Commemorating and Acknowledging the Current Moment on 3Views
Image: Thumbnail photos from 3views
written by Katharine Matthias - June 30, 2020
How do you memorialize an ephemeral art form when it moves online? In a recent interview with American Theater magazine, Sarah Ruhl and Melissa Crespo considered the role of the 3views criticism website in the current moment. At the beginning of the interview, Sarah Ruhl shares that the website was refocused during the pandemic because the survival of artists and performance houses is at-risk and that it is currently more important to nurture artists and theaters to ensure their survival.
Not only does this website refocus its attention on artists and theater-making, but it also acknowledges what has been lost through the pandemic and features those artists and plays that were postponed or cancelled through various links on the website, including having artists sing excerpts from the shows that would have happened. Sarah Ruhl refers to this website “as a slightly archaeological project” and questions “what tactile thing can we get our hands on?” for the site. As Ruhl and Crespo use this website to document and acknowledge what has been lost, it leaves the reader to ask how we can commemorate an art form that is ephemeral. Ruhl’s desire for the tactile highlights what is so special about sharing space with others; that is, tactility may be one of the fundamental aspects of theater shared in the same space.
As reopenings slowly bring us towards “normal life,” artists are left to question: how do we make theater now and what kind of theatre do we want to make when we leave this pandemic? How do we commemorate the present moment and treasure that presentness with each other? Ruhl notes that “our practice as theaters [is] to live in the present,” and theater continues to change as the present moment continually fluctuates. During this pandemic, perhaps the job is more than just innovations or relocating onto the screen, but also to discover and memorialize what has been lost.
