Abstract:

Education and theatre are two human activities most adversely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic as lockdowns and closures separate people and interrupt interactions between them.

In this research, I examine the students’ online theatre learning and practice experiences in a course titled “The Art of Love” that I have taught for two semesters in Spring and Fall 2022. It is a semester-long general education course offered to undergraduate students at Beijing Foreign Studies University. I conducted the class together with two colleagues, trying to interpret the theme of romantic love from the perspectives of theatre, film, and sociology. My focus was on the classical indigenous Chinese theatre known as xiqu. According to the syllabus, students were supposedly to be introduced to the xiqu masterpieces, study some basic performing skills and techniques through lectures and workshops, and present what they had learned in their final projects. There were a number of tasks the students could choose from for the final projects, but the short theatre production has always been their favorite. In reality, though, both semesters started out as in-person classes but were increasingly interspersed with distance learning sections due to epidemic situation development until they were completely switched to online classes. And the students' theatre productions were eventually prepared and presented online via virtual social networks.

The teaching/learning process was impacted by that switch from physical to virtual classes, imposed by COVID-19, in the aspects of content, delivery, learning outcome, and assessment. And the impacts were a mixture of limitations and surprises. For example, the master-pupil style of training for singing, dancing and acting wouldn’t fit in the frame of distance learning, hence almost no xiqu performing skills and techniques were fairly demonstrated, let alone highlighted, in the final presentations. Nonetheless, the students’ final projects, compared to traditional theatre, were extraordinarily engaging. In the virtual performance space, the student actors/crews, then back at home in different parts of China, acted simultaneously, reacted to each other immediately, and by manipulating the web camera, interacted with the audience members seamlessly. Moreover, the presenters even worked out new stage properties, settings and costumes, virtually. Also, by “re-living,” involuntarily, the dramatic motifs of separation and test of life and death in the face of calamity, contemporary young college students have reinforced their connection with the classical Chinese theatre playwrights and characters in the plays that are centuries apart.

Contrary to the Nietzschean claim “Theatre is dead!”, theatre may continue to grow and prosper in the era of virtual reality and metaverse. Likewise, online learning had been part of the teaching/learning process prior to the COVID-19 breakout. Though not yet replacement, it was certainly more than supplements to the traditional in-class experience. With the advancement in technology as well as the spurs of the pandemic, online learning may well develop and evolve as the future of education.

Keywords:

Online theatre practice, virtual social network, connection and disconnection, COVID-19 pandemic.