I have hesitated for a while to engage with the increasingly ubiquitous “[insert own subject field] in times of Covid-19” catchphrase, or variations thereof. This is because of some personal reservations about the appropriateness of turning a public health emergency — and immense human tragedy — into the latest academic mantra while the global pandemic is still in full swing and no foreseeable end (or “post-coronial” condition, as some are calling it already) is yet in sight. At the same time, on a professional level, I have been observing how the coronavirus crisis has profoundly affected my two main research areas, Chinese and theatre studies, and perhaps permanently altered the ways we think and work in these fields.

The past months have seen a proliferation of opinions on China’s pandemic response and the strategies of viral containment adopted by governments across the Chinese-speaking region. The media have sometimes presented the varying degrees of success of these measures as evidence to the effectiveness, or not, of authoritarian versus democratic regimes. Meanwhile, an escalation of racialized discourse on COVID-19 has given rise to a spate of virulent xenophobic attacks against ethnic Chinese people worldwide. 

As for the theatre, as a sector that relies substantially, if no longer exclusively, on physical proximity in a shared time and space, protracted lockdowns, venue closures, and travel restrictions have forced an almost complete shutdown of its embodied and live dimensions. But the new anti-pandemic guidelines have also fostered creative responses to the COVID-19 crisis and imaginative approaches to developing and sharing work virtually, in remote conditions and between distant bodies.

To some extent, the current pandemic reality brings new challenges to the performance model that my latest book, published just weeks before the new coronavirus reached Europe, defines as “transnational Chinese theatres”. Transnational Chinese theatres is a method of intercultural collaboration that connects communities of practice across the contemporary Sinosphere. It posits the existence of a rhizomatic ecology constituted by mobile networks of relations between practitioners based in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and ethnic Chinese communities worldwide. The broader geopolitical variation of this model, transnational Asian theatres, expands its conceptual remit to encompass exchanges not only within the Sinosphere but also across Asia, particularly East Asia, to explore practices of historical cross-referencing of political processes and collective memories through collaborative performance-making.

The concept of transnational Chinese theatres frames the history of Chinese-language theatres as a history of journeys. Transnational Chinese theatres are forged by the movement and circulation of people, technologies, and creative formats, and foreground the production of performances through travel, sustained person-to-person interaction, and embodied collaboration. But now that movement has stopped, and remoteness has replaced presence as the main mode of interpersonal contact, what kind of transnational journeys can there be? How can theatre travel? What kind of intercultural collaboration is possible? How can transnational Chinese theatres be produced and performed, now and in the future?

Although the global pandemic has disrupted the usual processes of devising, performing, and touring collaborative work, transnational Chinese theatres continue to be produced and disseminated in physically distanced and, primarily, digital settings — via video conferencing platforms, online streaming services, and social media. The virtual communities brought together through these channels of digital transnationalism have accepted the new pandemic reality not only as an inevitability but also as an opportunity to cultivate new modes of making and sharing theatre. For instance, Beijing-based director Wang Chong of Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental — an important figure in China’s postmillennial new-wave theatre — released an online theatre manifesto shortly after the première of his online production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, in early April. In Wang’s pandemic-inflected version, Gogo and Didi are recast as a heterosexual couple in a drama of confinement and forced separation during the lockdown in mainland China. Produced by the Guangzhou Opera House in partnership with Tencent and live-streamed on Tencent QQ in two parts, the production counted almost 300,000 audiences — a number that would be inconceivable for an experimental work presented in regular “live” circumstances.