Dr Tulp and the Theatre of Zoom – An autopsy of time and presence

Bevan-Mogg, Wendy; Westling, Carina

Abstract

In June 2020, Dr Annja Neumann (director), Dr Carina Westling (artistic producer) and Wendy Bevan-Mogg (writer) were invited by Cambridge Digital Humanities to create a contemporary response to Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp, as a way of exploring the process of creating live performances remotely. Their response resulted in a short, original piece of Zoom theatre that was performed sixteen times for audiences of four at a time on 16 and 17 July, 2020, with a remote workshop and panel discussion hosted by CDH in the evening of 16 June, attended by c. 40 people. A link to a recording of the performance and a copy of the script can be found at the end of this article.

The process of writing, casting, rehearsing and staging the play threw up a range of challenges, from technical and artistic to social. We created the piece at a very particular point in time, living through the beginning of a global pandemic and the confluence of a number of social justice issues. Grappling with new technologies and new ways of working we were all out of our comfort zones - and as a wider society, experiencing trauma. Working on this piece was a rich learning experience, proving that the Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp has much to teach us, and hopefully also our audiences, nearly 400 years after it was first created.

In this article, we will describe some of the challenges and opportunities that making this piece afforded us. While we will briefly cover some of the technical challenges inherent to the process, our focus, to fit with the focus of this issue, will be on the representation of death in our production and how this was mediated by the screen of our personal computers. At once removed and direct, the experience of creating a piece of theatre over Zoom conjures questions of embodiment and audience participation. We will ask how a meditation on this painting in a time of great contemporary trauma can throw light on our own relationship with death, how the format encouraged us to consider the nature of the embodied performance, how it felt to create a piece of work when physically distanced both from actor and audience, and whether it was possible to create a contemporary Memento Mori in such unusual circumstances.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 1, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Jul 1, 2023
• Publication Date: Jul 1, 2023
• Deposit Date: Feb 21, 2024
• Journal: Revenant
• Electronic ISSN: 2397-8791
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 8
• Article Number: 17
• Pages: 377-395
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11734957
• Publisher URL: https://www.revenantjournal.com/issues/death-and-the-screen-guest-editors-bethan-michael-fox-and-renske-visser/
• Additional Information: https://www.revenantjournal.com/issues/death-and-the-screen-guest-editors-bethan-michael-fox-and-renske-visser/