Deutsches Haus at NYU presents “Pandemic Theater and Community Building” with a lecture by the DAAD Visiting Scholar Monika Pietrzak-Franger (Professor of British Cultural and Literary Studies at the University of Vienna) and a conversation with Jay Wegman, Executive Director of NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts.

Theater has been associated with contagion and contagious emotions since Plato and Aristotle. In the twentieth century, Antonin Artaud proposed that theater or performance should be like the plague that takes control of actors’ and spectators’ bodies and infects them with an affective energy. For these infections to happen, however, audiences and actors must be in the same room. In times of the COVID-19 pandemic, this spatial proximity has been substituted by theater mostly performed and/or streamed online. In this talk, Monika Pietrzak-Franger will look at a variety of online plays and their attempts at community building, and then engage in conversation with Jay Wegman about how the pandemic has changed the ways in which we conceptualize, produce, and experience theater.

Location & Time

TODAY, September 16

6:00pm - 7:30pm
Deutsches Haus at NYU
42 Washington Mews, New York, NY 10003

https://as.nyu.edu/deutscheshaus/cultural-program/events/fall-2022/pandemic-theatre-and-community-building--a-conversation-with-mon.html