The artistic director of the Stuttgart-based Gauthier Dance Company, Eric Gauthier, named his dancers the Dying Swans after the extensive cancellation of international tours in 2021. The social and health-related challenges that affected the arts during the period of pandemic restrictions (2020–2022) allowed artistic work to be realised only in digital or screen-mediated forms, which became the sole means of artistic creation and of maintaining contact with audiences. The online première of The Dying Swans Project, which features sixteen original ballet choreographies, took place on 16 April 2021. The article examines the approaches to space employed by the choreographers, as well as the modes of artistic expression enabled through the digital medium, which, according to Gauthier, remains only an alternative to the traditional stage experience. Addressing the audience through the camera requires different performative elements, in which the stage is replaced by the urban environment, the studio or nature. This establishes new phenomenological, conceptual and theoretical foundations for the transformation of dance theatre. Theoretical interpretations, supported by an analysis of performance practice, point to the forced acceptance of virtual theatre as a temporary solution; at the same time, virtuality represents a challenge of the contemporary moment. Using Patrice Pavis’s method of analysis, the article examines the spatial aesthetics of The Dying Swans Project within the framework of hybrid forms that transcend the traditional stage space and, in the post-pandemic period, enter a new social paradigm. Pavis’s method is complemented by Foucault’s understanding of heterotopia as an “other space” in which incompatible spatial orders are juxtaposed.
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