Performance Narr of Pandemic

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This interdisciplinary course employs techniques of devised performance to engage narratives from various pandemics, including both the COVID pandemic and the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918, as a catalyst and developmental research process for a new performance project, In Sickness & In Health (working title), a collaboration between Georgetown's Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, the School of Health, Global Health Institute, and DC's Mosaic Theater Company who will premiere the original staged production in February 2024. Inspired in part by the legendary oral historian and Pulitzer Prize winning author Studs Terkel (with whom Professor Goldman collaborated on several projects), the course will engage oral histories, ethnography, and written/ verbal interviews with (and narratives by) people around the world impacted by both the COVID pandemic and the flu pandemic - including medical professionals and frontline workers; scientists; patients; surviving family members; policymakers and political leaders; artists; clergy; and everyday citizens. Together we will explore how these pandemics are represented, performed, and re-imagined and how they intersect with and radically influence our understanding of community, identity, social justice, art, care, plague, disease, well-being, and health. Drawing on an understanding of socially engaged performance as a mode of caring, and interrogating the boundaries between care practices and performance, the project is conceived as a liberatory artistic offering of embodied engagement with an ongoing living history of a pandemic in our midst. In this way it seeks to offer an antidote to the human urge to move on and forget, reminding us that despite the massive scale of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which infected close to a third of the global population and killed 25-50 million people (far more than World War I), society never fully processed or chronicled those events, and the pandemic produced no narrative equivalents to All Quiet On the Western Front or countless other classic "wartime" narratives. Students with an interests and backgrounds in devised performance, global health, medical anthropology, nursing and health sciences, narrative / dramatic literature, oral history, culture and politics, visual arts, and related areas are all encouraged to enroll. The approach of the course and the production seek to highlight and center diverse global and local voices -- rather than an American/ Eurocentric perspective. Students from all cultural and disciplinary backgrounds are welcome and encouraged.