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 the generosity of our donors, including the Mead Family Foundation, Jamie Hormel, James Langan, Steven Mastroieni, Nancy and Jeffrey Millman, David and Sonja Saar, James and Linda Saunders, Tracy and Marc Schwimmer, Hector Villarreal, Amy Whittington, Humanities for the Environment, Create the Change, UNESCO-BRIDGES, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts (Arizona State University), and the School of Music, Dance and Theatre (Arizona State University).

Anthropocene

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.

We undertook this project to raise the alarm bells about the climate crisis. Because scientific data can be opaque and difficult to decipher, climate scientists face challenges in prompting the general public to act. This is where performance comes in. Theatre has the capacity to impact audiences emotionally, intellectually, and somatically. With Anthropocene, we seek to create an impressionistic piece that indicted capitalism and human consumption without falling into the didacticism that often afflicts climate change theatre. Rather, we reveal the effects of overconsumption, slowly littering the stage with the detritus of fast food, fast fashion, and so much grab-and-go plastic, to show how our relationship to the Earth, to each other, and to ourselves is wildly out of balance. Through performance, we are able to convey a complex story of inequality and disharmony, a story about how the acceleration of our consumption, encouraged by capitalism, had led us to our current unsustainable situation.

The arts and humanities are necessary partners to the hard sciences in addressing the climate crisis and planetary health, and must be included in cross-disciplinary collaborations from the start, during the pre-policy imagining stages, as they vitally connect to people in ways that augment the impact of scientific research and increase the value of that research. This performance helps make visible the impact that the performing arts and humanities thinking can have in addressing the most challenging issues we face today.

Trailer

AnthropoceneTrailer.MOV

The Devising Process

Key Themes

The Term Anthropocene

Healing Our Relationship

with the Earth

Acceleration of Consumption

Take Action

Episodes

We 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.