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. 

The Devising Labs

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