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This essay details and examines several of the revelations that directing in new digital modes during the COVID-19 pandemic surfaced about the need for refreshing outmoded theatrical practices and paradigms. Using the production of Natsu Onoda Power's adaptation of The Lathe of Heaven that I helmed at Brandeis University in the spring of 2021 as a case study, I sharpen particular focus on how engaging the project with openness, curiosity, and generosity compelled me to rethink many of my artistic habits and assumptions and reconsider how I view my role as a theatre-maker in higher education. Stewarding the production yielded many important insights about ways to enhance the creative process for all involved, especially student participants. By outlining several of those insights in what follows, I aim to demonstrate how developing practices that center students' growth and care can enable more robust and enriching artistic experiences and pedagogical outcomes for them. I also aim to illustrate the ways in which such practices can engender more imaginative and meaningful approaches to show selection, rehearsal, and the collaborative process more broadly.
There was certainly much for theatre artists, scholars, and teachers to lament about the nearly two-year halt that the rapid spread of COVID-19 brought to live stage performances. Going several months without entering a rehearsal room would have been inconceivable to me before March 2020. That students who spent multiple semesters cultivating various creative and artistic fluencies would not have the chance to put what they were learning in the classroom into practice onstage would have been equally unthinkable. And yet, these were the circumstances that many of us were confronted with when the pandemic rendered gathering in person a potentially deadly health hazard.
A lot will surely be written in the years to come about the extraordinary lengths to which theatre-makers at all levels had to go to bring enriching performances to audiences around the globe during our long season of sequestering. There is already a growing body of literature exploring the expansion of those modes of theatrical storytelling that achieved fresh significance during the pandemic, Zoom theatre and streamed theatre among them. Like countless other stage directors, my inability to rely upon several of the key practices, techniques, and strategies that I have perfected...