Digital residencies: Theatre goes online

Abstract

Digital Residencies Project (2020-) was born during the 2020 lockdown from an idea of a network of Italian National Theatres: their aim was to involve the artistic community on the development and the experimentation of new digital art/performance forms designed for the online environment only; starting from a call for artistic proposal, the goal was to immerse audience connected into the web, in new formats of theatrical narration or choreographies at a time in which  all the cultural spaces were completely closed. Over four years, the winning projects have proposed: interactive storytelling, theatre piéce with the use of Virtual Reality or of the social platforms; theatrical narration supported by Artificial Intelligence, new audiovisual formats, immersive narrations with of 360° cameras, story tellings with the aid of chat bots. The evolution of technological proposals is the focus of the research in this paper, connecting them with analysis of the historical process of evolution of the Networked Theatres and networked Public and the meaning and the new forms of digital liveness and virtual theatres.