Dramaturgies of Domesticity: Participatory Performances at Home 

Friday, June 2nd
Espace domestique (1^ère partie)
Jenn Stephenson
9h30 – 10h30

In the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic when public health measures required the closure of large-scale gathering spaces, theatres were closed. Unable to be theatregoers, audiences became “theatre-stayers.” Theatrical works entered the domestic sphere as never before, recasting homes as theatres. Feelings of isolation, confinement, and sadness for lost opportunities and freedoms lived side by side with gratitude, appreciation of community, creative whimsy, and an embrace of domestic arts. By describing the various ways that theatre-at-home embraced the dramaturgical qualities of compelled pandemic domesticity, this analysis will reveal how productions used those affordances to create meaning to reflect on what it meant to be “at home.”