The Pedagogy of Grief: Lessons from Making Zoom Theatre During a Pandemic

Abstract

While the closure of theatres across Canada and around the world when the pandemic hit in March 2020 caused widespread feelings of loss amongst theatre practitioners and educators, the institutional pressures to find ways to survive and move on prevented many from processing their grief. This article examines The Stream You Step In (TSYSI), a series of four original Zoom plays co-produced by Outside the March and the University of Windsor in 2020, through the intersecting perspectives of pedagogy and grief. TSYSI was a response to grief on different levels: graduating students’ grief for their mainstage roles, which they had been working towards since entering the program but which they lost when the pandemic forced the cancellation of their planned theatre season; theatremakers, educators, and audiences’ collective grief for the loss of live theatre and the community it creates; and the grief experienced by society at large for the loss of Black and Indigenous lives, magnified in summer 2020 by the global outrage in response to the death of George Floyd and many others. Through reflection on two TSYSI plays, Karen Hines’s The River of Forgetfulness and David Yee’s good white men, this article stresses the importance of making space for grief within pedagogy. It argues that a grief-led creative process can honour what was lost, create and strengthen community, and foster opportunities to make new meaning. As theatres and educational and training institutions continue to face uncertainty, this article’s provocations contribute to ongoing conversations around ethics, representation, and collaboration in Zoom theatre.