INTRODUCTION

In March 2020, theatres around the world shuttered their doors in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. Although it was not the first time that theatres had closed to contain viral spread, the scale and length of the closure was unprecedented. Unable to gather in person, theatre companies beyond and across Canada cancelled productions and postponed entire seasons. In Canada's largest city, Toronto, 12,000 public performances were cancelled between March 2020 and March 2021, leading to an estimated loss of CDN$58 million in ticket sales, a decline of 17 million audience members, and “CDN$16 million in lost artist and production salaries/fees” (Toronto Arts Council 2021). While some organizations found the demands of creating performance under pandemic conditions untenable, many theatres began pivoting, deploying diverse strategies to present new work and engage audiences safely. Aside from the almost universal move toward forms of digital dissemination, which involved adapting existing plays or commissioning new works for virtual platforms, companies reduced cast and crew size; collaborated with other theatres; reimagined the functionality of theatre spaces; and moved to outdoor private and public venues.

This chapter considers how the “pivots” made by Toronto theatres in response to the Covid-19 pandemic represent a significant infrastructural shift in how theatre is conceived, constructed and presented. The chapter consciously employs the word “pivot” – a term that became ubiquitous in North America during the pandemic – with the dual purpose of both celebrating the creativity and ingenuity of theatres and signalling the challenge of constant adaptation. Focusing on the first and second waves (March 2020– February 2021), while acknowledging that waves varied geographically according to a series of factors (including government policies and supports, public attitudes and access to vaccines, masks and other forms of personal protective equipment (PPE)), it identifies the wide variety of artistic strategies companies developed to foreground the infrastructural reappraisal that followed. As the realities of the first pandemic wave hit, companies had to rethink their infrastructure, not only in the turn from live to virtual presentations, but also as a means of guarding against the uncertainty of last-minute changes in public health restrictions.

Around the world, urbanism in the twenty-first century is marked by contradictory trends in consumption. In high-income countries, a seemingly unending drive towards mass production and centralized global distribution in large warehouses and big-box stores sits in tension with a middle-class quest for novelty within niche markets of consumption and commodification (Zukin 2010). In a competitive world of late neoliberalism where cities have only themselves to sell, the hyper-drive to ground global capital in place and retain creatives and “culturepreneurs” leads to pockets of urban homogeneity in tension with a search for difference and particularity (Lange 2011). Informal street hawkers and traders juxtapose with a global drive to homogenize the retail landscape through shopping malls, while DIY subcultures in wealthy cities appropriate the ancient informality and localism of pop-up trade. In mid-and higher-income countries, some neighbourhoods are branded as districts of art and entertainment, while gentrification is encouraged by introducing hipster bars, cafes, galleries, studios and farmers’ markets into low-income communities and public spaces (Hubbard 2016). This palette of middle-class cultural amenities fosters consumptive opportunities to build cultural capital and distinction.

Civic leaders and real estate developers seeking to normalize neoliberal urban rule also deploy cultural capital in the marketing of lifestyles, identities and urban spaces (Novy & Colomb 2013), such that neighbourhoods, or specific spaces within them, might be experienced as “cultural” by visitors. The expressly symbolic leveraging of urban cultural infrastructure and the affective atmospheres of creativity, ethno-cultural “diversity” and heritage to change the perception of a place – culture-led urban placemaking – is inevitably linked to the destructive dimensions of urban regeneration. It builds the products of culture into places often at the expense of local communities. Civic leaders also deploy technocratic spatial rationalities in the planning of streetscapes, demonstrating hostility towards disorderly and informal appropriation of urban space by hawkers, panhandlers and the homeless for the discordance they present to a modernist aesthetic of cityness (Watson 2003). In contradistinction to the emphasis on physical and technical infrastructure as modes by which cities are made productive, street trading emphasizes “people as infrastructure” to facilitate economic and social opportunities for poor urbanites (Simone 2004).

On a Munich summer night in 2018, I attended a dance party. The music was all over the place: an Afghan qataghani was followed by German hip-hop, a Syrian dabke tune would play after a Turkish remix of an old recording of a tango track. It had been almost three years since: thousands of migrants had arrived in Munich's central train station; the city had erected refugee camps to receive newcomers; the asylum paperwork, the translation, the German lessons and the mutual aid networks had all been established.

The partygoers had grown up in many different parts of the world, many of them waiting on Germany's immigration apparatus to process their refugee claims, or their appeals after their status had been turned down. People were dancing, drinking, talking or smoking by the club door. Of the 50-plus people there, most had arrived in Munich since the proclamation of a so-called “European refugee crisis” – some by foot, by bus, by train and some, like me, by plane. We shared the same room that night because we knew the music would be diverse. While it can be challenging to dance to unfamiliar musical styles and the shift from one track to the next can be jarring, this was to be part of the night's beauty.

The party, called Plug in Beats, was billed as an “intercultural democratic dance party” (Figure 6.1). Each month, long-established Munich residents and newly arrived people came together in Orangehouse, one of the small clubs housed in Feierwerk, a city-funded cultural centre. Armed with smartphones, attendees would choose music for each other to dance to. The process, which borrowed from karaoke, followed a specific format. Attendees were greeted by Feierwerk staff and volunteers who passed around laminated cards with numbers on them. Translators were on hand, and instructions in six different languages (Arabic, Farsi, French, German, English and Spanish) were laid out around the room explaining that numbers would soon appear on a VJ screen above the stage, indicating the moment to bring one's smartphone to the DJ with a musical selection ready.