Theatre has been associated with contagion and contagious emotions since Plato and Aristotle. In the twentieth century, Antonin Artaud proposed that theatre or performance should be like the plague that takes control of actors’ and spectators’ bodies and infects them with an affective energy. For these infections to happen, however, audiences and actors must be in the same room. In times of the corona pandemic, this spatial proximity has been substituted by theatre mostly performed and/or streamed online. This article offers some preliminary thoughts on this development: it considers what we descriptively call “viral theatre.” We argue that we currently witness a form of viral theatre that manifests itself through an interplay of three aspects: first, the fact that both performers and spectators are in a state of disruption, second, the willingness/expectations on the part of spectators to participate in the event, and, finally, the use of communication technologies such as Zoom. The framework of the pandemic, therefore, enhances and modifies what viral theatre can be and what kind of effect it can have, oscillating between more Platonic notions of dangerous contagion when plays force us to explore questions of complicity and the Aristotelian ideal of cathartic emotions when plays/performers reach out to us for moral support.

As the recent Ebola outbreak demonstrates, visibility is central to the shaping of political, medical, and socioeconomic decisions. The symposium in this issue of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry explores the uneasy relationship between the necessity of making diseases visible, the mechanisms of legal and visual censorship, and the overall ethics of viewing and spectatorship, including the effects of media visibility on the perception of particular "marked" bodies. Scholarship across the disciplines of communication, anthropology, gender studies, and visual studies, as well as a photographer's visual essay and memorial reflection, throw light on various strategies of visualization and (de)legitimation and link these to broader socioeconomic concerns. Questions of the ethics of spectatorship, such as how to evoke empathy in the representation of individuals' suffering without perpetuating social and economic inequalities, are explored in individual, (trans-)national, and global contexts, demonstrating how disease (in)visibility intersects with a complex nexus of health, sexuality, and global/national politics. A sensible management of visibility--an "ecology of the visible"--can be productive of more viable ways of individual and collective engagement with those who suffer.

No abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic represents an enduring transformation in health care and education with the advancement of smart universities, telehealth, adaptive research protocols, personalized medicine, and self-controlled or artificial intelligence-controlled learning. These changes, of course, also cover mental health and long-term realignment of coronavirus disease 2019 survivors. Fatigue or anxiety, as the most prominent psychiatric “long coronavirus disease 2019” symptoms, need a theory-based and empirically-sound procedure that would help us grasp the complexity of the condition in research and treatment. Considering the systemic character of the condition, such strategies have to take the whole individual and their sociocultural context into consideration. Still, at the moment, attempts to build an integrative framework for providing meaning and understanding for the patients of how to cope with anxiety when they are confronted with empirically reduced parameters ( e.g. , severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus type 2) or biomarkers ( e.g. , the FK506 binding protein 5) are rare. In this context, multidisciplinary efforts are necessary. We therefore join in a plea for an establishment of ‘translational medical humanities’ that would allow a more straightforward intervention of humanities ( e.g. , the importance of the therapist variable, continuity, the social environment, etc ) into the disciplinary, medial, political, and popular cultural debates around health, health-care provision, research ( e.g. , computer scientists for simulation studies), and wellbeing.