Conference report: Doctors in performance, Tallinn, 1-3 September 2021

This report chronicles the author’s participation in the Doctors in Performance (DiP) Festival Conference, September 2021, at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, Tallinn. It is the fourth edition of DiP since its inauguration in 2014 at the Sibelius Academy, Uniarts Helsinki. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe in early 2020, most conferenceshave been either postponed, cancelled or held online. This Conference is one of the first to be held as an in-person event as Europe starts to move towards a post-pandemic period. Some participants gathered in person (including the author), while parallel online participation was also enabled as a hybrid event. This report records the conference events as DiP enters into maturity with a focus on artistic research and music performance. It also describes the author’s impressions regarding issues of ‘liveness’ in varied categories, including spoken presentations, music performances, their online equivalents, live or prerecorded presentations and online or live participations.