GLEDALIŠČE, PERFORMANS IN PLES V ČASU COVIDA-19: THEATRE, PERFORMANCE AND DANCE IN THE TIME OF COVID-19

Although it is perhaps still too early to tell how the pandemic will impact the future development of theatre and performance, short-term effects are already here. Most of them are negative. Many theatre artists lost their jobs and conse-quentially faced severe social insecurity. Some of them had to search for new temporary opportunities elsewhere; others did not even return to the theatre once the situation returned to normalcy. For some theatres, COVID-19 represented such a horrible blow that they, unfortunately, had to close permanently. In general, the development of theatre art was halted or at least slowed for a while. On the other hand, theatre creators did not give up. They struggled to find new ways to express their creativity and tried to forge new tracks to reach the absent audience. Thus, the time was not entirely lost. The internet was a vehicle that successfully moved theatre and performance closer to the spectators, although it was not completely able to fill in the gap of non-presence. Online productions stretched from trans-mitting pre-recorded performances to various experiments with online platforms like Zoom and Teams. No doubt, these developments will leave an impact on future theatre productions. Whether theatres will significantly shift away from the tra-ditional concept of “social gathering” is another question that only the future can answer.
This book should have followed the symposium Theatre, Dance and Perfor-mance after COVID-19 at the 55th Maribor Theatre Festival in Slovenia in October 2020. The symposium’s title was undoubtedly naïve and too ambitious in the pre-dictions of further pandemic course, hoping the health crisis would be over by autumn of the same year. Due to health restrictions, the Festival was interrupted only after two days. The rest of the programme – including the symposium – was postponed to May 2021 when Slovenian theatres were again allowed to re-open their stages. Now, as I write these lines, the epidemic is far from being over, although, with the introduction of the vaccine against COVID-19, the prospects that theatre will stay open are now much better. The chapters published in this book were finished more than a year ago, in the spring of 2021, shortly before the symposium, when the outcome of the pandemic was far more uncertain. Their principal value is thus to bring us one of the first scholarly insights and expres-sions of the significant worries about the state of theatre art at the pandemic’s peak. The book does not treat the continuation and final “normalisation” of the pandemic and, as such, does not provide a complete insight into the dynamic relationship between theatre, performance, dance and COVID-19. Nevertheless, I still hope the reader will embrace our efforts to make this phenomenon more comprehensive and accept it as a distinct and precious document of its time.

Editor