Content Transparency: This production about the climate crisis includes apocalyptic content, nuclear disaster, and an extinction event. It also includes stage fog, flashing lights, alarms, sirens, and loud sounds.
This project was made possible through funding from the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts Dean’s Creativity Council.
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Collectively created by graduate and undergraduate students through a series of devising labs, Anthropocene incorporates innovative media design, dance, movement, text, sound and image into a powerful portrait of our world out of balance. Its non-traditional and non-linear approach to storytelling offers flashes of characters within a mosaic of various worlds throughout history: the Silk Road, the Industrial Revolution, 1950s America to present day. Anthropocene tells a story of the escalation of consumption and how we are hurtling towards an unsustainable future.
AnthropoceneTrailer.MOVAnthropoceneReMIXedProgram.pdfWe 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. Non-linear structure also helps us to remember that humanity’s presence on the planet is a mere blip in its timescale.
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.
Below is a list of the episodes that comprise the performance. Each of these episodes is informed by deep dramaturgical research. Clicking the links below will take you away from this site over to the Anthropocene Dramaturgical Research Site.
