Performans i/jako zarażanie się w czasie pandemii Covid-19

To spotlight the double-sidedness of the relationship between theatre and medicine, the chapter focuses on communicable diseases that has been a key-figure for both vital developments in the avant-garde theatre of the twentieth century (from Antonin Artaud and Living Theatre till Christoph Schlingensief) and new performative strategies and tactics for political intervention and the mobilization of participants and bystanders (zaps, lock-on, flash mobs and smart mobs) in the first two decade of our century. The latter ones have been particularly influenced by the cultural imagination of digital (technological) networks and circulation of affects (emotion) as fundamentally viral, that is spreading by replication and mutation. In this context the chapter engages critically with recent works on theatre and performative practices as infectious medium (for instance, "Theatre as Contagion", 2019), especially with Miriam Felton-Dansky’s recent concept of "viral performance" which underlines her line of reasoning in the eponymous book (2019). Addressing specific form of virality in contemporary theatres, Felton-Dansky concentrates her attention on how "viral performance pressurizes and upends conventional ideas about spectatorship and participation" (197). The chapter, however, takes a closer look at how critical changes in medicinal practices and discourses on viruses and their spreads, pandemic and ways of contamination as well as Merrill Singer concept of syndemic have influenced (and still does) various forms of "contagious theatre" and "viral performance" in 20th and 21st centuries. Since Felton-Dansky published her book before the Covid-19 global outbreak, her main thesis of viral performance forms that are no longer necessarily linked to digital dissemination has to verified. To that end, the chapter pays a special concern to the issue of much needed changes in so-called outbreak narrative which Priscilla Wald pointed at already in her Contagious (2008), and how it may influenced a critical entanglement of theatre (performance) and communicable diseases.