"Connections": A Virtual Theatre Experiment in a Medieval Village

During the 22nd edition of Collinarea, Festival di Teatro Arte e Tecnologia (Collinarea, Theatre, Art and Technology Festival) the event Connections, created by Artistic Director Loris Seghizzi, took place in Lari. The whole village was cabled with optic fibres to set up the first theatre experiment with different and separately located stages. The social distancing due to the Covid-19 pandemic offered the occasion to stage a polytopic performance in the streets of the village, located in the Tuscan hills. The play, just like any TV broadcast, was coordinated remotely from a control centre at the municipal theatre. Each of the three sites set up for the event included a stage for live performances and used screen mirroring to stream the event in a sort of intertwined narrative. This paper describes the performance with a focus on its contemporary rewriting of Sophocles’ Ajax by the theatre companies Civillieri-Lo Scicco and Scenica Frammenti.