Joshua William Gelb – Theater in Quarantine

Established in response to the pandemic, Theater in Quarantine transformed an 8 sq. foot closet into a digital performance laboratory, attracting over 100 different collaborators, live-streaming dozens of original works, and reaching a global audience. In The New York Times Jesse Green called it “a new genre entirely.” The complete Theater in Quarantine archive remains available to view on YouTube.

Our performance space is a closet. It measures four feet wide by eight feet tall, and is only two feet deep. Our digital proscenium is effectively the same aspect ratio as an iphone and, like the conferencing boxes we’ve navigated in this age of remote work, it entraps the performer in an echo of the larger crisis of confinement that emerged in the early days of COVID. Those formative weeks in lockdown, characterized by isolation and loneliness, spurred our earliest experiments in digital performance, and by continuing to hit our heads against the walls of what is possible, my collaborators and I have developed a practice that both embraces and aestheticizes the challenges presented by these creative, technical, and indeed literal limitations. We ask how this utilitarian container, so uncomfortably small, can become a stage for the imagination, harnessing technology to introduce tools that expand our very concept of what’s theatrically possible.

This process was borne out of the desire to keep creating at a time when the theater industry was shut down and technology became not only a vital lifeline but an essential storytelling tool. Embracing 21st century solutions to the question of “what is “theatrical?” Theater in Quarantine integrates creative technology with the body in motion, finding tactility and dynamic physicality even in remote performance. We ask how it’s possible for a digital encounter to feel both intimate and immediate, challenging ourselves to reassert the liveness of our form in even the most mediated of circumstances.

Submitted are excerpts from 5 different pieces: our premiere live-stream of Kafka’s The Neighbor, an early dance piece choreographed by Katie Rose McLaughlin called Corners 1 2 3 4 and 5, Heather Christian’s I Am Sending You the Sacred Face, Topside by Scott R. Sheppard, and an adaptation of Tristan Tzara’s The Gas Heart.

Credits

YouTube

The Neighbor by Franz Kafka – translated by Joshua William Gelb

Corners 1 2 3 4 and 5

I am Sending You the Sacred Face by Heather Christian

Topside by Scott R. Sheppard

The Gas Heart by Tristan Tzara – translated and adapted by Joshua William Gelb