices in teaching and research. While the lessons we learned were because of a restructured academic environment, the issues we addressed existed previously and were often ignored. These are some of the things we will take with us postpandemic as educators and scholars.

In April 2020—only weeks after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic—the New York Times published an article titled “Why Zoom Is Terrible.” Quoting a gustatory simile from Sheryl Brahnam of Missouri State University, the article declared, “In-person communication resembles video conferencing about as much as a real blueberry muffin resembles a packaged blueberry muffin that contains not a single blueberry but artificial flavors, textures and preservatives.”1 It has been a year marked by the absence of “in-person” connection, or in the language of our field, of spatial copresence. The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally disrupted our ability to share space. Spatial copresence, it turns out, is what the coronavirus requires to spread. The virus, in this sense, is a phenomenon of the live. While technologies like Zoom have maintained our capacity for temporal copresence, the now ubiquitous status of “Zoom fatigue” points to new ways to consider spatial copresence, and by extension “liveness.”

Because sensory theatre productions are designed with neurodiverse audiences in mind, practitioners are first and foremost concerned with accessibility at all levels for their audience members, incorporating multiple senses throughout a performance to allow a variety of entry points for audiences that may have wildly divergent—and often competing—access needs. One-to-one interaction between performers and audience members results in highly flexible performances that respond to physical and auditory input from individual audience members, through which performers curate customized multisensory experiences that communicate the production's theatrical world to its audience. Given this reliance on close-up interaction, the circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic have posed a particular challenge for sensory theatre makers. In in-person sensory theatre, performers focus on neurodivergent audience members, with parents and paid carers often taking a (literal) back seat, but remotely delivered sensory theatre during COVID-19 hinges on the carer's facilitation of sensory engagement curated by sensory theatre practitioners. Oily Cart, a pioneering London-based sensory theatre company, responded to COVID-19 restrictions with a season of work presented in various formats in audiences’ homes, and their production Space to Be marked a shift in the company's audience engagement to include an emphasis on the carer's experience.1 Using this production as a case study, I argue that the pivotal role adopted by carers during the pandemic has the potential to shape future in-person productions, moving practitioners toward a more holistic, neurodiverse audience experience that challenges a disabled–nondisabled binary by embracing carers’ experiences alongside those of neurodivergent audience members.2

In March 2020 I came home from a theatre conference with a nagging cough, which I had been fighting for some time. Yet, it deepened and strengthened over the next few days. In the following week, symptoms accumulated and were strange and fluctuating: an experience with which I would become all too well acquainted in my COVID journey. Two weeks later on a second telemedical appointment a doctor heard me describe the coughing and chest burning I felt—where it almost felt like a sunburn—and told me it sounded like I had COVID. The inhaler she prescribed helped, but I originally dismissed her diagnosis. These were the early days when a test could not be found or taken, so I lacked confirmation that my body would verify to me for the months following through more drastic measures. A year later, after ongoing and prolonged symptoms of costochondritis, fluctuating high heart rates, difficulty breathing, and a multitude of costly hospital and specialist visits—including now being a part of the Post/Long COVID clinic in my state—I am changed. My health, like most of our lives this past year, follows a path of uncertainty and unknowns.

My experience of this pandemic began with bureaucracy. I want it to end with dancing.

There was certainly much about the hurried switch from in-person to online teaching and learning in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic that inspired angst. The decisions that many colleges and universities made to halt on-campus activities and deconcentrate their communities left scores of us scrambling to pack up some of the things we hoped would help us withstand a few weeks away from our offices and classrooms. When I think back on those frenzied days, I often chuckle at how naive I was about the extent to which the pandemic would radically upend our lives, forcing us to rethink every aspect of our ways of being in the world. I was in the middle of leading a discussion on The Tempest in my dramaturgy course when the official word came down from university administrators that all classes would move online and most students would have to vacate their residence halls. A palpable feeling of dread quickly swept over the stuffy classroom. Students began to weep and to wonder out loud what the news would mean for, say, their senior thesis projects or the department's futuristic mounting of The Tempest, which would have to shutter before its second weekend of scheduled performances. I tried my best to remain optimistic, even as I too began to question what the fast-moving changes would mean for how we would finish out the semester. I felt a special call to offer comfort, reaffirming my commitment to supporting students no matter what was ahead.

The last seminar of my “Introduction to Literary Theories” course in the fall semester of 2020 involved really difficult material on gender and race; it was exposing; none of the students had their cameras on. I was nearly in tears. Kept composure. We had been navigating well through the semester, with this and the other first-year module on poetry—subjects adjacent to theatre as a result of my situation within a department of English literature. This semester, I've been more bold, gently asking students to turn cameras on; I remember, though, always, Owen Parry's articulation of audience participation at the start of a Zoom event for the Welsh National Theatre. Some people hang back; some people are highly present (front-row types—I was always one of those); but all of this is good.1 I've been relaxing my need to “see” everyone out there. As a committed lecturer—a relapsed performer who has found solace in lecture stages—I'm always keen to read the room, normally; to see body posture, faces, engagement or puzzlement, and to respond to this; everything nonverbal that goes on. I was devastated, unsurprised, at the end of a conversation with a colleague on the development of what may become a major “Creative Hub,” to hear that our lecture halls might be replaced with sort of multifunction rooms, as if movable chairs meant we could suddenly be free. I think not enough is understood of the theatre of a lecture hall—the theatricality, the performativity, of what goes on—ways this is live, deeply so; ways students are not “passive” at all listening. That we don't need to go to “participatory art” in order to find ourselves within an ethical, social, committed space together; everything of that sort is lost with screens, or nearly. The sentiment of speaking out into a void.

The year of COVID-19 social distancing is a reminder that people can and will gather in person in mass acts of resistance and community care, even in a pandemic. This year highlights how theatres, theatre skills, and theatrical techniques can be a key part of community building and dissent. The examples of the Twin Cities in summer 2020; Portland, Oregon, in 2020–1; and France in spring-summer 2021 showcase the potential for theatre artists to use their skills and spaces to support protest work. I highlight these three examples due to my personal connections (I am from the Twin Cities; live in Portland and serve as a legal observer during the Protests; and, in my scholarship, specialize in French theatre and protest), due to the scale of these actions, and in order to amplify the pandemic protest and performance work happening in these places. Together, the efforts of Twin Cities, Portland, and French activists and artists showcase how, against a backdrop of mourning and anxiety, the pandemic has been a time of invigoration in mass protest, mutual aid, and coming together to try to build better worlds.