As a piece of devised theatre, Anthropocene has been years in the making. It began first with what Vision Keeper Rachel Bowditch calls "Originary Hunches," artistic impulses that first motivated the exploration of this topic. This moved into various devising labs. And then COVID hit, disrupting everything. As we returned to campus in the fall of 2021, Bowditch and Project Dramaturg Karen Jean Martinson began to work on the show in earnest, planning the devising labs through which the piece was created and conducting extensive research. More detailed descriptions of the devising process follow below.

Originary Hunches

The inception of the project began almost 20 years ago and has evolved through three specific artistic hunches. Bowditch recalls how these hunches evolved:

The first hunch arrived when I visited two exhibits at the New York Historical Society in 2003. One exhibit was a series of 65 photographs documenting the lifespan of the World Trade Center, from the building of the twin towers, their completion, the collision of the  two planes into the towers on 9/11, and their collapse into rubble.

The exhibit right next door was about everyday life in New York City and it was designed like a city diner. There was a cup of coffee in a blue Greek diner paper cup and a bagel with cream cheese—a staple grab-and-go New York breakfast. Next to the coffee and bagel was a list of all the resources that went into this humble meal, detailing the unseen chains of consumption that made this everyday consumer transaction possible. These two exhibits resonated in such a powerful way, raising questions about the DNA of human life and the DNA of human consumption. It felt like a story existed within and between those two worlds. 

The second hunch came many years later when I was working with Moises Kaufman from Tectonic Theatre Project. We were asked to develop theatrical moments based on artificial intelligence. I created a moment with actors crouched in several small boxes having intimate conversations with Siri as their sole source of human connection. Again, this felt related—but I was unsure how. I imagined an entire set constructed out of a series of boxes as a metaphor—for Pandora’s box, a tomb, a womb—that could be transformed into a variety of different environments, such as an office building, an apartment complex, a factory, a morgue, a 1950s kitchen and more. 

The final hunch arrived in 2018 when I wasas a fellow at the Harvard Mellon School for Performance Research. A guest speaker from the United Nations kept mentioning the anthropocene—a term with which I was unfamiliar. As soon as I learned more about it, I realized that anthropocene was a concept that encompassed all the contradictions I was grappling with artistically, serving as an umbrella term to capture the complexity of our current moment and the need to find new visions for the future. I knew from the start that I wanted to tell this complex story of macro and micro systems through images, sound, movement, and other elements of the stage. 

Why Devising?

Philosophically, devising emphasizes the collective over the individual, thus it is especially well-suited to a world grappling with climate change, offering a valuable model for collectivist ways of living and being. Indeed, countless environmental activists stress that while individual choices can make a difference, true systemic change can only come through collective action. Fenton Lutunatabua of the Pacific Climate Warriors writes, “So much about this story about individualism needs to be left behind. The future needs to be one that’s collective and communal.” Devising reinforces this collectivist ethos; it requires active, generous collaboration, and it trusts that the answers that you need can be found in the creativity of the people in the room, who each bring to the project their own unique skills and imagination. 

“‘We’ is a crucial word.” 

Rebecca Solnit

Philosophically, devising emphasizes the collective over the individual, thus it is especially well-suited to a world grappling with climate change, offering a valuable model for collectivist ways of living and being. Indeed, countless environmental activists stress that while individual choices can make a difference, true systemic change can only come through collective action. Fenton Lutunatabua of the Pacific Climate Warriors writes, “So much about this story about individualism needs to be left behind. The future needs to be one that’s collective and communal.” Devising reinforces this collectivist ethos; it requires active, generous collaboration, and it trusts that the answers that you need can be found in the creativity of the people in the room, who each bring to the project their own unique skills and imagination. 

Our chosen methodology for crafting this production was Moment Work, a devising technique developed by Tectonic Theater Project. Artists create and discuss Moments, which are discrete theatrical units that can be deepened through dramaturgical research, expanded through further exploration, and ultimately sequenced together into a full production. Throughout our process, we continually scrutinized what we had crafted, conducting a granular analysis of the intent we hoped to express in each scene while amplifying the cohering themes that emerged. 

Every moment that you see in this show began with an initial spark—an image or an idea drawn from collective research and dialogue. For example, our research about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, led Clara Kundin, a devising lab participant and the Assistant Director, to create an image of a person blowing seeds in an attempt to reseed the Earth, which remains largely unchanged in this production. Stage Manager Becca Levy pondered the question of who gets left behind in a tragedy, drawing on her Jewish faith in considering the story of Noah’s Ark; though we moved away from a more literal engagement with this story, its resonances appear multiple times, when characters are forced to choose what to take and what to leave behind. Prompted by her research on the slow violence of aerosols and chemicals, dramaturg Karen Jean Martinson envisioned the aerosol dance that ends the 1950s sequence, which we then connected historically to the Industrial Revolution, when coal-powered production created air pollution and smog. The moment was layered with further meaning when we researched how the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in 1816 caused “The Year Without a Summer.” All of this is contained in a moment titled “London Fog,” a brief movement piece originally created by Cassaundra Mora where one actor swirls around another actor with a sheet of visqueen plastic to create the illusion of smog. These accumulated layers of meaning evolved organically to become the rich performance we have crafted. 

Just as repeated themes and imagery have emerged through this process, so too have certain materials become crucial to the work of unifying the production. For instance,  plastic bags are used to represent fish, a baby, an ocean, a dress, natural resources, and polluted rain. Even without trying to connect moments, connections nevertheless appeared, as when the fabric being sewn in the Industrial Revolution transforms into contemporary fast fashion. Through the devising process, we have been able to craft an imaginative and powerful performance about a topic as immense and overwhelming as the Anthropocene. 

The Devising Labs

For more information visit https://anthropoceneproject.com/about.