Climate Emergency

Evan Silver aka Tiresias details their inspirations and intentions for cryptochrome, a sonic odyssey and ritual meditation that invites audiences to imagine themselves in the sensory worlds of other living things.

In the solo show KOAL, Jacinta Yelland explored both human and non-human experiences in response to catastrophic bushfires in Australia. She shares the insights and creative decisions that kept her piece deeply entwined with nature and culture.

Plant Man is a performative forest: a full-body suit filled with living plants, created and inhabited by Marco Guagnelli. He writes about the ways this performance-based artistic research project explores embodied relationships with nature through plant-filled garments and performative actions.

The solo dance theatre piece LOAM adopts the balance, duration, and repetition of soil. Cara Hagan details the research questions and generative processes that she used to shape LOAM—and her own life.

The 2025 Theatre in the Age of Climate Change series explores solo performances that take on ecological issues. Curator Chantal Bilodeau introduces the series by using her own play, No More Harveys, to ask: how can we use theatre to hold the entire world in one body?

Using Sarah Cameron Sunde’s 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea, Dr. Una Chaudhuri articulates protocols for endurance—through performance, connection, and action—as we face the rising tide of climate emergency.

In 2024, the Island Shakespeare Festival in Whidbey Island, Washington, set a goal of producing “zero-waste.” They partnered with local sustainability organizations to confront their waste issue and transform the front-of-house experience for theatregoers.

Ghost Forest grapples with the climate crisis playing out through sea level rise that impacts forests of the Eastern Bay in Maryland. Taylor Leigh Lamb discusses the way the play’s ecological approach extended into new play development process that supported the art, the artists, and the surrounding community.

When government agencies establish well-structured frameworks for environmental action, they enable the arts and culture sector to function as a central, active contributor to addressing the climate emergency and ecological crisis. Iphigenia Taxopoulou discusses the growing trend in these cultural policy collaborations paving the way for a sustainable transition.

How do you insist on hope in the face of crisis? Can Miami restructure itself to avoid climate peril? And what might anti-Zionist Jewish theatre look like? Playwright Talia Rodriguez considers these questions and more in this essay on her play Pitbull’s Party at the End.  
 

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.