Mahlu Mertens: "Scaling Up Thinking via the Microscale in Elke rots wordt ooit een kiezelsteen (2025)"

This paper combines Timothy Clark’s notion of “derangements of scale” (2012) with Thea Brejzek and Lawrence Wallen’s concept of the “spatial double” (2018) to analyze collective Plankton’s performance Elke rots wordt ooit een kiezelsteen (Every rock will eventually become a pebble, 2025). In this production, a miniature replica of the theatre itself takes center stage. The performers, acting as puppeteers, manipulate handcrafted cardboard scale models of inanimate objects and non-human animals to imagine the future of this space after humans have gone extinct. This paper argues that this spatial doubling—mirroring the actual theatre with a smaller-scale model—creates a disorienting effect: it pushes the human performers into the background while simultaneously turning them into a stand-in for humanity as a geological force. The work thus decentres human experience while keeping human responsibility in the Anthropocene in the spotlight. The micro-scale of the model, paradoxically, compels audiences to “scale up” their thinking, highlighting the multiple scales at which Anthropocenic processes operate. This case study thus illustrates how puppetry or object theater – with their tradition of working with models – can contribute to thinking on multiple scales at once, and to rethinking the relationship between the human and the non-human on stage.

Helen Gilbert: "Puppet Instrumentalities and Ecocultural Belonging" 

This presentation centres non-European puppet performance as a provocation for thinking ‘beyond the box’ about the concepts of ecological emergency and posthuman futures. It turns initially to Australia’s northwest coast to analyse the mobilisation of puppetry in Indigenous-led projects aiming to foster grass-roots action that addresses the combined effects of climate change, colonialist extractivism and urban/tourist development. In this context, puppet work typically encompasses creative multispecies entanglements and mutual responsibilities that are not only performative but also potentially instrumental and enduring. Activated by myriad human and other forces, puppets stand to both clarify and repair ruptures in the vital web of social, ecological and spiritual relationships that subtend Indigenous life worlds. I will discuss such instrumentality in relation to ecocultural belonging, briefly linking this concept to recent debates about puppetry as a posthuman artform ideally positioned to expand the limits of anthropocentric environmentalism. From that vantage point, my focus turns to a preliminary analysis of eco-activist strategies in The Herds, a massive 2025 public art-and-climate-action project involving the intercontinental migration of puppet animals from the Congo Basin to the Arctic Circle, together with their various human agents and collaborators. This epic migration, punctuated by rolling interventions staged in tandem with local community and cultural sector allies at a range of African and (Western) European waypoints, is overtly designed to ‘challenge perspectives on the climate crisis’ and ‘spark meaningful change’. I consider this mission in the light of urgent and shared concerns about environmental justice across Indigenous and Global South constituencies and its (arguably) belated appearance in ‘mainstream’ eco-dramaturgies in Europe. Beyond specific comparisons of puppet–human dynamics in the case studies at issue, my presentation broadly aims to open windows on activist performance constellations in the long wake of European imperialism.

Matt Smith & Nik Wakefield: "Putting the object centre stage: hubcap landscapes, conflicts of interest, and ecological dysfunction"

This presentation mixes provocation with performance as two artists/scholars engage with the problem of how to feel our way through the contested zones of the dysfunctional anthropocene; on a path of extinction. If extinction is a hyperobject, it might be too big to see on stage. And yet perhaps it is not extinction that is the problem, but the limits of aesthetic principles that prevent European theatre from staging at least small-scale glimpses of already-occurring extinction. After Claire Colebrook’s Who Would You Kill to Save the World (2023) we might encounter the death of bourgeois subjectivity in the theatre, particularly as a threat to stale naturalisms. Pushing human actors off-centre is a productive way to pay attention to the active and destructive forces around us. This presentation articulates a human with a sense of extinction as sensible within mundane aspects of the everyday. These pieces of evidence are visible through a forensic process of literalism: in which the relationships between humans, objects, and environments are no longer externalities but rather felt and internalised. Through practice we invite the conference to witness this process of divination with things. The puppeteer entangles their energies with a connected but seemingly separate entity and creates this new chimaera. The embodied performer internalises the contextual ecology within their body.  Is the theatre a good place to solve these problems? What if the theatre became the place to plan extinction? How might ecodramaturgy (Lisa Woynarski 2020) make objects and hyperobjects sensible to the audience? How can we bring these objects into space without turning them into metaphors of human thought? Is it the imaginative function of the artifice of the stage or the physical actuality of theatre’s labour that makes it capable of proposing alternative practices of living, dying, and extinction?

Ariane de Waal: "Shifting Scales in Dramatic Responses to the Climate and Care Crises"

The imperative to care is ubiquitous in a present characterised by the combined crises of climate breakdown, neoliberal capitalism, global health emergencies, and other inequities. Popular discourses about ‘self-care’, conservative calls to protect ‘our children’, and environmentalist injunctions to care for the planet proliferate. At the same time, scholars of feminist care ethics are insistently drawing attention to an escalating crisis of care and to the co-option of interpersonal care arrangements by the current system of “financialized capitalism” (Fraser 2022). Their diagnosis of eroding care resources and capacities has, in turn, led to a questioning of the role of the (performing) arts in developing alternative imaginaries and ethics of care (Fisher and Thompson 2020; Millner and Coombs 2022).
This paper enquires into constellations of care in British climate change theatre. Against the backdrop of scholars’ assessment of an expansion of “carelessness” (The Care Collective 2020), it sheds light on dramatic explorations of relationality, shared vulnerabilities, and terminality. Taking its cue from Sarah Ensor’s argument about the ethical care practices that can spring from “an acknowledgment of endings” (2016), the paper argues that British theatre envisions, but also problematises, modes of caring ‘until the end’ – of individual lifespans, family lines, or a habitable planet.
The paper specifically examines dramatised care constellations involving children and elders, asking how these relate to the future-oriented logic of environmentalism. Inflecting the ecocritical terminology of scales with feminist care ethics, I argue that British climate change theatre evinces, both through form and content, scale effects that call attention to the uneasy extrapolations between interpersonal caring capacities and global concerns surrounding humans’ stewardship for the planet. The paper focuses on two plays of the 2010s, Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone (2016) and Arctic Oil by Clare Duffy (2018). Reading these two plays alongside each other throws into relief the limitations of heteroreproductive modes of care: interpersonal ethics predicated on normative Western views of the autonomous, self-responsible, white liberal subject who saves ‘the planet’ and ‘our children’, are, as the productions invite us to consider, no suitable framework to amend the global inequalities multiplied through global warming and the attendant ecological catastrophes.

Andrew Burton: "Give and Take – a manifesto for a theatre of reciprocity"

I will introduce ‘Give and Take’, a manifesto for a theatre of reciprocity which I developed over a 10-month period from 2024 to 2025, as part of my Arts Council England funded project to develop my creative practice as an eco-dramaturg in the East of England.
‘Give and Take’ urges theatres to contribute to the lives of the local communities they serve, and play a part in healing the natural environments in which those communities are situated. Rather than simply taking audiences’ time and money, ‘Give and Take’ encourages theatres to explore radical new ways of giving back to their communities in a relationship of reciprocity, inspired by the idea of the Gift Economy espoused by Wall Kimmerer (2013) et al.
Some commendable initiatives are currently underway in the UK’s subsidised theatre sector to help theatres address the climate crisis by reducing their carbon footprint, not least The Theatre Green Book. But reducing carbon emissions is simply not enough. In a time of incipient climate breakdown (Read, 2022), society needs to find ways of challenging late capitalism’s opportunistic extractivism and replace it with a hedonistic imaginary of post-growth living (Soper, 2020).
Through active listening and radical empathy, arts organisations and artists throughout the UK, Europe and beyond can forge a relationship of deep reciprocity with the communities they serve. Rather than relying on outdated metrics of financial success to satisfy stakeholders, theatres could change the ground rules by celebrating kinship, contributing to “living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth” (Haraway, 2016) with non-human others.

Jodie Hawkes & Pete Phillips: "Growing Old With You Performance Discussion"

Growing Old With You, a decade-spanning performance project, began in 2010 as a tender exploration of shared futures. Aged 29, Search Party envisioned a lifelong ritual, marking each decade with a new iteration, inviting audience and performers alike to age together. The initial piece, performed on a salt-strewn corridor, distilled personal histories and simple actions into a stark meditation on care and the fragile complexities of togetherness, born in the shadow of new parenthood.
Now, at 43, they return with Growing Old With You (Again), a work born from the liminal space of midlife. This new duet, rooted in the specific landscape of the Manhood Peninsula, an area at risk of permanent inundation (and their family home), weaves narratives of marram grass, the sea's shifting tides, and the stark reality of environmental change. Drawing on Karen Christopher and Mary Paterson’s work on entangled making of performance duets (2021), these ephemeral encounters, juxtaposed with Search Party’s enduring collaboration, become a means of processing the uncertain future.

Drawing on the concept of climate coupling and the drifting influence of water, Search Party explore the interconnectedness of (post)human experience and environmental reality. Echoing Byung-Chul Han’s assertion that ‘the subject of hope is a we’ (2024: 7), the paper embraces the possibility of a shared future, even as they confront the immeasurable distance and loss that lies ahead. The work is driven by a deep yearning for a shared future, a desire to create a lasting connection in the face of increasing uncertainty, to ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016). This commitment to the life-long project, a continuous act of active hope, becomes a way to reckon with the challenges of a changing world, finding solace and strength in interdependence and belonging and of the attempt to grow old together with the land. Growing Old With You offers a compelling case study of a contemporary performance duo that interrogate and go beyond normative understandings of ‘the human’ in the face of ecological crisis.

Natasha Stott: "The Performance Projection Paradigm: An exploration of a dialogue between the moving body and projected image, through improvisation"

In this paper, I argue that for something to be truly intermedial there must be a two-way ‘conversation’ where both parties contribute and influence each other. The key contribution is the development of a practical methodology for intermedial dance practice, the Performance Projection Paradigm (PPP). This methodology enables real-time interactive feedback between the moving body and projected images, rooted in improvisation. Drawing from Extended Realities, this “cyborgian” (Haraway, 1985:65) perspective, aligns with Donna Haraway’s theory that technology and humanity are inextricably imbricated. My methodology emphasizes the live interplay between dance and electronic image projection as a co-creative practice, facilitating continuous co-creation and mutual evolution of body, projection and performance. I analyse this interaction through Deleuze & Guattari’s notion of “becoming” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972:39, 1980:232) and Haraway’s theory of “sympoiesis” (Haraway, 2016:33). The PPP allows for a dynamic, ‘dialogic’ exchange between the performer-participant and the visualist in a continual feedback loop.
The PPP consists of three connective models: the Shifting Shape System, (abstract shapes); the Suggestive Spectrum, (colour associations), and the Choice Method, (decision-making in improvisation). Developed through three waves of practice and research, these models prepare participants for the interactive, improvisational phase, which I call the performance-play. Ultimately, the PPP provides a toolkit with environmental needs, technical set-up, immersive specifics, performer requirements and a bespoke EMP warm-up, offering other practitioners a framework for exploring and creating intermedial performance through kinesthetic play.

Roxanne Korda: "The Harlequin and the Land: A workshop on anthropomorphising the human"

This paper will present and analyse the approach and outcomes of a two week workshop at Nature, Art, and Habitat, to develop new representations of the Harlequin through voice, text, and movement. It will explore methods towards promoting empathy with the non-human through a post-qualitative approach of “affirmative assemblages” and “collective imaginings” (Rosi Braidotti, 2018) that can help us embody and personify the natural world, and in particular the role of minerals as migrating servants or scaffolders throughout our ecosystems. The Harlequin’s role as comic servant (or Zanni) and migrant has taken many changing forms, paralleling the important morphological, and necessary, role of minerals in the composition of our environments and the development of life. This work searches for a disruptive anthropomorphism, situated within contemporary trends as a metamodern approach to theatre, exploring a pendulum which swings between a humorous irony of the exaggerated human trope, and the sincerity of the role of nature in a healthy world. Inspired by Virginie Magnat (2020) who explores how the use of the voice requires an imaginative engagement with the environment that necessarily extends the human experience to that of a wider ecosystem, this paper will explore how an embodied and human-centred approach, can give the effect of de-centring the human to non-anthropocentric views.
Magnat describes Grotowski’s notion of ‘presence’ as having the ability to enable performers as a conduit for the “more-than human” saying that: “he refers to artistic practice as the way, an embodied engagement that requires standing in the beginning, which implies a process that is both performative and ecological since it entails cultivating the productive tension between instinct and consciousness, and fully experiencing the contradictions and mysteries pertaining to our own organicity, to the forces of life, and to the living world.”

Soyun Jang: "Attuning to a Robot Arm: A Dancing Body’s Perspective"

How can dance improvisation foster an affective human–robot interaction beyond anthropocentric norms? This autoethnographic research is based on the experience of programming and dancing with an industrial robot arm (KUKA) to explore how we attune to a robot and the role of movement therein. Attunement here is understood as an embodied tendency to affect and be affected by another. It is a bodily, affective, and perceptual mode of relating to more-than-human bodies that emerges through movement and contextual sensitivity. It proposes an alternative to representational models of communication by emphasizing situated, sensorimotor forms of meaning-making. By leaning into our capability to attune to more-than-human bodies, it becomes possible to design robot movement that is unique to the robot’s materiality, rather than designing them to mimic human gestures. We tend to attribute meaning to moving bodies, fostering a sense of understanding and connectedness that is felt through our own embodiment. We understand movement of other bodies not because they convey intentions or emotions that precede it, but through a comprehensive understanding of the context in which the interaction emerges – shaped by our own situatedness as moving, feeling bodies. Dance as an art form is valuable in this context of robot movement and attunement in human-robot interaction. Dancers and dance theories can offer techniques and insights for exploring movement possibilities that are based on the unique physicality of the robot. Furthermore, dance heightens one’s sense of their body and surroundings. This underscores the embodied experience of attunement as a deeply affective and sensual experience both internally and intersubjectively. In this regard, dance invites us to imagine the possibility of affective human-robot interaction that is based on attunement. Finally, dance performance can be a site in which we observe movement as a process of meaning-making rather than a vessel for predetermined intent.

Lissie Carlile: "Beyond the Anthropo-zine: The Feral & Fleeting Trouble of Rewilding Wolves"

My zine, Beyond the Anthropo-zine: The Feral & Fleeting Trouble of Rewilding Wolves, responds to the call for submissions through addressing the conferences core theme for imagined post-anthropocentric futures in contemporary theatre and performance. The Anthropo-zine focuses on a possible future landscape where wolves return through rewilding conservation in the UK. Addressing the need for rewilding to navigate social, cultural, and political barriers (Carver et al., 2021), the Anthropo-zine advocates for a ‘multispecies response-ability’ (Haraway, 2016) and provides a platform for care-giving within contemporary performance practice.
The zine examines the performativity of the wolf through an inquiry into its cultural positionality as a charismatic lupine, explored through contemporary theatre and performance practice. Through an ‘art of noticing’ (Tsing, 2015), my research engages with the Wolf as a feral protagonist (Tsing et al., 2024), in adapting and adopting to staying with the trouble (Haraway, 2016) of the Anthropocene. Tracking the wolf’s journey in the UK—from extinction (circa 1680) to speculative reintroduction—  consideration is lent to how post-Anthropocene kinship might emerge. The anthropomorphic framing of wolves is explored through Haraway’s SF figures: ‘science fiction, speculative feminism, science fantasy, speculative fabulation, science fact [and] string figures’ (Haraway, 2016, 10).
Drawing from D-I-Y zine culture, the design employs collage techniques; layering wolf traits, tropes, superstitions, and folklore to reflect the ‘SF’ (Haraway, 2016) assemblages of this charismatic carnivore. The wolf’s appearance/disappearance/reappearance in the Anthropocene is mirrored in the ephemerality of paper documentation and the transient performativity of zine culture.

Carl Lavery: "A landscape letter to Édouard Glissant, in the shape of a film."

Throughout my work on ecology and performance, I have been interested in experimenting with ecological ways of thinking and writing. When it comes to ecocriticism, conventional academic interpretation is not something that interests me, greatly. It has the potential to be dangerously extractive, a way of making profit from a distance, the very antithesis of how the entanglements and troubles of ecology are actually experienced politically, aesthetically and affectively. In keeping, then, with what I understand ecology to be, an event - maybe even a passion - that undoes all forms of exceptionalism and isolationism, I wanted to problematise normative notions of academic distance, and, in the process, to create a sense of vulnerability, to open myself up, to risk something.
In recent writings and films, such as in my forthcoming monograph An Idea for a Theatre Ecology (MUP, 20205), I have called this approach a ‘methodology of implication’. But let us make no bones about it. The sense of vulnerability I am courting here has nothing whatsoever in common with the enforced precarity – the ‘fast’ and ‘slow violence’ – imposed on vast swathes of the earth’s population (human and non-human). That precarity is deadly and destructive. It has to be contested and ultimately removed. The vulnerability that I am engaged with is aesthetic, freely chosen, just another iteration of what some would call ‘privilege’ - and yet, it is not without its uses. Especially when one is looking to move beyond what Peter Sloterdijk terms the ‘bell-jar of self’, the deadly enclosure where ‘one chokes on one’s exhalate’ (2009).
In keeping with that gambit, I have made short film on the decolonial ecologist and poet, Édouard Glissant. The film is a lyrical letter from me to Édouard and is a dialogic exploration of some of his key concerns. In particular, his intimacy with the landscape of Martinique, his interest in an im/material ecology of hurricanes, fire and sea, and his fascination with the silent, ghostly walker who appears twice in his beautiful text Poétique de la Rélation (1990). I also offer two readings of contemporary performance work by Jade Monserrat and Minia Biabany, two Black feminist artists whose practice, though not linguistic, would surely be recognised by Glissant as ‘poetry’ – the thing that, for him, undoes all forms of incarceration in its quest for a relationality that never forms a unity.

Bronislaw Szerszynski: "Onomatophore"

I originally devised The Onomatophore of the Anthropocene in 2013 for a conference with Bruno Latour in Paris, and the script was published in the conference’s resulting edited collection (https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781315743424-19/). To the accompaniment of animated computer graphics, it is presented as the formal reading out of a fictional final and binding decision on the Anthropocene proposal, by an imagined galactic ‘Commission on Planetary Ages’ – the only institution in the galaxy with the skill and authority to name the ages of a planet. It feels even more relevant today, after the formal rejection of the proposal last year.  It is partly a satire of geological bureaucracy and human hubris, but in writing it I did a lot of work to imagine a very different, alien way of thinking about the nature of time and causation, planetary time units, how they arise (Revolutions of the Earth!), how the Earth is changing at present and the place of humans and machines in these changes and its future.
In terms of the mood, parts of it I think of as lyrical, beautiful, giving a sense of the majesty and mystery of what planets do over deep time; part of it is a bit more humorous (as alternative ‘onomatophores’ (name-bearers) of the Earth’s new epoch make their competing claims; and the end is scary (basically, a maximalist interpretation of the Anthropocene as change of Aeon, in which humans and their agency are sidelined).

Living Stone is a practice research project led by Liz Pavey which investigates how durational improvised dance can help us make sense of the immensity and rhythms of geological time through developing an embodied sense that we carry deep time within us. This eco-somatic practice is informed by deep ecology, geology and philosophy - notably the feminist posthuman phenomenology of Astrida Neimanis who argues for our simultaneously metaphorical and lived figuration as bodies of water. Living Stone is grounded in an understanding that “the distinction between “life” and “lifelessness” is a human construct. Every atom in this body existed before organic life emerged 4000 million years ago” (Seed 2007: 36). Exploring the figurations living stone, living fossils and deep time bodies, the practice foregrounds our elementality and intra-being - specifically our embodiment as rock, our mineral composition and lithic trans-corporeality - and our embedment within natural cycles and ecosystems. It encourages a questioning the of social imagination of rock as something static, lifeless and separate from us, and fosters ecological responsibility through offering an embodied appreciation of our planet as living organism not resource.
To date, the project has encompassed several Deep Time Walks*, two participatory projects, and four performances at Newcastle’s Great North Museum Hancock responding to the museum’s Frosterley Marble, Fossil Stories Gallery, and Crystals & Gems display, and working with bones, rocks and fossils from their handling collection.
In this movement workshop participants will be guided through a series of embodied experiences exploring our elementality as air, water and rock. They will explore, connect to and move with a small rock or fossil, tuning into their energetic aliveness and experiencing the pleasure of connection finding collective rhythm as a group. No previous dance/movement experience necessary. The practice will be contextualised through a brief presentation about Living Stone.

Ben Hunt: "Unsettling UK Animal Rights: Anti-Right and Box of Shadows"

This creative provocation explores how animal rights performance in the UK unsettles normative concepts of "the human" by staging entangled relations of species, violence, and care. Drawing on my practice-led research into endurance-based activism and interspecies performance, including site-specific interventions, vigil-based theatre, and activist embodiment, I argue that such performances not only challenge anthropocentric dramaturgies but actively dissolve the boundaries of Enlightenment humanism.
Focusing on works such as Anti-Hunt, a durational treadmill performance embodying the entanglement of fox and saboteur, and Box of Shadows, an immersive installation on slaughterhouse witnessing, I trace how activist theatre displaces the figure of the sovereign human and foregrounds shared precarity. These performances, both live and digital, manifest what Gago terms potencia, a collective and affective force grounded in interdependence rather than domination. Through proximity to nonhuman suffering and the visceral invocation of species collapse, they offer ecodramaturgies of crisis and futurity.
This presentation also considers how such work engages with posthumanist aesthetics of refusal. Rather than offering symbolic closure or redemptive narratives, these performances invite affective entanglement that destabilises spectatorship and subjectivity. I position this against Enlightenment and colonialist constructions of the human, drawing on posthumanist and queer theory, including the work of Haraway, Braidotti, and Yusoff, to suggest that activist performance can generate alternative modes of relating, knowing, and imagining.
The provocation includes excerpts and reflections from my own performance practice, opening a space for discussion on how contemporary European performance might not only represent anthropocentric and ecological crises but also performatively dismantle the concept of the human at their core.

Lisa Woynarski (on behalf of Lisa Woynarski, Tanja Beer, Linda Hassall, Natalie Lazaroo): "Eco-creative storytelling: more-than-human approaches to climate justice"

The John Akomfrah multi-screen work, Acadia (2023), uses images of colonial objects, clocks, insects, cells, plants, cargo and flags to depict the Colombian Exchange – the large ‘exchange’ of flora, fauna, disease and peoples through European settler colonialism. This ‘exchange’ is considered the start of the Anthropocene epoch, when certain humans began to leave a measurable impact on the earth’s geology (Lewis and Maslin 2015). Across 5 screens in the shape of a cross, at The Box Museum in Plymouth, the images present a non-linear story. It is an eco-creative approach to a journey of migration, from Plymouth to America, which is interrupted by more-than-human objects and lives. Akomfrah notes that ‘Humans are never the only actors on the stage’ (The Box 2024). Through a more-than-human perspective, the immersive screen installation signals colonialism as the founding ideology of both the so-called Anthropocene and current climate crisis. This work inspired Woynarski’s own emerging dramaturgical experiments (with collaborator Sarah Blissett) on more-than-human storytelling for the climate crisis. This paper puts this work in conversation with an emerging research project by the Performance and Ecology Research Lab (Griffith University) with an opera company in Queensland (Australia) that explores the potential of ecological storytelling from a more-than-human perspective. It seeks to consider how an eco-creative approach to touring performance can contribute to knowledge sharing and ecological regeneration/impact within rural communities in outback Australia. The idea of migration is continually troubled through the focus on birds and their journeys, impacted and interrupted by climate crisis. By comparing migration and colonialism in a European context to an Australian one (which utilises the European performance form of opera), we suggest that eco-creative storytelling, that centres the more-than-human, sheds light on how theatre and performance can speak to climate crisis and the contemporary moment.

Stef Kerrigan: "Post-Human Futures and the Long Shadow of Human Corruption in The Intrusion (2025) and Animal Farm (2022)"

In her Introduction to Earth Matters, Theresa J. May questions how “do we live and behave in relation to one another and to the land, in a way that sustains life, land, community and justice?” (2021, p. 12). Community, in this instance, envelopes the broad ecology of all planetary life. However, much of the injustice wrought upon this expansive and diverse community is the result of a single offender and thus, human history and politics are intrinsic to the current crises.
To highlight cyclical human power structures, Bric à Brac Theatre and Told by an Idiot’s The Intrusion (2025) and Robert Icke’s adaptation of Animal Farm (2022), a Children’s Theatre Partnership Project, both make use of anthropomorphised allegory much like George Orwell’s original 1945 novella. These theatrical works incorporate varied modes of storytelling - including object theatre, creative captioning, audience interaction, puppetry and multimedia - to define the central figures as other than human. In the animal and insect protagonists, both works highlight the violence inherent in perpetuating hierarchal systems that prioritise individualism over the collective. The imagined futures represented are posthuman and dystopian but are exposed as a direct consequence, and replication, of decidedly human corruption.
This exploratory paper draws on these two examples to consider theatrical interplay between bodies, objects and technology in the representation of human precarity and posthuman futures. I consider how dramaturgies of species alienation might provide possibilities to interrogate flawed models and histories of human hierarchy, in the hope of proposing alternate ways to live sustainably, collectively, and justly for all.

Rosemary Klich: "Biodigital Ecologies and ‘Macroperformativity''"

This paper explores the ‘macroperformativity’ of ecological and computational systems as manifest in intermedial artworks. Addressing installations from the Ars Electronic 2023-2025 exhibitions There is no Planet B, Global Shift, and Connected Earth, that explore the overlap of human, ecology, and technology, the paper will engage with what authors such as Peters, Jandric, and Hayes (2021) call, ‘biodigitalism’; the convergence of biology and digital technologies, which they suggest is increasingly recognised as “the coming horizon”. Biodigital convergence applies to technological and living (human and non-human) ecologies, ecosystems, and environments, and as such, the concept of the biodigital is linked to post-anthropocentism. Some of these artworks demonstrate convergence, others suggest it through theme or aesthetic; they present snapshots of the ‘mediated planet’ (Wickberg et al, 2024), highlighting the datafication of environment and role of ‘eco-media’ (Bruhn, 2021). Following discussion of the biodigital and theorisation of the overlap between ecology and technology, the paper will examine the installations as relational and performative, asking what exactly is in process in these works and what agents are performing. The concept of ‘macroperformativity’ suggests the performance of structures manifest at the scale of species and planet, and the chapter will offer conclusions as to the capacity of ‘macroperformativity’ as a concept that suggests the performance of entire ecologies, embedded networks, and global structures, whereby these usually hidden or unrecognised systems are made visible.

Jonathan Kirn: "Performing More-than-Humanness. Towards an Embrace of Human’s Inherent More-than-Humanness"

Essentialist understandings of the human have proven remarkably resilient. They remain impactful despite of arguments emphasizing the inherent more-than-humanness of humans through notions of relationality, ecology, or posthumanism. It thus remains a task to come to terms with this inherent more-than-humanness, a task which has to revisit the human: If humans are always already more-than-human, how can they learn to embrace their own more- than-humanness? Combining theoretical insights from performance studies with an analysis of performance artworks, I offer an approach to answer this question. Thinking from the concept of performativity, which emphasizes that humans, non-humans, or more-than-humans do not exist independently but emerge in relation, I argue that embracing more-than-humanness is a matter of performing in certain ways rather than in others. Staging such performances allows to better understand how more-than-humanness emerges. It creates a space that is open for unlikely or absurd performances, allowing to experiment with the performance of more-than-humanness. At the same time, it shows that the emergence of more-than-humanness is not limited to an actor performing themself but is equally a question of how this actor is perceived. Performing more-than-humanness is a matter of looking and being seen, speaking and being heard, acting and being acted upon, both on and off stage. In analysing performances of more-than-humanness, I focus on two case studies: BVDS’ Song of Songs and Frida Laux’ Paradance. While BVDS explores how bodies emerge which blur the lines between human and non-human, organic and technological, Frida Laux offers a set of scores, inviting the audience to experiment with their own felt more-than-humanness. The pieces, thus, both enable a better understanding of the performative becoming of more-than-humanness, while also offering strategies to incorporate them into off stage performances.

Patrick Lonergan: "Staging the Non-Human on the European Edge – John Gerrard’s Leaf Work and Brú Theatre’s Ar Ais Arís"

This paper addresses the conference theme by discussing two performances that were presented outdoors on the west coast of Ireland in 2021. John Gerrard’s Leaf Work involved the performance of AI-generated movements (inspired by traditional Irish performance practices) by a leaf-covered figure on an enormous reflective cube that had been sited in to Derrigimlagh Bog in Connemara. As both a carbon sink and a source of fossil fuels, bogland has become a focal point for ecological debates in Ireland; this specific bog is also significant as the site of the transmission of the first transatlantic radio signal from the Marconi station in 1907 and as the landing place for Alcock and Brown’s first transatlantic plane crossing in 1919. Leaf Work offers a lament for how those technologies have affected the present while also using technology to consider how ‘live’ performances can be presented by non-human actors.
Another meditation on virtual reality was Bru Theatre’s Ar Ais Aris, for which audiences wore VR headsets that brought them to different spaces in rural Ireland while also allowing them to encounter Irish-language texts that focussed on emigration, famine, and the impact of colonisation. By blending texts that are usually seen – and often dismissed – as representing ‘traditional’ forms, the show used VR to overturn the marginalisation of Irish culture in the past and present.
In placing the non-human in dialogue with elements of human culture that have been degraded or forgotten, these performances propose an alignment between traditional indigenous Irish performance forms, technology, and the ecological. By doing so, they encouraged audiences to think from Europe’s margins rather than its centre – about how ecology, performance, and the human interrelate and inform each other.

High on a windy mountainside sits a cailleach, a hag whose days as a powerful goddess are long behind her (if they were ever quite as impressive as she remembers).
The world is changing. She who once held such sway over the weather has been usurped by humans. And a retired climate goddess needs a hobby – so why not take up kidnapping? But the only ones she seems to be able to reach are the different ones, the ones who find it hard to ignore her nighttime calls. The changelings.
Every family has a sensitive one. What do they know that the rest of us don’t? What journey do we need to make to hear what they are saying?
Changelings braids storytelling with acappella singing, spoken word with humour, Celtic myth with personal experience.
Adderstone are Cath Heinemeyer and Gemma McDermott, storyteller-musicians with a leftfield take on life, love and climate. They weave the a cappella and folk traditions into live storytelling performance that darts from frenetic cities to lonely mountains. Everything looks different through an adderstone.

William McEvoy: "‘What kind of tree is this?’ (Chekhov, The Seagull). Arboreal disruptions of the anthropocentric"

This paper forms part of a larger research project thinking relationally about objects in theatre, fiction and performance, via ideas of animacy, subjectivity, temporality and the non-, or post-human. It focuses on the role of trees in a range of theatre texts as vectors for forms of philosophical thinking about perception, the aesthetics and ethics of theatre, and for dystopian fantasies about post-human ontologies. By looking at works by Chekhov (The Seagull), Beckett (Waiting for Godot) and Crimp (Attempts on her Life), the paper traces the shifting role of the tree as disruptive of form, as a site of indeterminacy, and as an uncanny remainder in the aftermath of destruction. In each case, the powerful religious and literary connotations of the tree as object are subverted by new forms of perception, by small acts of textual disruption, or by quizzical conjunctions of the ecocidal. The paper argues that trees in these three plays divert our attention from the human towards other forms of knowledge and modes of being beyond those reliant on categorization, enumeration and naming.

Vânia Gala: 'Plotting (E)Scapes"

This article considers the project Greenhouse. Greenhouse- Portuguese representation at the 60th Venice Art Biennale - is a transdisciplinary project that brings a ‘Creole Garden’ ” (Edouard Glissant: One World in Relation, 2010) into a Palace and thus opens it to various questions. I will analyse the implications and philosophical associations in the making of Greenhouse. I will argue that - the Greenhouse project – the bringing of a ‘Creole Garden’ into the inside(s) of a Palace can be understood as counter-plantation practice of mutual distribution, multiple positionings and alternative choreographies.
Drawing on Wynther’s (1971) thoughts in affirming the practice of the plot as an inspiring way that goes far beyond a material garden - into Black performances of resistance and Black life and its entanglements - as a form of counter plantation inspiring new performances and ways of living together I will discuss how Greenhouse emerges as a proposition of this nature. I will examine the various strategies - beyond the cultivation and nurturing of specific plants – used in the project exhibition project, Passa Folhas performance, assemblies.
Creole gardens are repositories of living practices, of traditional knowledge to cultivate, feed and share food deeply entangled with cultural, spiritual and healing practices that plantation owners attempted to take away from enslaved workers. They offer a groundbreaking, visionary, and subversive orientation as plots (plans) to imagine and cultivate Black life in resistance to the totalizing idea of the plantation.
I will analyse the complex land/scape of the Creole Garden taking over and juxtaposed with a study library made of imperial woods inside Venetian Palace and discuss how such an intervention might or might not go beyond a material garden offering other possible futurities that “refuse all categories of fixed and imperial thought” (Glissant, 2021) and counter systems of white supremacy, terror, dominance, opression and extractivism echoing Glissant’s ideas of trembling. On another note, I will point to the limitations of such proposition in cultivating life and kin towards challenging and plotting against “the intertwined death‐dealing logics of racism and ecocide” (Davis et al, 2019, p. 4).
The intention is to discuss, analyse and articulate the concerns such a land-scape can generate in the context of the Venice Biennale in 2024 under the gaze of Adriano Pedrosa’s specific curatorial proposal and outside the Giardini in a Venetian palace near the Accademia bridge.

Fani Apospori: "Rising With: Vulnerability, Hydroontology, and More-than-Human Performance in RISE: From One Island to Another"

In a context defined by accelerating climatic transformations and the enduring violences of (neo)colonialism, Indigenous aesthetic and performative practices are emerging as critical responses to intersecting environmental and epistemological crises. This paper asks: what does it mean to perform from the edge of a calving glacier or the inundated shores of an irradiated atoll—not as spaces of loss, but as sites of relational resistance and posthuman imagining? This presentation examines RISE: From One Island to Another, a video-poem by Kathy Jetn̄il- Kijiner (Marshall Islands) and Aka Niviâna (Greenland), as a work that fundamentally reconfigures human performance through the lens of hydroecology and posthuman theory. Situated at the convergence of nuclear and climate colonialism, the poem articulates an environmental dramaturgy in which ice, coral, ocean, and land function as more-than-human agents. The two poets do not simply perform on these landscapes—they perform with them. Ice, stone, sea, and irradiated reef structures emerge as co-performers, shaping what might be termed a hydroontological stage, where relationality supersedes anthropocentric centrality. The poem’s choreographies of ritual exchange and its evocation of ancestral mythologies generate a transoceanic ethic of care that moves across deep time and geopolitical space. Vulnerability here is not rendered as fragility, but as a shared ontological state—one that gestures toward collective resilience. Drawing on hydrofeminist and posthumanist frameworks (Neimanis, Faris), this paper argues that RISE mobilizes the genre of performance poetry to contest technocratic paradigms and instead articulate an environmentally just epistemology grounded in kinship, myth, and material interdependence. Through its embodied poetics and more-than-human dramaturgy, RISE offers a blueprint for a submerged politics of care—one that rises from water, remembers with myth, and acts through solidarity.

Anna Street: "Anthrop-eau-scenes: The Performativity of Water"

I will discuss the research project HydroArts, a French government funded project devoted to compiling and analyzing artistic engagements with the element of water. Committing to expanding the scope of theater and performance studies to the non-human, HydroArts focuses on how water can be understood as a creative partner in productions that openly engage with the interdependence of matter. HydroArts focuses on contemporary performance and installations involving water as a live element, claiming to identify an aquatic turn in artistic practice. Over the past thirty years, thanks in part to technological advances and rising ecological urgency, artistic engagements with water as a live element are multiplying in parallel with changing conceptions of human and non-human confluences. From using dye to turn urban rivers bright colors and composing music along with the sound of melting icebergs to flooding theater stages and submerging sculptures onto the ocean floor, collaborations between the element of water and contemporary artistic forms are enjoying unprecedented proliferation. Drawing on productive overlaps between new materialism, post-humanist philosophies, and the Blue Humanities, the project explores how oceanic or wet epistemologies can offer alternative perspectives for art appreciation. After tracing a brief history of water in theater and performance, I will focus on recent examples of hydroperformances, such as Early Morning Opera’s Holoscenes, the company Théâtre de l'Entrouvert’s Les Vagues, and Florentina Holzinger's Ophelia's Got Talent, paying close attention to how water’s performative qualities may inform the relation between ethics and aesthetics.