The year 2020-2021 witnessed profound and historic changes in the relationships among theater making, media, and society: from productions abruptly canceled and theater venues closing, to new digital and hybrid theater forms on social media, to a powerful racial justice movement, particularly in the US-theater community. The global health crisis has forced performance makers to redefine theater and its central social and cultural functions. This course investigates theater of the past year and a half, asking how contemporary theater's relationship to its own social and political moment has changed, perhaps for good, at a time when audiences cannot gather in person. We explored questions of institutional shift, examined significant digital performances made during the COVID-19 pandemic and traced movements for racial justice in the theater world. Our semester culminated in the creation of a living archive – digital and physical – of Berlin and New York-based pandemic theater. The living archive is composed of short documentary videos, visual collages, audio encounters, and hybrid performances. The archive was part of an exhibition and symposium (Pandemic Past/Hybrid Futures) hosted by Viral Theatres. Our two collaborating courses at Bard College Berlin and Bard Annandale held regular in-person and virtual meetings, and conducted parallel investigations into pandemic theater. The course invited artists and curators from the performing arts sector, discussed the stakes and cultural implications of archival practice, and compared notes about how to document, describe, and understand the history we have all been living through together.

Taught by Nina Tecklenburg and Ramona Mosse, Bard College Berlin Professors of Theater and Performance; Miriam Felton-Dansky, Bard College Annandale Professor Theater and Performance