“And Now … !” took place in UpStage on Saturday 8 March, celebrating international women’s day as well as the diversity and creativity of UpStage performances.

The event began with the evening’s host, Helen Varley Jamieson, welcoming everyone and acknowledging the role of women in UpStage, in particular the four women who originally dreamed up and initiated UpStage (Karla Ptacek, Leena Saarinen, Vicki Smith and Helen) and our current lead developer, Gloria. She also talked about the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which born from a meeting of women in the Hague in 1915 on the brink of WWI. In today’s volatile political situation it is important to work for the inclusion of women in peace negotiations and diplomacy.

Annie Abrahams then spoke about why she and Helen had decided to withdraw their performance “Nice Girls?” from the programme. Her first reason was personal, as she is still grieving the unexpected death in January of her friend and colleague Daniel Pinheiro. Annie and Daniel collaborated on numerous projects exploring online connectedness and co-presence of bodies. Her second reason related to the need for conversation rather than performance in these confusing times, to address questions around women’s place and power as well as broader cultural questions.

The Mobilise/Demobilise book was presented, which documents the now completed project that enabled the complete rebuild of the UpStage software and stimulated a burst of creative energy. We then got straight into the performances.

First up was Dance Plague by Organic Theatre. From the moment the uplifting music began the audience were swept along with Flanker and Origami, and their accompanying vibrant, mysterious Interlopers. The colourful characters led us on a journey through architecture, weather, bystanders and into a worm-hole, plunging back in time to another world of theatre.

Backyard of Weird Creatures wrenched us into the future, with a script and visual media developed using AI tools to interrogate the role of AI in the creative process. We went somewhere weird, flying to the rain on the back of a cat, where we celebrated the mess, embraced the cyborg body and finally returned to the peace of the backyard and welcomed the rain.

The final performance of the evening was Repose, one of the cyberformances from the Mobilise/Demobilise festival in 2021. Women dressed in crinolines printed with native fish and birds, and a cartesian map, placed shells along a remembered shoreline in a car park, making visible the contours of colonisation. In the next scene the audience were invited to name their favourite coasts, which were added to a bottle as a message for the future.

After the performance there was a lively discussion, with questions from the audience about all three performances, and about UpStage and cyberformance. Thematically diverse, the performances were united by their use of UpStage, and showcased different features of the platform. It was a great celebration of cyberformance as well as of international women’s day.