DIGITAL THEATRE
ARCHIVE
documenting twenty-first-century online and hybrid theatre
and performacnce from before and during the pandemic
Team
Magda Romanska
Kasia Lech
Jeff Gagnon
KJ Jarboe
Yizhou Zhang
Categories
Zoom Plays
Social Media Plays
WhatsApp Plays
Soundcloud Plays
VR | AR Plays
DIGITAL THEATRE ARCHIVE
The Digital Theatre Archive (DTA) documents a broad range of web-based interactive theatre experiments, including podplays and other sonic performance experiments (sound games, sound walks, transoperas, immersive soundscapes), network plays (works of theatre written in blockchain or navigated through on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram), robo- and data plays (algorithmic performances, technobjects, and data-based dramaturgies), Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) plays (video game plays, performances on Second Life, performances which combine VR or AR and live interaction), and other interactive, new media-based theatre and performance projects.
A story in Research historical context
While the closures of performance venues were devastating to many theatre artists and smaller institutions, it also spurred unprecedented innovation. Unable to mount traditional in-person, live performances, many theatre artists embraced the live and interactive online shows using a variety of interactive technologies and formats, including teleconferencing, video games, VR, AR, haptic technologies, social media, and phone and text messaging. The pandemic fostered an incredible outpouring of creativity and cutting-edge, intermedial and transmedial experiments. Although it predated the pandemic, the nascent artistic form flourished during the lockdowns; variously called digital theatre, transmedia theatre, hybrid theatre, or cyber theatre, it blended theatre with film, video game, augmented reality, and teleconferencing.
Prior to the pandemic, the majority of mainstream theatre and performing arts organizations remained hesitant to embrace digital culture and the potential for experimentation and audience outreach it offered. This reluctance persisted even as they faced challenges to audience expansion for in-person programming, now in competition with at-home streaming services, and despite the impact that effective digital communication could have on their bottom line. There was scepticism about the digital tools, concern over the implementation cost, and lack of in-house technological expertise.
In opposition to mainstream organizations, however, the pre-pandemic fringe and avant-garde segment of the performing arts did engage with the increased digitalization of our public sphere, producing a wide range of cutting-edge, web-based interactive theatre experiments. – Digital Access to the Performing Arts (2026)
Why Archive?
Although a substantial online performance culture currently exists, as of now, there are no available digital humanities models for the preservation, curation, and archivization of these multiplatform theatre works. As long as this remains the case, works by many theatre artists are often undocumented, and thus they are lost, and unrecoverable. Even those which are preserved in some form by their creators remain siloed, without a space of discourse for this newly developing culture to reflect upon itself. Developing methodologies for documenting and archiving digital performance art is essential for theatre and performance research as new digital technologies challenge our understanding of liveness, embodiment, and materiality. The Digital Theatre Archive contributes to this effort by bringing together production information, and links to related materials, providing a shared resource for research and critical discussion.
Team
Magda Romanska
Kasia Lech
Jeff Gagnon
KJ Jarboe
Yizhou Zhang
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Say Hello!
The Digital Theatre Archive (DTA) is an educational, research, and archival project serving the public good. Materials are presented solely for education, research, and historical documentation. No permission for commercial reuse or data mining is granted through this website. The archive follows an indexing approach similar to Google’s, using publicly available information, press materials, and content provided by artists, with links to original sources where available. Copyright in third-party materials remains with the respective rights holders. If you’re an artist or rights holder and would like to add, modify, or remove an entry or image, or provide a missing credit, please contact us.