Changing Narrative Through Theatre. The Case of Bergamo ER Theatre Covid Play

Recent approaches to storytelling in the organisation consider the material and affective elements for writing differently about organisations, events and history. To explore this perspective behind the linearity of a traditional narrative, we present research about a theatre workshop organised by doctors and nurses in the Emergency Room of Hospital Papa Giovanni XXIII of Bergamo that brought to a collective theatre play on the painful experience of having faced the covid crisis in the Emergency Room (ER). The contribution explores how the theatre drama's narration line emerged in the path of the rehearsals, where memories, bodies, emotions, affects, and materialities are met and merged in a complex sociomaterial and affective entanglement. The paper articulates how this mixture has created an affective and emotional temperature to allow a series of new meanings to emerge in the collective reading of the traumatic pandemic experience. It explores how the theatre workshop enabled a collective emotional turning point, reconfiguring the narrative of hospital stories and creating a space for previously untold stories to be shared.