ABSTRACT
In “Surviving the Fugue: Reflections on Pandemic Storytelling” the actor/director Erica Terpening-Romeo examines the nation’s attempt to find a story, a narrative, to come to terms with the fugue-like complications of the Covid-19 pandemic. A source of her own attempt was research on the autonomic nervous system, where in a ventral state our focus in response to danger is on “connection, communication, and interpretation” (story making), and she links this with the work of a director devising a concept for a stage production. All of us, “the bodily politic,” as she adjusts the phrase, “caught in the paroxysms triggered by the pandemic,” create stories marked either by “dissonance” (making national unity impossible) or “consonance” (with the hope of a shared experience). She herself builds “stories from scraps right now” but envisions a time when the “noise [will] resolve back into music.”
