2025 LMDA Presentation: The Metacognitive Dramaturgy that Centres Audience Engagement in *Darling*
Members of WOOMcollaborative Andrew Houston, Joanna Cleary, and Brooke Barnes digitally present in the LMDA Conference 2025: Dramaturgy and Creative Infrastructure: The Metacognitive Dramaturgy that Centres Audience Engagement in Darling
ABSTRACT
What separates a spectator from a performer? In 2022, WOOMcollaborative created Darling, a one-woman performance following grad student Erin Ziegler as she discovers an anonymous woman’s journal from 1976 and three cassette tapes from her gynecologist lover. This sole performer isn’t an audience member, yet embodies the range of audience reactions to this story. She exists in the world of Darling, but also—through audience interaction and layered readings of performance texts—as a facilitator of, and medium to, audience engagement.
Jenn Addesso, who plays Ziegler, wrote Darling after finding these tapes and journal. Rather than Ziegler representing Addesso herself, she symbolizes how we generate audience engagement through metacognitive processes involving transference of past events onto present circumstances, performer onto spectator, and found historical material onto the speculation of interactive performance. Darling, set within an academic institution, premiered at the University of Waterloo.
Our presentation will discuss not only how Darling engaged its audience through performance, but also how this performance’s impact depends on collaborative and situational input from the audience. We will also address COVID-19-related challenges to actualizing this story, which would’ve been impossible without support from publicly funded institutions, such as the university, library, and the Waterloo Regional Art Fund.
