Indonesian Performing Arts in the Era of Covid-19: Digitizing Campus Theatre

In Indonesia, the Covid-19 pandemic dramatically affected many sectors, in particular modern theatre and higher education institutions that host campus theatres. This study focuses on the strategies employed by campus theatres to survive the pandemic, focusing on digital theatre productions by Petra Theatre (formerly Petra Little Theatre) in Surabaya, Play Performance Class in Yogyakarta, and Teater Kampus in Makassar posted on YouTube in 2020-2022. Taking the perspectives by Matthew Causey on digital performance, supported by Sarah Bay-Cheng’s dramaturgy of distortion of mediated theatre, and by Philip Auslander on liveness in mediatized performance, we analyze the emergence of certain aspects of mediatized/digital theatre that pertain to actor-audience relation and time-space relations exemplified by the digital performance offered by these three campus theatres.