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Image: From the production ‘Raum : Raah’. Credits: Kaivalya Plays Foundation, 2026.
Background; distance as a condition of making
I am an Indian theatre-maker. Since 2020 I have made live performance across distance, between cities, time zones and collaborators who rarely share a room. I did my MA at Royal Central during the pandemic, when the rehearsal room was spread across several countries. In 2022-23, as a German Chancellor Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, I spoke with artists and collectives in Germany about how they kept making work once being in the same place was no longer a given.
Over these years I found that distance did more than separate us. It decided what could be made, when collaborators could meet, whose connection held and which ideas survived. A lagging video link, a rehearsal split across time zones, a collaboration that existed because funding crossed a border: each began as a practical problem and ended up shaping the work. Performing Distance starts from that experience.
Notes of distance; infrastructure, labour, technics and conditions
Writing on telematic, digital and hybrid performance has mostly told two stories. Before 2020 it was a story of innovation, where new technology closed the gap between places. During the pandemic it became a story of necessity, about keeping theatre going when people could not gather. Both put technology at the centre. The conditions of making stay in the background: patchy internet, unseen technical labour, visa refusals, funding rules and the everyday tools artists actually have. Most of these accounts also come from Europe and North America, so work from the Global South rarely appears in the histories of the field.
I treat distance as part of a work's dramaturgy. The systems a performance travels through, who builds them, who pays for them and who can fix them when they fail, all belong in how we read it. The central question is how distance shapes performance made across geographic separation and unequal infrastructure, from the telematic experiments of the 1970s to today, and what language we need to talk about that work.
The labour of distance. The technical, emotional and communicative work that keeps a connection alive, and who does it.
Infrastructural asymmetry. The gap between people who can access and shape systems of connection and people who have to work with what they are given.
Distance as condition, distance as choice. When artists choose separation as a strategy and when it is forced on them, and what changes in the work between the two.
Vernacular technics. The forms that come out of working with phones, messaging apps and low-bandwidth tools that are already part of everyday life.
Image: From the production 'we are a people among stuff' Credits: Ligeti Zentrum, 2024.
Based at PTEQ, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
The research is based at the Centre for Performance, Technology and Equity (PTEQ) at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London.
Funded by a £5.6 million grant, the Centre for Performance, Technology, and Equity (PTEQ) is dedicated to innovating ground-breaking approaches to immersive and digital technologies from a performance-led perspective, in tandem with promoting social equity. The vision for PTEQ is to catalyse research and development at the intersection of performance and technology with community and cultural industries partners that will champion inclusivity, diversity, and resource equity, to transform the discipline of theatre and performance, foster cross sector-innovation, and position the UK as a global leader in intertwining social justice with technological innovation through the arts. PTEQ’s physical facilities currently include a motion capture studio and sonic arts lab, with a media lab under construction.
PTEQ is a natural home for this project. My research asks who gets to connect, on whose terms and with what resources, and PTEQ treats those questions as central to work on performance and technology. I am supervised by Prof. Kate Elswit and Dr. Liam Jarvis.
Are you making work across distance?
I would like to hear from artists, collectives, producers and technicians who make performance across distance. That could be a telematic or hybrid piece, a show that tours as a set of instructions, a performance by phone or post, or a collaboration held together over WhatsApp. I especially want to hear from people working in South Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and about work that has never been written about.
Please get in touch if you:
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have made, or are making, distance-based work and would be open to a conversation
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work on the technical or producing side and know what it takes to keep a connection alive
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hold documentation, technical riders, funding reports or archives of work that has dropped out of the record
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are researching related questions and want to exchange ideas
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would like to take part in upcoming residencies and workshops
All conversations follow Royal Central's research ethics process. Nothing you share is published without your consent, and you can withdraw at any stage.
Get in touch with me at 255943@cssd.ac.uk or gauravnijjer@gmail.com