Theater Workshops During COVID-19: Yes, They Were Possible

Participants observing physical distancing in a theater workshop during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Contextual Note

This article was written on May 14, 2020, during the first phase of the COVID-19 emergency. It responded to a very practical question at the time: whether theater workshops could resume in schools while meeting the necessary safety requirements.

The regulations referred to in the article belong to that period and should not be regarded as current health guidance. I am keeping it because the pedagogical reflection behind it remains valid: theater can transform a limitation into creative material.

Could We Continue Making Theater?

In May 2020, some teachers asked me, understandably full of doubts, whether it would be possible to resume theater activities in schools with children and young people.

My answer was simple: yes, it was possible.

I was not suggesting that we could continue exactly as before or ignore the conditions imposed by the emergency. I was arguing that a theater workshop could be redesigned without losing its educational purpose.

For the kind of work I am discussing, the only truly essential elements were the participants’ physical presence and a suitable space. Everything else could be reorganized.

A Limit as a Rule of the Game

Introductory theater workshops allow participants to explore different modes of expression through the body, voice, space, objects, relationships, and the concrete transformation of creative thought.

The possibilities are vast.

Many theater games and exercises work precisely because they impose limits. Precise rules are established—boundaries that prevent participants from relying on the first solution and force them to explore the remaining possibilities more deeply.

The limits may concern space, movement, relationships, or the use of the voice and objects. They may prevent participants from speaking, moving freely, approaching one another, or using a particular form of expression.

A limit does not necessarily eliminate creativity. It often forces it to find new paths.

During the emergency, the difference was that some rules were not established by the workshop leader for pedagogical reasons, but imposed by external circumstances. From the perspective of theater work, however, they could be approached in the same way: recognized, respected, and transformed into conditions for creative exploration.

A Workshop Must Be Able to Adapt

A well-led workshop is not a rigid sequence of exercises prepared in advance and applied in the same way to every group.

It must adapt to the people involved, the space, the time available, and the conditions in which it takes place. Participants are often complete strangers at the beginning of the process: the workshop leader must observe them, listen to them, and continually modify the work in response to what they do.

That is why I believed that a competent professional could design a process that respected the restrictions imposed by the situation.

It was not merely a matter of enduring those limits, but of overturning them, as theater has always done, and transforming them into starting points for experimentation.

If people could not come close to one another, we could work with distance.

If personal space had to be more strictly defined, we could explore what a body can communicate without moving.

If certain forms of relationship were not possible, we could look for others.

The workshop would take a different form, but it would continue to be theater.

Rebuilding Connection

At that time, it was already clear how severely the emergency had reduced opportunities for connection, especially for children and young people.

A theater workshop could not erase what had happened, but it could offer a space in which participants could meet again, express themselves, and recognize both their own emotions and those of others.

After months in which physical presence had been limited or impossible, sharing the same space had a particular value. There was no need to force participants to talk directly about what they had experienced. Theater could allow them to work through it using play, images, the body, the voice, and the relationships created onstage.

For precisely this reason, I saw the theater workshop as an important form of support for the return to school: not as an optional extra, but as a place in which presence, trust, and expressive awareness could gradually be rebuilt.

Safety Rules Become Rules of the Game

For all this to be possible, it was of course necessary to understand clearly the conditions for resuming activities and to respect them.

My claim was not: “We can carry on exactly as before.”

It was: “We can continue making theater, even if we have to do it differently.”

Once the necessary rules had been established, the workshop leader’s task was to transform them into rules of the game. Not to circumvent them, minimize them, or endure them passively, but to design activities that could exist fully within them.

This is the reflection that remains valid beyond the emergency in which it originated.

A good workshop leader does not apply an unchanging lesson. They observe reality, recognize the limits that are present, and find ways to transform them into creative possibilities.

Theater often begins precisely there.