Performing Grief in Pandemic Theatres

This Element shows how theatre innovated new forms to support theatre workers and communities in grief from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fintan Walsh (Author)

9781009464819, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 May 2024

74 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1 cm, 0.25 kg

This Element explores how theatre responded to the death and loss produced by the COVID-19 pandemic, by innovating forms and spaces designed to support us in grief. It considers how theatre grieved for itself, for the dead, for lost ways of living, while also imagining and enacting new modes of being together. Even as it reckoned with its own demise, theatre endeavoured to collectivise grief by performing a range of functions more commonly associated with funerary, health and social care services, which buckled under restrictions and neglect. These pandemic theatres show how grief cannot only be let mourn over individual losses in private, but how it must also seep into the public sphere to fight to save critical services, institutions, communities and art forms, including theatre itself.

1. Enter grief: all the world's a morgue
2. Who's there?: theatre mourns itself
3. To name the names: commemorating the dead
4. Rupture and rebirth: reassembling anew
Coda: life worth living
References.

Subject Areas: Theatre studies [AN]