Abstract
Ironically, the live performance strength to create community by bringing large groups of people into proximity has also made playhouses traditionally vulnerable to being closed as sites of physical as well as moral and social peril to the community. Given advances in medicine since the last wave of the Black Death, fear of pestilence factored little into our original decision to stage Kevin Kerr’s drama about the 1918 influenza epidemic as part of our 2020-21 season. However, by spring 2021 this had significantly changed, as we tried to rehearse, produce and perform a play about an older global epidemic in Saskatchewan in the middle of another global pandemic that had – again - closed all the theatres – and many points beyond. Using our 2021 production of Unity (1918) as the nexus point, this paper aims at exploring three questions: (1) How do we continue defining and creating theatre under conditions that seemingly deny its very existence? (2) How has the rapid evolution of electronic media since the late 19th century both helped and hindered the ability of theatre and theatre artists in Saskatoon to meet the challenge of different pandemic eras? (3) How did our production of Unity (1918) demonstrate some of the adaptations and hybridizations with media that local theatre artists and programs have used to continue to perform theatre in a COVID season and to bring Kerr’s 1918 Saskatchewan vividly to life for audiences isolated from it in time, and from each other and the performers in space?
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
COVID, LIVEPERFORMANCE, DIGITALPERFORMANCE, 1918FLUEPIDEMIC, UNITY1918, SASKATCHEWAN
