Abstract
While theater cannot prevent climate change, it can engage with conveying knowledge and attitudes. This paper does not measure the impact of specific theater performances on test participants. It rather analyzes which artistic methods the authors of a specific corpus of texts use in order to communicate climate change. In this sense, this paper is not concerned with pragmatic suggestions regarding climate change per se; instead, the focus is on communicating climate change through theater. Integrating climate-change science into theatrical performances generates aesthetic challenges: how can dramatists represent a long-term global phenomenon within the spatiotemporal limits of a performance? How can drama convey scientifically sound information along with captivating characters and plots? How can performances elicit more nuanced viewer responses than panic in the face of impending disaster or apathy based on lacking concern? Taking transnational American Studies and postcolonial literary theory as points of departure, this paper will discuss English-language theatrical works linked to Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA), an initiative originally launched by artists in the United States and Canada to publicize the 2015 Paris Climate Conference (COP21) and designed to occur every other year. This activism-oriented project translates issues related to global climate change into a transnational theater practice that experiments with innovative drama aesthetics and that fosters communication across boundaries between theater professionals and amateurs, climate-change specialists and the scientifically untrained general public as well as local action and international orientation. Despite continuing notions that science represents rational thinking whereas artistic depictions express or arouse predominantly fearful emotions, this body of very short performances and the online forum in which some of the same theater practitioners exchange ideas and experiences offer working models for effective collaboration that may support widespread activism.
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Notes
- 1.
Theater scholar Una Chaudhuri, for instance, has been urging these matters since the 1990s. See, for instance, the special issue of Theater on “Ecology and Theatre” (1994) that she edited, her essay “The Silence of the Polar Bears: Performing (Climate) Change in the Theater of Species” (2012), and the volume she co-edited with Shonni Enelow Research Theatre, Climate Change, and the Ecocide Project (2014).
- 2.
Ecocriticism—the study of environmental issues and representations in literature and culture—has adopted both a postcolonial and transnational outlook, thus acknowledging the necessity to go beyond an “Anglo-American focus” (Heise 2008, p. 387). Also see Cilano and DeLoughrey (2007) and Huggan and Tiffin (2010).
- 3.
A similar approach can be found in Abbasi (2006). While communicating climate change is linked to the social sciences and to the necessity of transforming vast amounts of data into “narrative storytelling,” the arts are not mentioned (p. 11). The societal domains included in the conference proceedings are “Science, News Media, Religion & Ethics, Politics, Entertainment & Advertising, Education, Business & Finance and Environmentalists & Civil Society” (pp. 17–18).
- 4.
For details, see Fish (1980).
- 5.
- 6.
Similarly, Abbasi (2006) characterizes science as verbally oriented and “Society” as visually oriented, but casts journalism and television as solutions to science’s non-inclusive use of language (pp. 107–108), particularly regarding the desideratum of giving climate change a human face (pp. 114–115) rather than focusing on landscapes and animals. In the same vein, people engaged in the area of “religion & ethics” are supposed to “harness visual media as well as traditional written and oral media” (p. 138).
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
“Climate Change Theatre Action 2015 Edition.” See https://www.thearcticcycle.org/ccta-2015/ (Last Accessed 21 Sept 2017).
- 12.
See https://www.thearcticcycle.org/ccta-2017/ (Last Accessed 21 Sept 2017).
- 13.
For instance, the 2017 corpus includes plays about tribal communities in India that are mistreated by powerful corporations; about rural populations in Pakistan whose way of life is deemed less valuable than certain kinds of modernization; about the clash between economic growth and environmental protection in Ethiopia; and about the impact of corruption on waste management in Lebanon. The CCTA plays are made available to participants but have not been published. In the following, the year in parentheses indicates to which CCTA corpus a play belongs.
- 14.
It goes without saying that the entire corpus of CCTA plays in itself, with works by authors from developing and industrial nations around the globe, embodies the principle of abolishing cultural hierarchies based on economic and political power.
- 15.
Comedy as a means of inspiring audiences to consider the possibility of extinction, based on scientific publications, also occurs in Chantal Bilodeau’s “Homo Sapiens” (2017), which is set in the distant future and treats audience members as specimens of homo sapiens as perceived by the dramatic characters who hail from a more advanced human species. Animal characters also recur as commentators on human folly in plays that feature animals equipped with symbolic implications: bald eagles in Elaine Ávila’s “Brackendale” (2017), a play which cites scientific research, and Elspeth Tilley’s “The Penguins” (2017), a play which alludes to Aristophanes’s The Birds and is designed to provoke thoughts about post-humanism, as indicated in the author’s note preceding the play.
- 16.
Similarly, Andrea Lepcio’s “Alone” (2015) succeeds in depicting a woman representing the wealthy “1%”-ers. She lives on literally and symbolically high ground that saves her from flooding, within earshot of the voices of those further below. The rather dry representation of “1%”-er arguments regarding their sense of entitlement implicitly results in a plea for empathy, but without being maudlin or melodramatic.
- 17.
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Balestrini, N.W. (2019). Transnational and Postcolonial Perspectives on Communicating Climate Change Through Theater. In: Leal Filho, W., Lackner, B., McGhie, H. (eds) Addressing the Challenges in Communicating Climate Change Across Various Audiences. Climate Change Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98294-6_16
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