Theater in Quarantine
Shortly after the coronavirus pandemic closed all theaters in mid-March, Joshua William Gelb transformed a tiny closet inside his East Village apartment into a white-box theater. Along with co-Creative Director Katie Rose McLaughlin, they 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.
Theater in Quarantine is an Obie and Drama League Award-winning performance laboratory dedicated to the exploration of the live theatrical experience in the digital space. TiQ has live-streamed dozens of visually distinctive, original works to its YouTube channel, working out of a closet in the East Village that's only 8 sq feet. Our digital and hybrid programming spans genres and styles, with world premieres of new plays, new musicals, adaptations of classic texts, dance, and site-specific art installations. The work has been called "Virtuosic" by Jesse Green in the New York Times while Helen Shaw in Vulture wrote that the closet “makes confinement a virtue, a prompt to imagination.” TiQ has been presented by The Invisible Dog, New Georges, Theater Mitu, CulturalDC, Ann Arbor Summer Festival, The New York Public Library, and was a 2021 artist in residence at LaMama and CultureHub's Experiments in Digital Storytelling.
Highlights Directed & Choreographed by Katie Rose McLaughlin: