Key Themes 

At one of our early design retreats, our collaborator and media designer Jake Pinholster joked with us that we were creating a performance about everything. In a way, this is true: climate change is inextricably linked with neoliberal capitalism, globalization, advertising and consumption, industrialization, extraction economies, and the historical legacies of colonization, enslavement, and the racial and gender-based oppressions that justify these systems. To truly speak of climate change is to deal in all these complexities. But this offhand comment also alerted us to a potential dramaturgical problem: to tell a story about everything is to tell a story about nothing. We also needed to find a narrative structure that allowed for complexity and aligned with our devising process. One truism of devising is that you have to believe that the answers that you need can be found in the creativity of the people in the room. As we generated different sketches using Moment Work, a devising technique developed by Tectonic Theater Project, we continually scrutinized what we had crafted, looking for cohering themes to emerge. As we began to assemble a performance treatment from our Moments, we articulated our intent with each scene. This sort of granular analysis was informative; it allowed us to gain clarity in our approach. 

Stories of Imbalance

Though we had gathered together around the power of one single word - Anthropocene - what our ensemble kept returning to was the fact that our relationship to the earth, to each other, and to ourselves is wildly out of balance. We realized we were trying to craft a story of inequality and disharmony, a story about how the acceleration of our consumption had led us to our current unsustainable situation. Thus imbalance is threaded throughout the performance: from the world underwater through to the final moment. We have identified particularly important moments in history, when significant social changes led us further askew: the mechanization of labor and the building of coal-powered infrastructure during the Industrial Revolution, the acceleration of consumption in the 1950s, our reliance on fossil fuels, and now our moment of reckoning. We also considered the methods through which we are estranged: the alienating language of business; the convenience culture of fast food, fast fashion, and fast deliveries; and our relationship to technology.

Moments of Connection

As a counterpoint to this frenetic imbalance, we have injected moments of connection into the performance. In part, this emerged out of the Critical Response Process (a technique developed by Liz Lerman) we held after one of our showings, where one respondent asked "What in humanity is worth saving?" We needed to include the beauty, generosity, kindness, and respect that humans are capable of showing. These moments emerged rather organically through the process, and became centered around the Mother and the Indigenous Seed Scientist.