Theatre in a Pandemic: Notes for a Theory of Social Distancing as an Aesthetic Category

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has generated a broad supply and demand of “responses” to and interpretations of the current situation. In the artistic field, lockdown has fostered extimacy and rewarded a series of more or less performative “community” and relational initiatives. Balconies, linked or recorded and shared through mobile phones in real time, have been redefined as spaces for participation in rituals and cultural practices of a collective nature. Specifically, in this article my aim is to reflect on performance and relational aesthetics in a lockdown and post-lockdown situation; that is, subject to logics such as social distancing or other protocols of sanitary and responsible behaviour. In this respect, I will emphasise the metamorphosis of performance, born under the sign of criticism of institutional frameworks, into one of the main channels of community production/expression.