Modules engaging with Environmental Sustainability and Performance

This module explores theatre texts, performances, films and environmental sustainability. Performance practitioners have reflected on environmental issues for centuries; for example, Shakespeare’s plays respond to and help document, the first major deforestation in Europe. Today questions concerning sustainable performance practices are becoming increasingly urgent in the face of climate crisis.

The module explores a range of theatre, performance and film texts which respond to the environment from Euripides to Caryl Churchill, from Studio Ghibli to Frozen II, from Greta Thunberg’s speeches to XR interventions. It considers theatres of activism alongside the question of what we can do to promote sustainable performance practices. The course will build an understanding of the politics, possibilities and challenges of theatre, performance and the environment.

This module teaches students to recognise and evaluate how theatre and performance engages with, is informed by, or challenges prevailing ideas and practices related to memory. The module investigates ecological concerns about landscape, soil, forests. This includes commemoration of mass graves and memory activism in rivers, forests, deserts.

In this module students will be introduced to the skill sets that scenographers/theatre designers use to create and communicate the atmospheric conditions for performance. Students will be encouraged to research and adopt experimental and sustainable processes to design a scenographic experience that is environmentally and emotionally charged.

This module aims teach students how site-based performance responds to the social/political and cultural characteristics of non-theatre spaces. This often includes outdoor spaces, and performance making which teases out related politics, ethics, and concepts of those spaces.