About Our Process
Grounding Our Work
Environmental activist and scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology Joanna Macy argues that systemic change, in response to our climate emergency, will happen in three ways*:
Direct action to prevent further damage to the biosphere
Experimentation with new ways of organizing to sustain life
Enabling a global shift of consciousness based on values of connection, empathy, and community
In "Performing Climate Justice," students have explored how artivists (activists-artists) contribute to all three vectors of change. We use a performance studies lens to consider how artivists respond to the climate emergency, to human exploitation of and disconnection from natural ecosystems, to migrations and displacements, and to the rights of land, water, air, nonhuman animals, and other nonhuman entities.
Artivists create opportunities for facilitating conversations, shifting the story, creating awareness, bringing people together across their different experiences and interests, building coalitions, placemaking, and providing concrete, sensory experiences of the ecosystems of which we human animals are a part.
*In Lucy Neal, Playing for Time: Making Art as if the World Mattered (London: Oberon Books, 2015), 208-9.
(Click to read more.)
Performance Studies
An interdisciplinary field that developed at the intersection of anthropology and theatre studies, Performance Studies explores both formal performance such as theatre or installation art and "performance in everyday life," that is, how we transmit knowledge and reproduce, and also revise, our social reality in our everyday behavior. Performance Studies locates performance as both knowledge production and action in the world. Students in Performing Climate Justice followed the late performance studies scholar and ethnographer Dwight Conquergood in considering the three “A’s” of performance: as aesthetic accomplishment (delight in the making and the made), embodied analysis (here, both research and the critical revision of existing practices, finding new embodied techniques that could be drawn on for future practice), and activism (convening a “we” capable of acting in response to the climate emergency.*
Promoting Response-ability
Performance may enable what Donna Haraway, a noted feminist scholar working at the intersections of gender, ecology, animal studies, and technology, had called ”response-ability":
Response-ability is that cultivation through which we render each other capable, that cultivation of the capacity to respond. Response-ability is not something you have toward some kind of demand made on you by the world or by an ethical system or by a political commitment. Response-ability is not something that you just respond to, as if it’s there already. Rather, it’s the cultivation of the capacity of response in the context of living and dying in worlds for which one is for, with others. So I think of response-ability as irreducibly collective and to-be-made. In some really deep ways, that which is not yet, but may yet be. It is a kind of luring, desiring, making-with.**
Imagining the Future
We have to be able to imagine a desirable future in order to invest –bodily, emotionally, in the everyday practices of our lives – in necessary changes to our current, fossil-fuel-driven habitus ---
Our local and bodily home and its historical structuration by and orientation to consumption, enabled by fossil-fuel-based technologies allowing us to travel, trade, and exploit labor across expanses of time and space;
The bodily and spatial habits that organize the realness and naturalness of our world, what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called the “habitus”: “embodied history, internalized as second nature and so forgotten as history."***
If our embodied actions bear the traces of forgotten histories -- of fossil fuel capitalism, white supremacy and racialization, cisheteropatriarchy, and ableism, among so many other genealogies carried by our bodies today-- performance scholar Margaret Thompson Drewal has suggested that performance may provide “an active re-membering of that forgotten history.”**** Such a re-membering entails both the reactivation of memory and embodied techniques for putting our bodily members back together, so as to restore relationality and rehumanize through response-ability.
But the ability to imagine a desirable and liveable future has been asymmetrically distributed, racially, generationally, between the Global North and Global South, along gender and sexual lines, according to physical/cognitive/emotional abilities, and economically. How can we distribute this ability more equitably?
Works Cited
*Dwight Conquergood, “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research,” The Drama Review (TDR) 46, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 145-156, quotation from 152.
**Donna Haraway, quoted. in “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhucene: Donna Haraway in conversation with Martha Kenney,” in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), pg. 256-57.
***Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1990), 56.
****Margaret Thompson Drewal, “Yoruba Reversionism in New York City.” Unpublished paper (1995).
Adapting CCTA Plays as Radio Plays
Throughout the semester, students in Performing Climate Justice read, analyzed, and vocalized scripts from the 2020 CCTA collection Lighting the Way: An Anthology of Short Plays About the Climate Crisis*, along with a curated selection of 2023 CCTA plays (chosen by instructor Tom King as best suited for radio play adaptation). Students were invited to choose their favorite plays for adaptation and name the performance and/or production roles they preferred, and King created production teams accordingly.
*Chantal Bilodeau and Thomas Peterson, editors, Lighting the Way: An Anthology of Short Plays About the Climate Crisis. Arctic Cycle (United States, 2020).
Accompanying script analysis, students (most of whom had no prior performance or audio editing experience) participated in a variety of workshops:
Mark Dellelo, Director of the Sound and Image Media Studios (SIMS) at Brandeis University, gave two in-class workshops on recording audio, assembling and editing audio tracks in Adobe Audition, and adding sound events. Subsequently, students worked with SIMS staff to record and begin editing tracks.
Jimena Bermejo, Co-Director, Mobius Artists Group, engaged students in foundational performance exercises.
Anneke Reich, Artistic Director, Artists’ Theater of Boston, showed students how to divide scripts into macro and micro beats and find action verbs to name character intentions.
Chantal Bilodeau, Founding Artistic Director of Arts & Climate Initiative and founder of Climate Change Theatre Action, discussed with students the CCTA process and questions about dramaturgy and impact.
Public Facing
From the beginning of the process, students know their work will have an audience beyond the classroom. Considerations of audience and address -- to whom are we speaking? how will we produce work for our desired audience? to what ideas are we truly committed and how will we best communicate those ideas? -- shape our work from the start.
Textual Considerations
Students made very minor adjustments to the text so that physical actions and visual information could be communicated aurally. For example, an eye roll onstage may be communicated in a radio play by a vocalized sigh or scoff. Sound designers communicated information about settings (the time and place of the playworlds) through soundscapes and sound events. Swear words has to be adjusted for radio broadcast, per FCC regulations.
Ethics of Casting
Contemporary theatre ethics require intentionality in casting, supporting racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, ability, and economic inclusiveness. Many wonderful CCTA plays are written to be staged by performers with specific racial, ethnic, and national heritages. If we could not cast those plays with appropriate voice actors, from among class members, we chose not to perform them. We celebrated gender/sexual inclusivity by casting "Cassandra Drowning" with two femme presenting actors, rather than the heterosexual couple suggested by the playwright, and foregrounded intersectionality by changing the privileged homeowner of "The Committee to Expropriate" to a white woman.
Feedback and Revision
Students submitted draft radio plays and podcast scripts for feedback and listened to recordings in the classroom in the final week of the semester to judge how their plays sounded in a public setting.
Devising an Action
As part of the CCTA process, producing teams invite audience members to take action toward mitigataing the causes and effects of climate change. In "Performing Climate Justice," we accompanied each radio play with a podcast reflecting on the messages of the plays and what producing teams wanted listeners to take away from them. Students used creativity, storytelling, humor, interviews, and other podcasting techniques to share information and resources in an approachable and accessible manner. The podcasts also provided a mechanism for hosting the actions listeners would be invited to take. Students participated in a design lab process, during the final two weeks of the semester, to design a campus action or intervention to share in their podcasts, exploring participatory decision making and community engagement.
Widening the Circles
Our design lab process asks individual participants to bring to the table the following elements:
One "good" for which they want to advocate -- for example, one method for slowing climate change or mitigating its effects; one aspect of climate justice that they think must be part of the conversation; or one aspect of a resilient, sustainable, and adaptive future.
One "element" of the ecosystem (including both “natural” and “built” systems) for which they want to advocate: air, water, land, food, biodiversity, housing, transportation, heating and cooling systems, place, waste, etc.
One scientific datum (fact, statistic) or science-based prediction that they would prioritize in a discussion of how the climate crisis is impacting that element (air, water, biodiversity, etc.).
One art practice imagining a just transition toward a just future, drawing on the artists and practitioners studied across the semester and particularly from Lucy Neal’s incredible compendium Playing for Time.
One skill that they can contribute to a collaborative project addressing climate change.
One shareable activity that gives them joy.
In the initial phase of the design lab, participants share what they've brought. Each team nominates a facilitator to hold space and to ensure that everyone gets to speak for or against any item, that power is shared and decentralized, and that the process will draw on all ways of knowing and experiences. No one person has all the knowledge; each participant contributes what they know. Affinities emerge and the team build consensus for their top choice in each category. Teams consider how their top choices -- the “good,” the aspect of the ecosystem to be addressed, individual skills, and the “joy”--can be brought together and made to speak to each other.
From here the design lab process asks team members to consider the obstacles that must be overcome to create and embody joy in a just future--for example, existing stories that have to be shifted; how to make the project specific to their communities at Brandeis; what they'll need to know about those communities and who they'll need to learn that from; how to invite participation by community leaders and center their experience and knowledge in the subsequent design process; consider impact and the longevity of the project; and the ethics of community engagement.
Throughout, participants are asked, What is the smallest scale you can work at? At what scale can you actually make change? Creating localized, feasible actions brings folks into the conversation and helps them feel they can exercise their muscles as engaged members of a community. It is through the conversations that are begun, and the memories held in our muscles, that these small actions begin to connect and resonate with each other, widening the circle.
(Click to read more.)
Creativity as a Vehicle of Exploration, Research, and Communication
Creative work not only incorporates research. It constitutes a research method. Questions and problems that come up invite analysis and the finding of solutions. Questions must be made local and specific to the work; they take on urgency and concreteness. Decisions must be made: What is the most direct statement of our intentions for this work, and what do we want those who listen to it later to take away from it? How do we best make information approachable and accessible? How do we speak to climate science but also to climate emotions? How do we connect this to what is "at hand" and available in our listener's lives, finding the small but feasible scale where a change can be made?
Working collaboratively on a radio play and podcast enables team members to explore its message in depth. The creative process focuses the group’s attention and invites sharing of expertise and perspectives. Collaborative work involves the labor of holding space for diverse expertises and perspectives and imagining and designing a "container" for diversity, a "form" for the creative work of both those who create it and those will engage and sit with it later. (Forms are therefore not thing-like but process-like.) Our collaboration is interdisciplinary, bringing together students with different disciplinary expertises while inviting them to choose roles outside their individual comfort zones, out of the belief that a just response to the climate emergency will require drawing on all the disciplines. The collaborative process also invites further research, as a means of widening the group’s knowledge base. Creativity and analysis/research are not opposed, therefore. They facilitate each other.
Investing Belief in Collaboration
Working collaboratively and in community requires unlearning the habits of competitive individualism fostered by the university system. Our process requires each member to choose roles and be responsible to those roles while maintaining group engagement. Each team’s commitment to the exploratory process of collaboration is necessary to achieving a unified, cohesive, and exciting project-campaign.