Performance Brief

MADAM TSETER’S DIGITAL SÉANCE: A PODCAST FROM THE ARCHIPELAGO

Do you remember the sounds of the pandemic?

The Zoom notification. Dogs barking during meetings. Neighbors arguing through thin walls. Electric fans humming beside laptops. Frozen screens. Buffering circles. “You’re muted.” “Can you hear me?” “Please log out and rejoin.”

As theatres closed and gatherings became impossible, these sounds became part of our performance ecology. At the same time, podcasts flourished. Horror stories, true crime investigations, self-help programs, educational channels, and theatre podcasts accompanied people through isolation. Voices continued to travel even when bodies could not.

Madam Tseter’s Digital Séance draws inspiration from two practices: podcasting and sapi. While Western artistic traditions often invoke the muse as a source of inspiration, many Southeast Asian cultures understand creativity through possession, visitation, and embodiment. In sapi, the body becomes a vessel through which another presence may speak. Rather than waiting for inspiration to arrive, the artist allows themselves to be entered by voices, memories, and energies beyond the self. In this performance, Madam Tseter does not merely cite artists from the archive. She embodies them.

This performance is a work-in-progress and the third installment in an ongoing series of digital artistic research projects that investigate solo performance as embodied inquiry. The first installment, 3-in-One Body Problem, explored the fragmented body across physical, digital, and imagined dimensions. The second installment, PolyVlog Anatomica, drew inspiration from the anatomy theatre, transforming the performance space into a site of examination where multiple digital selves, organs, memories, and identities could be dissected, displayed, and reassembled through networked performance. Madam Tseter’s Digital Séance extends this inquiry into archives, memory, and transmission, asking how voices from the past may be reactivated through the performer’s body in the present. Together, the works move from the fragmented body, to the dissected and multiplied body, to the possessed and archival body.

Set in the year 2100, Madam Tseter, a teacher-artist-scholar-medium, revisits voices from the Tawid sa Harbour podcast archive and summons pandemic performers through a live podcast-séance. Part keynote, part performance lecture, part spirit communication ritual, the work explores how artists survived through digital creation, remote collaboration, community theatre, livestreaming, and artistic experimentation under precarious conditions.

Audience members become members of a Digital Séance Circle, channeling spirits, and contributing play money whenever advertisement ghosts interrupt the proceedings. These ads humorously expose the economies of conferences, publishing, mobility, and artistic labor. To restore the signal, participants must collectively fund the séance.

Madam Tseter wears a costume inspired by the aesthetics of pambahay—the domestic clothing of lockdown life. Emerging from the MonoVlog, where performers appeared in house clothes with towels wrapped around their heads, the costume evolves into an ensemble built from the Southeast Asian Good Morning Towel. Found across homes, markets, ports, and communities throughout the region, the towel becomes a material metaphor for archipelagic flow: ordinary, mobile, adaptable, and shared across islands. She appears in the clothing of pandemic survival. For the podcast-séance, the pambahay can signify that the spirits are not being summoned into a grand occult chamber. They are being invited into the domestic spaces where people actually survived the pandemic.

Through voices, glitches, spirits, and stories, the performance asks what survives when theatre disappears. The answer is neither theatre alive nor theatre dead, but a new creature continuing to travel through the currents of the archipelago.

Abstract

In the podcast-séance, Madam Tseter problematizes the Philippine theatre debate during the pandemic: is theatre dead or alive? Borrowing from Schrödinger’s cat quantum thought experiment, Madam Tseter reframes pandemic performances as a state of superposition where the stage exists between planes: presence+absence, stage+digital stream, ritual+recording.

Drawing from the state of Filipino digital performances featured in the 2021 Tawid sa Harbour podcast, the performance traces how practitioners (Layeta Bucoy, Aldo Vencilao, Sining Banwa, MC BLCK, James Harvey Estrada, Rain Matienzo, Janna Cortes, Zheg Arban, Ela Figura) cultivated an ecology of survival by creating, distributing, and consuming digital performance as a way to feed themselves, sustain their creative work in the academe, and serve their communities in the time of a global pandemic. These practitioners responded to the summon of Madam Tseter to transform crisis to connection, forming archipelagic digital crossings across the Philippines.

As Madam Tseter once again stages a ritual of summoning through sound, voice, and silence, the work calls for the spirits of pandemic performances. The podcast-séance becomes a dramaturgical metaphor–an invitation to the voices of practitioners to the ghosts of theatre, and to the static in-betweens.

Madam Tseter proposes an aural laboratory of whispers of stories, knocks of creative labor, and vibrations of agency featuring an archipelagic creature, alive in code and embodied in performances. The performance summons listeners to join the circle and witness the quantum ontology of theatre amid the shifting tides of technology, crisis and innovation.

*Performance Studies international (PSi) and the Critical Island Studies Consortium (CIS) 2026 Joint Annual Conference, 15-18 July 2026 | Universitas Kristen Indonesia, Jakarta, Indonesia.