AustLit

'In the first article in this issue, Julian Meyrick offers us a way of looking that seems particularly apposite in the current moment when the collateral damage from the COVID-19 pandemic to the practice and study of live performance so preoccupies us, and the way forward appears so opaque and contingent. To (perhaps grossly) simplify his far more complex assertion – that we occupy a space of both retrospective and prospective memory – the injunction to look back in order to look forward takes on poignancy in a time when we are still counting the losses in theatre scholarship and Theatre and Drama courses (particularly in Australian universities) that have been decimated in COVID-related restructures, with no clear signs regarding when or if our discipline might rebuild. And while performance venues have, on the whole, re-opened, performances or seasons are frequently cancelled as key artists contract the virus and are forced to retreat to isolation. We, as audience, have returned to witness these performances, with what Silvija Jestrovic describes as ‘an almost absurd suspension of belief, despite the all-permeating crisis which we live and breathe’.1 And, perhaps, absent a stable notion of a ‘new normal’, this condition of suspension currently conditions what Meyrick – in his article for this issue – describes our ‘capacity to imagine different futures now’. It is possible, I think, to acknowledge this positionality, or apply this useful frame, to all the articles in this issue, as each speaks out of a ‘space between’.' (Introduction)