Originally entitled “(Post)Pandemic Theater”, the course ran at the Bard Annandale and Bard Berlin campuses and focussed on the profound impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the performing arts. Using case studies from US and Germany, the course focused on how the performing arts had fundamentally altered their reach, audience, institutional structures, and the quality of social encounter by going digital. It investigated how these changes challenged the established ideas of theatre’s liveness, physicality and communality.

The course ran alongside the applied research project “Viral Theatres”, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and also received a development grant from the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN).

Building on the fundamental collaborative aspect of the 2021 course which engaged students from different cultural and geographical backgrounds. The course was adopted as an Open Society University Network (OSUN) Network Collaborative Course (NCC) under a new title, “Digital Theaters”. As an NCC course, it ran in a hybrid format with students meeting in person at their local campuses and also via online across the network. The focus shifted to highlight creative collaborations between different geographies–notably between the Global North and Global South–and the development of a Living Archive of student works. Students from six campuses collaborated on the study and creation of digital theatre works. The collaborating campuses were: Bard College Annandale, USA; Bard College Berlin, Germany; Central European University, Vienna, Austria; Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia; University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa; and Birkbeck, University of London, UK.

The course changed its name to Performance and Digital Culture and developed a more in-depth collaboration between campuses by pairing campuses to work together throughout the entire semester. A series of workshops with guest artists allowed students to hone their digital skills with professional artists and devise their own creative performances. The course continued to shift its focus to the creation of digital theatre works. It also expanded to novel topics such as generative AI, critically questioning of the commercialisation of digital culture and of the inherent biases and opacities of the digital industry.

In January 2024, select students from the Fall 2023 cohort were able to join an OSUN-funded week-long intensive training in Bogotà, in which students from 10 countries created the live-stream performance entitled “Why Dig up Graves?” that was presented to in-person and online audiences. The week-long intensive training was funded by the Network Collaborative Courses Program of OSUN.

In the fall semester of 2024, the NCC course was offered at two Global South campuses, the Universidad de los Andes and the University of Witwatersrand. The unique positionality of these spaces provides a fertile ground for the creation of collaborative digital theatre works that explore the unique circumstances of these two vibrant cultures and promote a dialogue across geographies.