ALVIN TAN

FOUNDER AND ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF THE NECESSARY STAGE

“[The pandemic] has given me time to reflect on theatre as a form, and if other forms can be made that borrow from live theatre, such as Zoom performances.

I co-created Who’s There? with the Transit Ensemble, and I threw myself into the exploration and discovered Zoom performances must be made for Zoom and with cyber devices. Zoom performances are not to

( replace ‘live’ theatre because it cannot. It should be regarded as a new form. If things do or can go back to normal, then I would—from my foray into making Zoom performances—have new approaches or ideas of how I would use multimedia in my black box shows; or my appreciation of interdisciplinary composition would be different, as I would now be able to draw from the interdisciplinary experiences I had from creating Zoom performances.

The purpose of theatre heightens during Covidian times. It’s the physical gathering of a community that cannot be replaced by Zoom performances. Yet how theatre inspires Zoom performances make us use Zoom as a platform for international intercultural collaborations, in a way that the usual form of theatremaking would find challenging to afford due to the costs involved; these can only happen when there are special commissions.”