Embodied Dramaturgy and Solo Performance: In the Pool with Emily Steel’s 19 weeks

19 weeks by Emily Steel is a solo show performed by Tiffany Lyndall-Knight based on Steel’s own experience of terminating a pregnancy at nineteen weeks after a foetal diagnosis of abnormality. Drawing on interviews with Steel and Lyndall-Knight, along with my experience as an audience member of the 2018 season of 19 weeks in Adelaide, this article interrogates the embodied dramaturgy of 19 weeks with a focus on the conventions of bodily memory (Whitney) and frame of perception (Wagoner). These conventions curate the audience’s emotional proximity to the world of the play and emphasise the protagonist’s subjectivity. Through this interrogation we can better understand the embodied dramaturgy of 19 weeks and perhaps, by extension, the multifaceted languages of the body in solo performance more broadly.