Performative Responses to Anti-Asian Hate amid the COVID-19 Pandemic: Digital Activism and Community Building in WeRNotVirus

Digital Theatre, Liveness, and Participation

The shift to digital performance during the pandemic has fuelled discussions about the challenges, chances, and lasting significance of the digital in the theatrical landscape in the twenty-first century on a wider scale. Without knowing at the time when and if a return “back to normal” was going to take place, playwrights, dramaturgs, artists, critics, and scholars have engaged in a discourse about the future of theatre since the beginning of the first COVID-19 lockdown measures. Caridad Svich’s Toward a Future Theatre: Conversations During a Pandemic documents some of these conversations, which bespeak the resilience and creative power of those involved in theatre-making. Early notable scholarly publications on the changing role and forms of digital theatre include, for instance, Pascale Aebischer and Rachael Nicholas’s report Digital Theatre Transformation: A Case Study and Digital Toolkit detailing the transformation of Creation Theatre and Big Telly’s production of The Tempest from an immersive promenade performance into a digital event and including a Zoom theatre toolkit for creative practitioners, and Barbara Fuchs’s Theatre of Lockdown: Digital and Distanced Performance in a Time of Pandemic, which provides an overview of the impact of the pandemic on the development of virtual theatre as a hybrid form merging filmic and theatrical elements. The swift publication of journal special issues such as Covid-19: Theatre Goes Digital. Provocations, guest-edited by Maria Chatzichristodoulou et al., as well as Presence and Precarity in (Post‑)Pandemic Theatre and Performance, guest-edited by Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Heidi Lucja Liedke, and Tamara Radak, bespeaks the urgency of scholarly engagement and necessity to theorise and respond to the new forms of digital theatre that have outlasted the pandemic.

The notions of liveness, presence, audience engagement, and participation are among the issues most frequently discussed by scholars investigating practices of digital theatre; this is evidenced, for instance, in Philip Auslander’s publication of a revised third edition of his Liveness: Performance in a Mediatised Culture. A notable contribution to the theorisation of the digital is Jared Mezzocchi’s “Transmedia Manifesto,” in which he argues that the necessity to innovate and collaborate in rethinking theatre for an audience at home has had a significant democratising effect and led to an increase in sustainability, inclusivity, and equity. He outlines how creative digital practices can establish a shared space for many and are integral to creating a “future of anti‑racist, anti‑oppressive, accessible theatre,” which replaces the discriminatory status quo, a “Theatre of the Able.” Mezzocchi’s answer to the question of whether we can perform our social and communal connectivity in the digital space just as well as in the physical, posed by Barry Houlihan and Catherine Morris in their comments on digital theatre in the COVID-19 era (159), would undeniably be an emphatic “yes.” If Houlihan and Morris are concerned that the “digital divide” (159) may hinder participation and the feeling of community that live performances instil in audiences, Sarah Bay-Cheng argues that “in a digitally connected and networked world, participation creates presence [. . .], people do not participate by ‘being there’; people are ‘there’ by participating” (“Theater History” 130).

In a more recent article entitled “Digital Performance and Its Discontents (or, Problems of Presence in Pandemic Performance),” she interrogates Erika Fischer-Lichte’s assertion that the bodily co-presence of actors and spectators is the “constitutive moment of performance” that sets the “autopoietic feedback loop” in motion (Fischer-Lichte 74). Discussing recent examples of successful digital feedback loops, such as witnessed in the real-time Twitter audience of Fake Friends’ Circle Jerk (2020), Bay-Cheng emphasises that contemporary relations are necessarily embedded within virtual networks and stresses the importance of algorithms in establishing autopoietic feedback loops in a process of continually feeding back and forth information on our viewing preferences. She concludes that “the traditional binaries of theatrical presence and absence based on physical co-presence [. . .] are perhaps no longer meaningful to either creating or understanding post-pandemic performance” (“Digital Performance” 22). The problem of digital presence, Bay-Cheng postulates, is going to challenge the existing epistemology of theatre and performance studies.

WeRNotVirus: Viral Theatre and the Virulence of Racism

These questions concerning the impact of digital presence, as well as social and communal connectivity, are at the centre of the digital arts event WeRNotVirus. The project was funded by the Arts Council Emergency Response Fund and conducted in cooperation with Omnibus Theatre and Moongate Productions.^[2] Livestreamed via Zoom on 13 and 14 June 2020 and made accessible on YouTube afterwards, WeRNotVirus features ten newly commissioned short performances that include and merge different forms of artistic expression such as film, animation, dance, song, and poetry. They give insight into the realities and experiences of the most racially targeted and abused minority group amid the pandemic and address issues such as identity, race, stereotypes, and Othering. Two panel discussions with activists and academics, titled “The Lack of Representation of British East/Southeast Asian Voices in the Media about COVID-19” on 13 June and “Building Solidarity across Communities to Combat the Rise of COVID-19-Related Racism” on 14 June 2020, put into perspective the artistic urgency of the preceding performances. The titles of the ten performances bespeak both the fragility and strength of BESEA people and their communities, as they faced a pandemic of racist insults and attacks in addition to the COVID-19 restrictions:

The short performances which constitute WeRNotVirus are diverse in aesthetics, representation of BESEA experiences, and topics. In the following, I provide a panoramic overview of the ten performances to elucidate their unique features and to identify common themes.^[3] The first day of performances on 13 June is introduced with “Cosplay” (which appears as “I Am Not a Virus” in the video description of WeRNotVirus on YouTube), written by Enxi and performed by Leo Wan and Jennifer Lim, which begins as an act of stand-up comedy. The live performance of a comedian negotiating the importance of differentiating being British from being Chinese amid the pandemic – and asserting his Britishness whilst denying his Chinese heritage – is interrupted by his sister in China intruding into his Zoom show, clearly upset with her brother’s biased depiction of his place of origin. Concerned with the themes of blame, belonging, and family politics, the abrupt ending of this piece shows how humour and reality are not always compatible.

Similar to “Cosplay,” “Family Scenarios,” written by Will Harris and performed by Katie Leung and Sophie Yau-Sylvestre, deals with the complexities of family and identity. Both protagonists, who meet by chance, are transracial adoptees looking for their birth relations and, unable to do so, imagine family constellations, which they note down together. The animated piece in the style of a continuously evolving drawing reveals some of these through song and lyrics. As their paths divide in the end, these fictitious family scenarios are all that is left.

“The Air We Breathe,” written by Shaofan Wilson and performed by Emma Lau, is a spoken word performance using rhyming couplets, where the emotionally invested speaker directly addresses the audience to tell her story of racial discrimination, of feeling singled out, and of exclusion. In her urgent call to action, she asks us to “mend hearts, build a community” (39:51–39:53) in order to overcome hatred and create a better postpandemic world.

Jimin Suh’s “Shame,” a one-person play performed by Michael Phong Le, is occupied with the claustrophobia of lockdown – highlighted by the frustrated protagonist speaking to a broken toilet seat – and staying sane in a country “swamped with virus” (50:08–50:10) that no longer seems safe. Oscillating between wanting to leave his apartment again and being too afraid to venture outside due to experiences of racial discrimination, the protagonist is angry with himself and the world, struggling with feelings of guilt, shame, and his self-perception as a moral coward.

The first piece of the performances shown on 14 June, Amber Hsu’s “Conundrums,” is a spoken word performance by Camille Mallet de Chauny. It relates to “The Air We Breathe” in its direct communication of anger and frustration upon seeing people one loves “getting battered and bruised and blamed and beat” (6:52–6:55) as well as in its lyrical quality, using alliteration, rhyme, and repetition to reinforce its message. Next to the insights into both the personal and shared pain of a community, this performance spreads optimism and hope and appeals to the audience to imagine a different future and “let this be the moment” (12:18–12:19) to engage in building an equitable world.

“Contagion,” written by British-Nigerian playwright Oladipo Agboluaje, narrated by Simon Manyonda, and animated by NoMattsland, offers a unique perspective on COVID-19-related racism using animation, collage, and live footage. Taking into focus the racial discrimination Black people experienced in Wuhan during the COVID-19 pandemic, this piece asks its audience to interrogate one’s own patterns of stereotyping and bias as well as seemingly convenient – but often elusive and dangerous – categories, such as perpetrator and victim.

JM Arrow’s “Do My Eyes Look Small in This,” performed by Peyvand Sadeghian, makes visible the tensions which the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and religion can cause for a person who identifies as Muslim, bisexual, and British South East Asian. This one-person play features a female protagonist who is in the process of putting on make-up as well as her niqab, which, crucially, has acquired a double function in the pandemic. It both reflects the protagonist’s conscious choice of representing Muslim womanhood as diverse and is used to conceal her facial features to avoid being racially targeted. The protagonist shares her experiences of being accused of “passing privilege”: in addition to being Othered as a member of each of the groups she belongs to, she is also discriminated against from within the communities with which she identifies. The play thus complicates the notions of group identity, freedom, and belonging while challenging the idea that communities can accommodate difference.

The final piece of WeRNotVirus is entitled “No Time for Tears.” Written by Daniel York Loh and performed by Ghost and John, this performance merges spoken word, dance, collage, and song to dissect the “model minority” myth. Its use of language – rhyme, repetition, a strong emphasis on verbs, and a powerful intonation indicating a sense of urgency and agency – mirrors how rhythmic movement and dance convey its activist agenda: to resist and to speak up. The dance performance is sometimes interrupted by extreme close-ups of food scraps and waste, which not only link this piece to another WeRNotVirus piece concerned with food, “It’s Not a Game to Someone,” but also allude to the controversy about the role of wet markets in the evolution of COVID-19 and, more generally, biased views of East Asian food cultures. “No Time for Tears” expresses anger at ignorant authorities and the British government’s reluctance to act upon racist hate crimes as well as love and hope for the BESEA community and humanity at large.

At its core concerned with the anxieties and harmful effects of the pandemic, WeRNotVirus can be read as an example of viral theatre, showcasing its three characteristics: “first, the fact that both performers and spectators are in a state of disruption, second, the willingness to engage on the part of spectators, and, third, the use of communication technologies such as Zoom” (Liedke and Pietrzak-Franger 131). While WeRNotVirus is clearly emblematic of both the first and third characteristic of viral theatre, it is worth considering the second, audience engagement, in some depth. As shown in the table above, three out of five performances each day were pre-recorded, two per day took place as live performances during the Zoom events. To start each event with a live performance was a conscious choice made by the directors to maximise the feeling of liveness that the audience is accustomed to from visiting the theatre, as Jennifer Lim of Moongate Productions explains:

the idea is to simulate a “live” theatregoing experience as fully as we possibly can under the circumstances, though there’s no illusion that it can ever replace live theatre, where audiences and performers breathe the same air, share the same space and engage in a communal act of energy giving and learning. What we do have is a digital space. We would like to utilise Zoom features to enable us to come together for a “shared experience” as much as it allows. (Qtd. in Moses)

This shared experience was ensured with a warm welcome by the hosts, Leo Wan on Saturday and Moi Tran on Sunday, who also provided instructions on how to use Zoom features, such as enabling full screen and speaker view, muting microphones, and explaining how to activate closed captions and use the chat box for asking questions during the panel discussions. Interestingly, on 13 June the audience was encouraged to turn their cameras on and explore the gallery view to see and perhaps wave at fellow audience members to create “a live theatre experience as close as we can” as well as a sense of community spirit, whereas on 14 June the audience was asked to switch off cameras for the best viewing experience. For the Zoom audience members, the panel discussion following the performances opened a space for engaging with the panellists and exchanging impressions and responses. The immediacy of this shared viewing experience and WeRNotVirus’s liveness are now lost to those who watch the recordings on YouTube. Considering the autopoietic – or digital – feedback loop once more, YouTube as a streaming platform has become successful partly because it enables comments and thereby community engagement as long as videos remain available on the platform.

“I AM NOT A VIRUS”: Agency and Community

Sheen’s contribution to WeRNotVirus is the project’s signature piece and captures its essence: to speak up against all forms of racism, individually and as a group. Its significance and function within the larger framework of WeRNotVirus is mirrored in its title, which highlights the unique experientiality of COVID-19-related racism for each individual and the different effects it may have. For her pre-recorded contribution, Sheen published a call for East Asian female-identifying participants and received positive responses from nearly 100 women within two days. Each of them was sent a line of text and asked to record themselves expressing the line. This information on the production process is communicated to the audience of “I AM NOT A VIRUS” in written form before the recording begins. This is significant because it prepares the ground for a reading in terms of its feminist and community agenda. The particular power of this five-minute piece lies in its use of repetition and seemingly simplistic categories (I am/I am not) as well as binary opposites (I/you) to expose and counter common and harmful stereotypes that are frequently used to discriminate against ESEA people:

I AM NOT A VIRUS

I am not deaf – there is no need to shout at me

I am not a tourist

I am not an exchange student. English is my first language

[. . .]

I am not yellow

I am not a “peril”

I am not your scapegoat

I am NOT a virus

I am not your diversity

[. . .]

I am not a harbinger of death

I am not a bringer of pestilence

I am not a disease

[. . .]

I am the receptionist you ignored

I am the retail assistant that you made fun of

[. . .]

I am the job candidate you rejected

I am the cleaner you never see

I am the teacher you got fired because my face does not mirror yours

I am NOT a virus

[. . .]

I am a neighbour

I am YOU

I am NOT a virus

I am a human being

[. . .]

I am a daughter

I am a son

I am a mother

[. . .]

I breathe

I hurt

I bleed

I grieve

I love

[. . .]

I am loneliness

I am despair

I am NOT a virus (54:40–58:56)

In their individually crafted video snippets, which are comparable to short, fast-paced TikTok videos, the participants – laywomen alongside artists – perform their lines in different ways, resulting in an aesthetically diverse manner that relies on the women’s physical presence and foregrounds their facial expressions. Some verbally state their line in English and, in two instances, in one more language besides English – Filipino and sign language – which validates the linguistic diversity of the participants and, in addition to the subtitles used throughout the piece, enhances accessibility. Others present their line in handwriting on a blackboard, on cardboard, on paper, their T-shirt, on their skin, or on a face mask; one person uses both Chinese and English on her sign.

Due to the lockdown restrictions, most participants record their lines in their private surroundings, either inside their homes, in the backyard, or during a walk in nature, which creates a sense of intimacy; all emphasise their line by modulating intonation and stress to convey a sense of urgency. Some participants use background and costume to reinforce their line, such as choosing a poster of a “Beauty Issue” of Vogue as a backdrop to “I am not an Oriental dainty” (55:03–55:05), stating “I am not a sex slave” (54:57–55:00) while hiding in bed under her blanket, or performing the line “I am the missing person that was never found” (57:27–57:29) wearing a red dress, symbolic of missing and murdered Indigenous women, thereby establishing a connection to another minority group that experiences intersectional discrimination and infringement of their rights.

“I AM NOT A VIRUS” thus creates a space for free artistic expression and each contributor uses her own strategy of embodying her line and relating it to the audience by drawing on different costumes, settings, and props. All participants speak directly into the camera, making eye contact with the audience. By looking straight at us, their expressions of pain and anger, but also vigour and self-assertion, gain an immediacy that is difficult to evade. The frequent repetition of the central statement “I am NOT a virus” enhances this effect, as does the firmness with which each woman delivers her line.

The dramatic arc of “I AM NOT A VIRUS” is also noteworthy. Significantly, instrumental background music is used to support the dynamic movement and emotional impact of the piece. In the first part, the music remains steady as each line begins with “I am not,” bringing to the fore common stereotypes of Orientalist Othering. The utterances then become more specific and illuminate the personal experiences of discriminatory abuse BESEA people have faced during the pandemic. Starting with “I am” and accompanied by the music rising in intensity and volume, the women speak about the transgressions that members of their communities have witnessed, such as “I am the person you verbally abused on the bus” (56:45–56:47). In this part of the piece, for the first time the audience is addressed as “you” and clearly distinguished from the speaking “I.” Through this juxtaposition of “I” and “you,” the perpetrators of anti-Asian hate crimes, as well as those who would perhaps not openly admit their proneness to prejudice and racist thought, emerge as the addressees of Sheen’s piece. In this open confrontation of the addressees with the lived experience of being discriminated against, the “human sensitivity to the invisible and intangible energetic change of bodies” (Tait 14) can be felt physically. The piece is designed to evoke affective reactions from the audience, which may include goosebumps or chills, a sense of awe or shame, and being moved. These are reinforced as the participants assert their personhood and humanity, their social identities, and their feelings as the piece progresses. The statement “I am YOU” (58:04–58:05) constitutes the performance’s most utopian moment in which the audience may experience “a processual, momentary feeling of affinity” as the binary opposition that was established before is collapsed, so that the “spectators experience themselves as part of a congenial public constituted by the performance’s address” (Dolan 14). It ends with thirteen repetitions of “I am NOT a virus,” then a woman confidently puts on her face mask that states “NOT A VIRUS” and breathes out audibly, in a sigh of relief, perhaps, confirming that everything has been said that needed to be said (58:55–59:32).

“I AM NOT A VIRUS” uses affect to empower the voices of a community and to evoke empathy by deconstructing stereotypes and engaging familiarity and intimacy. Sheen’s project is democratic and participatory as it involves individuals to speak both for themselves and as a member of the BESEA community, thus enabling agency, which Emine Fişek defines as “an individual or a community’s ability to articulate their viewpoint about a particular experience, and to their opportunity to exercise influence over the process of communal artmaking” (70). Each participant claims her own voice by speaking up directly and self-assertively against racial hate, yet, at the same time, the statements as a whole counteract separation and evoke a sense of group cohesion and agency as a community. Set into one coherent piece, the individual voices emerge as a chorus of women sharing similar stories, which often include experiences with discrimination and harassment in more than one category of being perceived as Other. Sheen’s all-female participants thus reinforce its intersectional feminist agenda, which is a significant milestone in making visible the complex, multi-layered issues that BESEA women face in society. Furthermore, the particular focus on women voicing transgressions makes this project relatable to the aims of the #MeToo Movement: it similarly empowers those who are usually not heard and refuses to portray them as victims, opening a space to connect and overcome pain and trauma as a community instead.

“It’s Not a Game to Someone”: “Anger into Making Us Thrive”

Martin’s one-person play, performed by Kirsty Rider, employs the social-media genre of the food vlog and conjoins its popularity with that of East Asian food culture in the West. Essentially, this performance – contrary to what its title allows us to anticipate – aesthetically plays with forms of blending (in) and the processes of creation and transformation on two levels: food and community. Its disconcerting effect is established in the first images we see, which are extreme close-ups of a hand kneading slushy greens in a jar. Before the first words are spoken, we can imagine that what we see here may be kimchi. This is confirmed as the protagonist – somewhat indifferently – begins to instruct her audience on the first step of kimchi-making: “Cabbage. Part each leaf, salt liberally, rub in” (12:54–12:59). The mise en scène is revealed simultaneously. We see the protagonist sitting at a low table in a living room; on the table there is some salt and an empty jar next to a bowl in which the cabbage is being prepared; in the background, there is an abstract painting on a white wall and a couch in the corner. This scene, introduced in a medium shot, does not reveal too much of the food vlogger’s neat home, but allows the audience to see the protagonist’s nuanced facial expressions as well as her surroundings. After a few seconds, her recital of instructions is interjected by an inner monologue, which is conveyed through voice-over. Because the voice-over uses less echo than the kimchi-making instructions, the pensive inner monologue feels very immediate and intimate. We gradually learn that she struggles to come to terms with the reality of the pandemic: “you begin to forget, sometimes, that the world can be kind – dazzling and warm and mesmerising and sweet. [. . .] I get angry so quickly” (18:18–18:39). She is shattered by the violent racist attacks against her friends and increasingly afraid to leave her house, perhaps developing agoraphobia. The food vlog may be a window into the world, but it is a world that seems too dangerous for her to enter physically. Alternating with the standard medium shots that establish the food vlog setting, medium close-up shots show the protagonist’s frustration and anger: she feels insignificant and powerless in the face of the anti-Asian hate crimes affecting her community, but she is certain that every voice speaking up matters: “It’s a privilege to choose not to be political, to choose not to care” (16:41–16:45).

The tension between the performance she stages for her food vlog audience and her inner state of despair lets us discern that this piece is concerned with the question of how to reach and involve an audience on the topic of racial discrimination by using one’s social media outreach and influence meaningfully. This question asks us to consider the possibilities of the digital in conversation with political activism and the roles that affect and community play therein. The concept of efficacy, outlined by Fişek in Theatre & Community, is useful in this context. Efficacy refers to a performance’s political effectiveness in communicating the goals of a community, which also includes the portrayal or representation of a sense of communal belonging or experience (16). While Fişek is convinced that “aesthetic strategies [. . .] have a direct bearing on theatre’s ability to generate collective responses across ideological lines,” she cautions that “There is no direct connection between community and the political effectiveness of artistic projects that seek to draw on the power of this grouping” (68–69).

“It’s Not a Game to Someone” negotiates this issue: like a sermon, the protagonist repeats “I feel like I’m preaching to the choir” (14:42–14:45) because she knows that her food vlog does not reach those who need to hear her message. Her audience, the echo chamber of those interested in learning to cook “authentic” Korean food, are most likely not the racist perpetrators lacking the empathy to relate to her feelings and the pain caused by racial discrimination. In one instance, the seriousness of the performance is interrupted by a witty remark which probes the racial category of skin colour: while peeling a grapefruit, the protagonist points out that it is essential to “scrape the white from the peel. The white’s where the bitter is. You just want the yellow of the skin” (17:00–17:07), equating white with bitterness and yellow with appeal. Only after uttering these instructions, she sees – or admits to see – the wordplay and smilingly adds: “I mean that one’s a given” (17:07–17:09).

Significantly, the process of kimchi fermentation mirrors the protagonist’s inner rage. As her cabbage and radishes ferment, so does her anger: “just anger, anger recycled, preaching this hatred on repeat until we know nothing but the fermentation of race and virus and privilege, until all I know to talk about with you all is this: we are not a virus” (20:09–20:29). This “fermentation of race and virus and privilege” is captured in short extreme close-up shots: we see indistinguishable ingredients, a fermented mush, but realise that they carry an explosive power. Martin uses kimchi as a pertinent metaphor for BESEA people, who have often been viewed as a homogenous group of racially minoritised people without individual identities and, thus, still face a “continued abject status” (“Becoming” 54) in British society, as Diana Yeh notes. The pandemic has reinforced this homogenising effect. The special explosive force of the fermenting kimchi parallels the anger of the BESEA artists who created WeRNotVirus. Lim explains how this anger was converted into artistic practice:

We decided that an urgent, creative response was needed to counter this serious rise in hate crime against British East/Southeast Asians, and we believe that the lack of representation has a lot to answer for. Theatre is a powerful tool for change too and we want to platform and uplift our community as much as we possibly can. (Qtd. in Moses)

“It’s Not a Game to Someone” uses anger as something productive, as a driving force. After admitting to herself that, “I think it’s maybe not the choir that I’ll need to be talking to” (22:08–22:12), in a shot akin to an aside that shows her pensive in her study, the protagonist openly speaks about her anger to the audience: “it’s preaching to the choir, but I want you to know, this anger is here” (23:37–23:44). Her anger is so potent that her direct inner monologue eventually becomes the main voice in which she speaks to her audience; she can no longer keep up the mask of acting in a normal manner. Hence, she views her “anger as fertiliser” (22:58–23:01), kneading “anger into massaging napa cabbage” (23:20–23:23), translating it into something beneficial. Instead of using aggression and violence to vent her anger, which she and her community have experienced all too often during the pandemic, she transforms “anger into kimchi” (24:15–24:18). Thus, her kimchi-making emerges as an act of self-care, as well as a service to others: cooking is caring. It thus becomes a productive force for her own good as well as that of the people with whom she will share her jars of pickle, having successfully transformed “anger into making us [. . .] thrive” (24:24–24:30). First and foremost, then, “It’s Not a Game to Someone” can be read as a performance about self-care and caring for one’s own community, especially if the efficacy of its activist agenda cannot be measured.

Digital Activism and BESEA Representation

The question of efficacy in the context of WeRNotVirus’s activist ambition, which I already raised in the analysis of “It’s Not a Game to Someone,” is pertinent and pressing. What are the project’s measurable, tangible effects? Has it “gone viral”? Are its messages still fermenting with the audiences? Looking at the audience numbers on YouTube, I find that, at the moment of writing, the video of the event on 13 June has received a little more than 4,000 views, while the video of the event on 14 June has received 2,000 views. Furthermore, the Zoom events on those days were fully booked with one hundred participants each day. In total, this results in approximately 6,200 views of the performances. While some might think this number is not particularly remarkable with regard to the clicks which larger YouTube channels receive for their videos, it is impressive when considering the audience numbers of a BESEA play when it is staged in a small theatre. In terms of reception and resonance in the media, it is notable that WeRNotVirus was announced in The Guardian before it aired and then reviewed by Arifa Akbar, who lauded the “cumulative power” of the project’s political agenda, but was hesitant about its theatrical ambition in her three-star review. Lyn Gardner praised the event in Stagedoor; it was also mentioned in The Independent and featured in The Stage as well as on the websites Migrant Voices and London Theatre Direct. Interestingly, it was also announced by a London-based correspondent in the Europe section of China Daily, the most widely circulated English-language newspaper in China – owned by the publicity department of the Chinese Communist Party –, perhaps owing to its agenda of fighting COVID-19-related anti-Asian racism beyond national borders. Considering the overall achievement and impact of WeRNotVirus, it can be ascertained that the project has reached a vast audience and received substantial attention in the news media and online.

In my analysis, I have explicated that WeRNotVirus has been a tool of self-empowerment for BESEA artists by creating a platform for artistic self-expression, representation, and connecting to members of the community as one possible way of speaking up about anger and fear as well as making visible the pain and trauma of racial discrimination. Significantly, it has established a space in which this discourse can take place. In her opinion piece titled “We Cannot Be Silent in the Face of Racism” for The Stage, Lim explains how the lack of space for and representation of BESEA artists in the media and in the arts may lead to racial stereotyping:

So much of what we see on our stages and screens fails to reflect the diversity in British East and South East Asian communities. Our only screen representations on major UK broadcast platforms in recent years – One Child, Strangers, Chimerica, Giri/Haji – almost exclusively revolve around monolithic “foreignness,” a generic Chinese or Japanese presence in Asian contexts – in a word “Othered.” There is very little of our diversity, our humanity, our presence as indigenous British people. We are literally ethnic ciphers. This is where our theatre can play a crucial role. If we are unseen and unheard, we fail to register as anything but blank, dehumanised ciphers rendering us all too easily as targets for racism. If, post Covid-19, theatre is to help mend the fractured state we currently occupy and help birth a more equal and enlightened industry that holds a mirror to society, theatremakers must boldly challenge racism and the structural barriers to actors and creatives of colour.

An example of democratic and participatory theatre, WeRNotVirus states in its credits that it stands in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter Movement as well as the East and South East Asian LGBTQIA+ community. Its call to defy discrimination thus reaches beyond its immediate community, acknowledging intersecting and related forms of discrimination that erase human dignity and hinder democratic participation. Due to its continued availability on YouTube, the activist agenda of WeRNotVirus may remain impactful beyond the pandemic. Using the Internet as an archive that allows audiences to access performances at any time and from many places is a substantial benefit of digital theatre. In line with Mezzocchi, I assert that the digital offers opportunities for creating more sustainable, inclusive, and equitable practices of making and accessing theatre, as WeRNotVirus proves. Perhaps this moment in time – looking back at the pandemic while witnessing the rising ubiquity of AI alongside a shift to right-wing extremism and nationalism – is a decisive moment for engaging with questions probing what is possible (and impossible) when considering what digital theatre can achieve in terms of human rights activism. If we wish to make sense of the complex entanglements between community building, minority representation, and digital activism, we need “to better integrate live performance and media studies with explicit attention to digital activism” (Bay-Cheng, “Digital Performance” 20).

Conclusion

My analysis of WeRNotVirus has illuminated how these complex entanglements between BESEA community engagement and digital performance as activism become visible in certain recurring themes and common patterns. Throughout the ten performances, the following four distinct, yet interlinked themes and patterns can be observed: first, the majority of pieces are solo performances set at home, often in the living room, kitchen, or bedroom, owing to the difficult circumstances of production amid the first lockdown. These performances use emotionally intense monologue to reflect on personal and community experiences with Othering, exclusion, and hate crimes. By directly addressing the audience, the protagonists’ exasperation and anger is shown as they openly convey their agenda, often including an urgent call to fight racist stereotypes and attacks.

Second, many performances use lyrical language and rely on rhyme and repetition, especially when emphasising core statements, for instance, “I am not a virus” or “I feel like I’m preaching to the choir.” This reliance on lyricism as well as patterns that establish regularity and rhythm – common devices in political activism and public protest – can be read as a strategy of reinstating order and a sense of safety at a time that denies vulnerable people the protection and agency they need.

Third, the incompatibility of “we” and “you” is repeatedly reinforced. This binary opposition actively establishes a BESEA group identity, effecting both an enhanced cohesion of the BESEA community and a clear disassociation from the perpetrators. Claiming the denominator “we” for the agenda of making BESEA voices heard, those who are established as “you” are confined to the role of listeners. WeRNotVirus thus deconstructs and inverts imperialist attributions of the white Westerner as speaking “self” who imagines the “Oriental” as Other.

Fourth, as a digital performance project, WeRNotVirus uses a diverse range of theatrical devices which intersect with other media and art forms, such as soliloquy, spoken-word poetry, stand‑up comedy, storytelling, movement and dance, song, animation, video, vlogs, news broadcast, and collage. This multimodality of interlaced art forms both mirrors the diversity and versatility of artistic talent in the BESEA community and hints at a conception of BESEA performative arts as cross-referential and inclusive in that aesthetic form and expression transcend generic boundaries.

Besides transcending generic boundaries, WeRNotVirus also questions traditional notions of liveness in theatre through its reliance on YouTube as an archive that offers continued accessibility. Its online availability may thus enhance its impact of representing BESEA voices and making visible their activist agenda beyond the pandemic. Exemplifying that “COVID-19 ushered in a new awareness of digital performance and the recognition that it might facilitate a kind of collective and global engagement with theatre across regions, genres and audiences” (Bay-Cheng, “Digital Performance” 20), WeRNotVirus envisions community against the backdrop of – as well as an alternative to – the virulence of racism that necessitated its evolution.