Environmentalism, performance and applications: uncertainties and emancipations

Abstract

This introductory article for a themed edition on environmentalism provides a particular context for those articles that follow, each of which engages with different aspects of environmentalism and performance in community-related settings. Responding to the proposition of Bottoms that there is a lacuna in the field of applied drama and environmentalism, we suggest that the more significant lack is that of ecocriticism. As the articles in this journal testify, there are many examples of applied theatre practice; what is required is sustained and rigorous critical engagement. It is to the gap of ecocriticism that we address this issue, signalling what we hope is the emergence of a critical field. One response to the multiple challenges of climate change is to more transparently locate the human animal within the environment, as one agent amongst many. Here, we seek to transparently locate the critic, intertwining the personal – ourselves, human actants – with global environmental concerns. This tactic mirrors much contemporary writing on climate change and its education, privileging personal engagement – a shift we interrogate as much as we perform. The key trope we anchor is that of uncertainty: the uncertainties that accompany stepping into a new research environment; the uncertainties arising from multiple relations (human and non-human); the uncertainties of scientific fact; the uncertainties of forecasting the future; and the uncertainties of outcomes – including those of performance practices. Having analysed a particular turn in environmental education (towards social learning) and the failure to successfully combine ‘art and reality’ in recent UK mainstream theatre events, such uncertainties lead to our suggestion for an ‘emancipated’ environmentalism. In support of this proposal, we offer up a reflection on a key weekend of performance practice that brought us to attend to the small – but not insignificant – and to consider first hand the complex relationships between environmental ‘grand narratives’ and personal experiential encounters. Locating ourselves within the field and mapping out some of the many conceptual challenges attached to it serves to introduce the territories which the following journal articles expand upon.

Keywords:

• environmentalism
• climate change
• risk
• precariousness
• site-specific performance
• pedagogy

Acknowledgement

Alan Reid, Monash University, Australia, and Editor of Environmental Education Research has acted as a consultant for this journal.

Notes

1. The term ‘Climategate’ was the short-hand reference applied by journalists to the hacking and circulation of emails held by the Climatic Research Unit (University of East Anglia, UK) in 2009. Climate sceptics claimed the emails showed a manipulation of data. A review led by Sir Muir Russell found no evidence of scientific misconduct.

2. See www.slowfood.org.uk (accessed 20 August 2011).

3. This article only references a few of the recent ‘climate change’ plays. For a comprehensive list of related UK productions, particularly from the 1980s onwards, see http://www.ashdendirectory.org.uk/directory.asp?searchTerm=allProductions. We name a range of productions and companies towards the end of this article. Most of these are also to be found in the Ashden Directory's deeply informative list.

4. There is more to be written on this subject. One area for debate is the role of ‘labelling’ these plays as environmental. It is perhaps those who observe (critics, award-givers) who have tried to make more of environmental matters in some of these productions than the companies and writers. Another is the repetition of character types: sold-out scientist (Water; Earthquakes), young and frustrated climate change campaigner (Water; Greenland; The Heretic); eccentric scientist (Greenland; Earthquakes). There is simplification here. As one reviewer put it, are these plays avoiding asking hard questions of their audiences? (http://www.whatsonstage.com/reviews/theatre/london/E8831296826827/Water.html, accessed 2 January 2011).

5. See www.performancefootprint.co.uk for details.

6. For detailed notes of these fascinating inputs, see an early section of Dee's blog: http://performancefootprint.co.uk/2011/02/the-scottish-weekend-one-account-dee-heddon/.

7. See www.capefarewell.com (accessed 28 December 2011).

8. See ‘Cove Tour’ at www.covepark.org (accessed 20 September 2011).

9. See Wallace Heim's engagement with the idea of improvisation, read through phronesis, a mode of practical reasoning (2003, 195).

10. This is not to be confused with Hulme's description of upper case and lower case climate change (2009, 327–8) which was not known to us at the time of Cove Park. This serves a different purpose to Sally's intention of the formal, public, large scale and the informal, private and small scale.

11. There is not space in this introductory article to argue a case for the strengths of all these pieces seen, particularly in comparison to the mainstream theatre discussed earlier. We leave something of these debates to the articles that follow.

12. See http://labofii.net/.

13. See http://www.juliesbicycle.com/.

14. See http://www.juliesbicycle.com/resources/green-guides/green-theatre-guide.