Climate Emergency

Kristin Idaszak shares about Dolores Díaz’s new play Black Sunday that connects the environmental racism during the 1935 Dust Bowl to contemporary migration crises in Chicago.

Robert Duffley, dramaturg for the We Hear You—A Climate Archive series, details the process of creating 77 Messages to the Future, an offering that amplifies and preserves youth perspectives on the climate emergency from around the world. He shares how this work counters dominant media narratives that exclude the voices of youth and illustrate the climate crisis as something yet to come.

Eseovwe Emakunu and Anita Anoma of Shanty Theatre recently launched a campaign that brought together primary school performers and university audiences for a dance drama performance about climate change. They discuss the creative process and impact of this performance project, which catalyzed action and learning about the impact of climate change and deforestation in Nigeria.

Ayesha Jordan writes about the intersection of performance and permaculture, and how slowing down and respecting the cycles of the earth are influencing her multi-species project in process. 

Deke Weaver discusses his life-long project, The Unreliable Bestiary: an ark of full-length performances about animals, our relationships with them, and the worlds they inhabit. Through this ambitious project, Deke and his team draw out the connections between disparate local and global dots and illustrate how the personal is political.

Tannis Kowalchuk, artistic director of Farm Arts Collective, shares about the project Dream on the Farm—a ten year project of climate change plays performed on Willow Wisp Organic Farm that grapples with the questions: How do we imagine our future? What are our dreams?

Chantal Bilodeau kicks off another installment of Theatre in the Age of Climate Change by reflecting on her journey working on the Arctic Cycle against the backdrop of the continuously increasing global temperature, and introducing the other playwrights who will be sharing about their commitment to creating a series of work about the climate crisis. 

Ashley Malafronte reflects on the 2024 Under the Radar Symposium, which convened global theatre artists, producers, and presenters in New York City for a day of keynotes and discussions that surfaced the issues plaguing the international performing arts sector, as well as the emergent paths that could strengthen it.

Macy E. Kunke shares the practical steps she took to cultivate more sustainable stage management practices for a recent production of Men on Boats. By utilizing a variety of digital tools instead of more traditional printed paper methods, the stage management team created only a fraction of typical paper waste and found that their work that was cheaper, simpler, and more collaborative than typical stage management processes.

Genevieve Simon reflects on the process of writing Bloom Bloom Pow, a play that makes space for collective grief by staging small-town chaos against a backdrop of the harmful algal bloom crisis in the Great Lakes region.

Playwright Raul Garza discusses the potent connections between environment and Latinx heritage that he explores by employing magical realism in his play Arbolito.

Theresa May discusses the way that two contemporary plays with dystopian settings—Transmissions in Advance of the Second Great Dying by Jessica Huang and Somewhere by Melissa Treviño Orta—lean away from typical tropes of destruction and individualism by instead centering care, kinship, reciprocity, and interdependence.

Chantal Bilodeau introduces a new installment of the Theatre in the Age of Climate Change series, which focuses contemporary plays and playwrights that explore the intimate impacts of climate change on both individuals and communities.