This thesis argues that the research problem, which describes a lack of a common understanding of the digital age, and what its major transformations mean for different stakeholders, can be fruitfully interrogated by attending to emergent forms of making sense in the digital theater. The aim of the study was met by raising and responding to the following research questions: How does the digital theater understand and experience digital existence in participatory potentials, and how do creatives in the digital theater bridge participatory intensities, the tensions and sometimes gaps between experienced reality and digital capabilities to expand on their own and their theaters’ participatory potential? The study combined a phenomenological approach, with an ethnographic method and narrative analysis, supported by a theoretical framework of existential media studies with a particular focus on digital existence, in combination with prospects for participation, using cultural participation theories. The original contribution of the study was to apply theoretically sampled dimensions that reflected and expanded on cultural participation theories and existential media studies in a theorizing synthesis, and that revealed three intermingling themes: subverting, intentionality expanded, and presence, i.e., how the respondents navigated, bridged and communicated participatory potentials to subvert participatory contexts to expand and extend on participation, intentionally, and with close attention to contentious considerations in the present moment.

Conceived in the wake of a global pandemic and the unanticipated need to create digital theatre, COVEN-19, or Magicks for Unprecdented Times as a devising project consisted of two witchcraft-inspired performances: a fall 2020 Samhain ritual and a spring 2021 Beltane ritual. The company of undergraduate and graduate theatre witches explored decentralized, iterative, slow, caretaking, queer forms of devising over digital platforms. The written portion of this thesis takes the form of a digital tarot blog: 22 (plus a bonus) interconnected essays and spells that interrogate feminist and queer theories as they pertain to the Coven’s devising process. This digital format not only reflects the malleable nature of the creative process, but it is also a kind of praxis that invites the reader to take an active role in meaning-making and resists an objective, singular narrative. Woven through these tarot cards are threads of utopian futurity, situated subjectivities, and anticapitalist temporalities. The essays and spells are primarily in conversation with adrienne maree brown, Judith Butler, Audre Lorde, Jose Estaban Munoz, and Starhawk – engaging with these theorists as thought-ancestors in order to activate rather than regurgitate their knowledges of radical hope and nonlinear process. The tarot deck takes a situated, backwards glance toward these ancestors as it grasps at seemingly impossible utopian horizons of collaboration and creation.