Theatre ecology

About this book

Here the author presents this study into the relationships between performance, theatre and environmental ecology. What are the challenges to theatre and the purposes of performance in an ecologically threatened world? How might ecological understandings refigure the interactions of theatre and performance? Is there a future for theatre as an ethically and politically alert art through environmental action? This work gets to grips with such questions by investigating an eclectic international sample of environments and performance events, in theatres and beyond. It proposes that performance is a peculiarly twenty-first century addiction which may be at the root of global warming. Addressing this possibility head-on, it reaches for pathological hope in historical theatre at the end of its tether and rumbles the contemporary paradigm of performance for signs of eco-sanity. Recognising the future is always before its time, the book is a paradoxically ironic tract for survival at the start of a fresh ecological era.