“When the quarantine is over, the world will change forever,” Microsoft founder Bill Gates said. Whether the challenges and changes caused by the pandemic are reflected in the further development of art, particularly theatrical art, will become clearer after the end of the pandemic, although we are already witnessing the emergence of a new hybrid art. The pandemic that suddenly struck the world has dramatically changed the world agenda. New regulations were imposed, the usual way of life was broken, the world was unprepared to face many difficulties. Before scientists and researchers could devise the ways and methods to fight the coronavirus (more precisely, COVID 19), humanity moved to a familiar, but not basic, remote format of communication. The World Health Organization declared the pandemic on March 11, 2020. World theatres celebrated International Theatre Day, March 27, in closed, darkened halls and in silence. Theatres did not stop working even during the First and Second World Wars, but the pandemic forced them to stop. Theatre, a synthetic and living field of art, entered a dead end, found itself on the verge of death-life. In the theatrical art industry, for some time, another period of crisis came. Due to the pandemic, art, like almost every field of industry, was forced to adapt to new rules of the game and find ways to survive and then develop. Performing arts are the only ones based on live communication with the audience between new and old fields of art. That is, a living relationship is one of its main strengths. The live communication platform was taken away from the theatre by the pandemic. Twenty-six centuries ago, the professional, verbal, Aristotelian theatre of the European model, established in Greece over a centuries-long period of development, showed that it has a unique resource and feature of self-renewal, selfpreservation. The suspicion of the disappearance of the theatrical art in a deadlock, in extreme crisis, has arisen many times throughout history. The main thing lost in online theatre is the process of energy exchange. This unique moment of the theatre, or in this new kind of cinema, is lost. It is impossible to select a perspective because the director and the cameraman offer the perspective and the viewer is forced to accept the offer who cannot express emotion and feedback live because he too has moved into virtual space. What will happen tomorrow? It’s hard to say. Time will tell. However, we have another type of combination of theatre and cinema, which is called online theatre.

This article discusses medieval Georgian professional theater. It had to exist under conditions appropriate to the era, those of strict censorship, which directly or indirectly expressed the monarchical narrative of feudal Georgia. Theater, as one of the directions of performing arts, whose main weapon and instrument is the word, was significantly influenced by the political, social, and cultural situation.

Georgian theater is not separated from world theater processes. Contemporary Georgian theater tries to introduce new technologies, although carefully, moderately, considering the audience’s interests. On one hand, the influence of tradition prevails, and on the other, the desire to adopt new technologies has the upper hand. Sometimes the introduction of digital technologies in the latest Georgian theater is due to the reflex of discovering a new world, which may even be unknown to the author of the play.