Joshua William Gelb and Katie Rose McLaughlin offer a lecture demonstration of their work for Theater in Quarantine (TiQ). TiQ is a new performance laboratory dedicated to the exploration of the live theatrical experience in the digital space. This white-box theater, born out of the stay-at-home orders in March 2020, has now streamed over 20 new and original works. TiQ set out to understand how artists can adapt to the digital form without sacrificing the integrity of the live event, as well as navigating how we can continue to responsibly collaborate while social distancing. For the Performance in the Age of Pandemic series TiQ will offer a rare view into how they create work, the technology used, and allow students the opportunity to engage with the creation as well as ask questions. 

THEATER IN QUARANTINE is a Drama League Award-winning performance laboratory dedicated to the exploration of the live theatrical experience in the digital space. Developed in response to the pandemic by Founder/Co-Creative Director Joshua William Gelb and Co-Creative Director Katie Rose McLaughlin, TiQ has developed and live streamed over 25 new, original works of performance in the last year alone. TiQ has worked with an array of remote collaborators (including Raja Feather Kelly, Heather Christian, Karen Olivo, and Underground Railroad Game’s Scott R. Sheppard); and has been established as one of the most consistent makers of digital performance, having been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vulture, on NPR’s All Things Considered; and reached audiences across the globe. Their work has been called "Virtuosic" by Jesse Green in the New York Times, who wrote, "The closet has produced some of the new medium’s most imaginative work." Helen Shaw in Vulture wrote that the closet “makes confinement a virtue, a prompt to imagination.” TiQ’s full archive can be found and streamed anytime on their YouTube channel at youtube.com/ theaterinquarantine. 

Joshua William Gelb is a director, performer, and librettist whose work runs the gamut from devised physical theater, to stylized adaptations of classics, to original musicals as well as collaborations with emerging playwrights. With an eye for the highly theatrical verging on the cinematic, Gelb’s direction has been known to feature striking integrations of music, movement, clowning, and dance. Most recently Gelb created a musical interrogation of the 1927 Al Jolson film Jazz Singer (New Yorker critic’s pick) which was commissioned and built in residence at Abrons Arts Center with Nehemiah Luckett. Previously in residence at Abrons, Gelb conceived and directed the sesquicentennial anniversary reimagining of America’s supposed first musical The Black Crook (NYT Critic’s Pick), about which he lectured at Harvard University's Houghton Library. His adaptation of Kafka's A Hunger Artist, developed with Sinking Ship Productions, was part of the Tank's Flint and Tinder series and has since travelled to the Edinburgh Fringe and continues to tour. Other productions include Bear Slayer (Ars Nova), Party in the USA (Incubator Arts Project/Edinburgh Fringe), Clara Not Clara: A Nutcracker (Minnesota Dance Theater / Knockdown Center / LMCC Process Space), Sometimes in Prague (Ice Factory / Joe's Pub / Polyphone Festival), Love My Band (Dixon Place), Dukus (Target Margin Lab), and Blind Alley Guy (Incubator Arts Project). The album of his pirate musical Hail Oblivion is currently available on Bandcamp. He is a frequent contributor to Little Theater at Dixon Place, and has directed several successfully returning #Serials at The Flea. With Room5001 Theater, Gelb conceived and directed the notoriously revisionist all-male Man of La Mancha. Gelb received his BFA at NYU Tisch’s Playwrights Horizons Theater School and his MFA in directing at Carnegie Mellon's School of Drama where he graduated as a John Wells Fellow. He has assisted Marianne Weems (The Builders Association) and Rebecca Taichman (Soho Rep), is a member of the 2012 Lincoln Center Directors Lab, and an associate artist with Sinking Ship Productions.

Organized by Neil Greenberg.

This event is part of PERFORMANCE IN THE AGE OF PANDEMIC, a virtual, public-facing event series exploring the context of the radical reorganization of life under the current COVID-19 pandemic and other health crises such as the AIDS and 1918 influenza pandemics. Guest artists, curators, activists and scholars will consider how performing artists have responded to and been affected by these worldwide epidemics, the varied forms and functions of the work created during these times, and potential longer term changes that may result, while also making space to consider the state of arts presenting institutions and infrastructure in the wake of COVID-19. Hosted by faculty from the Department of the Arts at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School. All events are free and open to the public, but prior registration is required.

Zoom link will be sent in advance of the event.