Precarious Bodies: Locating Spectatorship in the National Theatre of Scotland's Scenes for Survival Series

Abstract

This article examines Scenes for Survival, a series of short digital artworks co-created by the National Theatre of Scotland, BBC Scotland and Screen Scotland, for its intersecting dimensions of precarity. On the one hand, the series shows how a pandemic's challenges are unevenly distributed. On the other hand, it addresses the expressly precarious position of (post-)pandemic theatre – precarious in that theatre presupposes the co-presence of an audience of some sort. Drawing on Judith Butler's concept of embodied precarity, I explore how select monologues articulate a ‘new bodily ontology’, and what kind of audience is constructed in the process. As I suggest, Scenes for Survival proposes ways in which proximity and physical co-presence must be reconfigured, constructed across space and time. In doing so, the series adds to ongoing discussions of how to conceptualize digital spectatorship, especially in times when physical co-presence is impossible, and thus becomes an issue of vulnerability.