Episodes

The episodes in this play were developed through the devising process, and then ordered by Rachel Bowditch and Karen Jean Martinson. We both favor an aesthetic approach that crafts layered visual storytelling into a non-linear mosaic of Moments, with text sparsely incorporated through multi-lingual spoken exchanges, projections, and recordings.We are interested in emphasizing the recurrence of behavior, the fact that we often travel in the same pathways that were carved millenia ago. Present is linked to past not by a straight line, but by repetitions and returns. 

Some of our favorite moments of transition seek to emphasize thematic repetitions across historical time and space. Moreover, these non-linear patterns help us to grapple with the paradoxes inherent in the topic of climate change - the infinitesimally brief span of human existence in relation to the vastness of geological time; the slow, often invisible process of environmental destruction in contrast to our concept of violence as something immediate and tangible; the urgent need for drastic change set against the sluggish pace of legislation and collective political action; recognition of the fact that even if the entire human population instantly reached net zero emissions, it would still take the planet decades to begin to heal. 

Non-linear structure also helps us to remember that humanity’s presence on the planet is a mere blip in its timescale; as Tim Brannan notes in his article “The Anthropocene is a Joke,” “Geological time is deep beyond all comprehension,” so immense that “all of recorded human history is [geologically] irrelevant.” To name this epoch the Anthropocene, Brannen suggests, is either absurdly hubristic or wildly optimistic, suggesting that we are at the very infancy of an existence that will persist on a geological timescale, rather than rapidly hurtling toward our own extinction. It is much more likely that, far into the planet’s future, humanity’s existence will exist in a few centimeters of ocean rock littered with trace isotopes. We are an event more than we are an epoch. And yet, this, too, is paradoxical; whether humanity continues to live on this planet for another 50 years or 50 million years, we have undeniably initiated monumental change. The earth will go on, with or without us, but we have also impacted its future.