The concept of ‘climate dramaturgy’ (Klimadramaturgie) was first developed in response to a series of consultation workshops and conversations at the Donmar Warehouse, London (2022). The ethos was used as the underlying principle for curating a conference with the National Theatres of England, Scotland and Wales in September 2023, for around 300 theatre directors from across the UK. https://theatregreenbook.com/making-theatre-in-a-time-of-climate-crisis-resources/.
The ethos then evolved further due to AHRC Knowledge Exchange Fellowship with HighTide new writing theatre company – which is based in the eastern region of the UK, through workshops with directors, playwrights, dramaturgs and producers.
“We have to find a new art and a new psychology to penetrate the apathy and the denial that are preventing us making the changes that are inevitable if our world is to survive. We need a new art to waken people both to the enormity of what is looming and the fact that we can still do something about it.”
—Ben Okri, “Artists Must Confront the Climate Crisis” i
Novelist Ben Okri’s call to arms – ‘We have to find a new art’ – is an urgent cry for artists and cultural workers to recognise the role we have to play in these strange times, rocked by interlinked crises, local, national, or global, personal, professional, or political. For me, making theatre has always been about probing the question ‘what does it mean to be alive now?’, and this question is what brought me face to face with climate crisis, 15 years ago.
Yet the question of how theatre can and should respond to the climate crisis is one that confronts theatre-makers with complex questions of who we think we are as artists and how our relationship relates to the world around us. Is your response that, with UK director Matthew Xia, Artistic Director of the UK’s Actor’s Touring Company, it’s a no-brainer to green your practices: “Every piece of art is made with absolute ethical thinking about who is engaging with it, what messages are in it, how we are making it, what care are we putting into it”?ii Or does it feel to you that environmental care is outside the remit of theatre? Or that it isn’t relevant, as theatre is about people, not nature? Or that there are other, more pressing social justice issues that theatre needs to get to grips with? Or that, as artists, we shouldn’t be bogged down by specific social demands? Or is it worthwhile but just too difficult in an era of funding cuts? Is it, frankly, simply a luxury to even consider the environmental concerns in the current context for making theatre? Does it feel essential to you that theatres play a role in a society-wide effort to decarbonise and reduce environmental harm (but it’s not really about the art)? Or do you feel that as the possible carbon savings of theatre are lower than other, more industrial sectors, it’s more about the stories we tell, or ‘hearts and minds’ – engaging with climate crisis to engage our audiences? The extreme incommensurability between these different approaches means that it is often hard to know exactly what we are talking about when the question of ‘sustainability’ comes up – as it increasingly does – in the process of making work. Often, too, each of us might find ourselves holding a contradictory view, depending on the circumstances.
This is where climate dramaturgy comes in. Rather than holding a moral high ground or offering a one-size-fits-all list of ‘solutions’, climate dramaturgy is an ethos that recognises the cultural situation that leads to these apparent contradictions – and invites context-specific responses, which acknowledge the challenges and invite collaboration to find antidotes. At its core, climate dramaturgy embeds a relationship to climate crisis at the very core of artistic practice, by way of an invitation to make the art sharper, more present and more precisely expressive of the times we are in. Climate dramaturgy rejects the nineteenth-century separation of art and society embodied in the phrase ‘art for art’s sake’ and, equally, it rejects the twentieth-century valorisation of ‘progress’ and accumulation coded in the word ‘growth’. These mindsets are both out of date in a twenty-first century beset by an emerging range of challenges and possibilities.
For the climate asks us to reconsider everything about who we are and what the systems we live in presume about life. The climate and ecological crisis is the latest entwined genocidal and ecocidal violence to emerge from over four hundred years of extractive, transactive colonial capitalism,iv a violence that is global and has deep roots and which is now boomeranging to affect also those who were previously protected from it: Caucasian Europeans living in temperate climates.v Operating as though able to deliver no matter the circumstances, as though there were no limits, is an attitude made possible in the unspoken assumption that the living world and its peoples are an unlimited, free resource – and that productivity and profit justifies the exploitation of people and ecosystems the world over. The climate crisis is an outcome of these extractive, transactive systems, which have produced ‘high carbon culture’. This ‘high carbon culture’ is driven by speed, control, consumption, valorisation of material productivity and endless growth, built on addiction to fossil fuels and maintained by cultural practices that divide, categorise and isolate. Economist Kate Raworth describes this linear economy as one of ‘take’, ‘make’, ‘use’, ‘lose’,vi which pithily summarises high carbon culture’s treatment of the earth as a resource for consumption, and can also be applied to how theatre cultures treat people – extracting maximum creativity towards servicing the theatre machine. Climate dramaturgy invites a different approach.
Like Ben Okri, many who are paying attention to climate realities, believe we are living in the end times, and this can open the door to climate ‘doomerism’ and a desire to ignore the call for change – typified by claims like: ‘We are all screwed anyway, so let’s party while the world burns’.
But Okri forcefully speaks back against ‘the apathy and the denial’, arguing that:
"This is the best and most natural home we are ever going to have. And we need to become anew people to deserve it. We are going to have to be new artists to redream it. This is why I propose existential creativity, to serve the unavoidable truth of our times, and a visionary existentialism, to serve the future that we must bring about from the brink of our environmental catastrophe. We can only make a future from the depth of the truth we face now." vii
Ends are also beginnings, and a climate-attentive theatre could steer a course between what Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti calls ‘reckless fatalism’ and ‘desperate solutionism’.viii This names the painful double bind that dominates the discussion of climate crisis: either global climate catastrophe is an inevitability, or European cultures must face a severe ‘sacrifice’ of the lifestyles we are accustomed to. Climate dramaturgy offers methods to get out of this no-win mentality – without denying that it is the reality many Europeans – theatre-makers and audiences alike – feel they are living with. Indeed, avoiding quick fixes or damaging universalism is as important as recognising that fatalism or doomerism is a kind of indulgence that excuses living and creating art as though in times that already no longer exist. If theatre can hold and express the multiplicity of diverging stories that a culture needs, in order to work out how we live through and express and respond to unprecedented kinds of change, it can play a crucial role in enabling makers and audiences alike to shape – as well as cope with – the transformations that are underway.
At its core, ‘climate dramaturgy’ is the art and practice of paying attention – or, as philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers says, ‘faire attention’ – ‘making’ or ‘doing’ attention as an active practice that connects the dots to re-immerse our theatre practices in the living worlds around us. Climate dramaturgy was developed as a complement to, and creative fuel for, the UK’s Theatre Green Book, an extraordinarily effective compendium of know-how for reducing resource use and greening theatres from a materials perspective, which is increasingly being used all over the world (you can find the German translation here). As a kind of ‘chapter zero’, preliminary to the Theatre Green Book’s engagement with pragmatics, climate dramaturgy is an ethos and set of tools for creative artists that focuses on psychology of artistic mindset.
Effectively, climate dramaturgy explores our fundamental approaches, as artists, to our creative work, and recommends a shift in approach that values collaboration and attention over competition and individualism, but without lowering standards. The point is that it is not a question of ‘either/or’: ‘art’ or ‘ethics’: but ‘and/both’.ix Challenging the status quo feels necessary because I – and many around me – couldn’t help but see the mismatch between our concerns about climate crisis and our capacity to either express them or act on them through theatre. The twin cries of ‘No time!’ and ‘No money!’ forever seem to stymie attempts at change. Whether making a small-scale, avant-garde performance or working at the National Theatre, with its leading environmental practices, there has been a pervasive sense among practitioners in the UK that adhering to parameters for ‘sustainability’ will limit artistic freedom. Climate dramaturgy seeks to transform that equation – to move away from simplistic understandings of ‘sustainability’ as an ‘add-on’ separate from the core practice of making theatre – to demonstrate how paying attention to the context of climate crisis can be a driver of transformative artistic practice.
Because that’s what climate crisis is – it is the context of our lives, now and for always, not only a topic for the occasional play. Climate dramaturgy, then, names a holistic approach that encompasses ecodramaturgies but which is also relevant to all kinds of work, whether ecologically focused in topic or not. Like the Theatre Green Book, climate dramaturgy is not prescriptive with regard to a work’s explicitness about environmental engagement. Rather, climate dramaturgy is about the dramaturgy of bringing the context of climate crisis to bear on all artistic decision-making.
I’m going to discuss five of climate dramaturgy’s key approaches, which together contribute to a shift in mindset across all areas of theatre-making: from materials-use to story-form, from working methods to reassessing cultural assumptions about art. These approaches both form part of the ethos of climate dramaturgy and point towards practical actions that can be embraced by any theatre that adapts the approach to their specific context.
1. You are not alone: no individual can ‘solve’ the problem or change the system solo. Climate dramaturgy therefore starts with a holistic approach, recognising the multiple ways that artists, producers and management can be climate-responsive. By inviting conversation and transparency, climate dramaturgy allows practitioners to see each other’s challenges – and also to celebrate how much people are doing already. Whatever role you work in, do you know what other departments / areas of theatre are doing environmentally? How does your work relate to theirs? Recognising that you are not alone and that the answers are multiple, not singular, is the first step. Climate care is accumulative across different areas of theatre-making. Further, ‘greener’ measures often have a circular way of working – ‘outputs’ can become ‘inputs’ in another context. Most obviously, the ’waste’ from one production design can become creative fuel to be used in another design. Equally, creative collaborations can be nurtured beyond individual productions. The linear mode of production, which Raworth describes as ‘take’, ‘make’, ‘use’, ‘lose’, can be transformed into a set of relations that work more like a mutually fertilising ecosystem.
2. Timing. So often the conflicts that arise between environmental concerns and an artistic idea occur due to time pressure. There two key antidotes to the myth that mitigating environmental harm will always harm the art. Firstly, ensuring convergence of artistic and ethical ambition is often less about overall time taken, than timing. Early-stage planning allows decision-making processes to be, as the first edition of the Theatre Green Book put it, ‘designed out’.x Matching expectation of environmental care with the early-stage conversations needed to give the required lead-in times for research or saving found materials for making the work is crucial. More provocatively, it can be an invitation to rethink the model of ‘design’ then ‘execute’. What if ideas were inspired by, or matched to, already existing materials – allowing what is already there to speak to what might be? This challenges preconceptions of what art is and what artists do, but it is equally valid as artistic practice – and already practised by many artists, whether for environmental reasons, or not.
It also invites a sense of embeddedness in, and interconnectedness with, the world around us – no longer an extractive ‘resource fiction’, but celebrating instead the abundance of actually already available resources. If expectations around attention to environmental parameters are kept live in conversation from the very start, they can become generative, leading to more rigour in developing ideas, rather than merely restrictive. But decide a design is too environmentally costly after it has been fully conceived, and it leaves the makers with the depressing no-win choice between environmental harm and realising their vision.
3. Rehearsing the future. When an individual theatre productions’ carbon footprint is minimal compared with the impact of the theatre building’s overall energy use, and that pales into insignificance against the impact of the industrial sector, what is the value of working to minimize harm where we can? Climate dramaturgy’s claim is that it isn’t about winning a numbers game, but about rehearsing – enacting in the present, the future of a non-extractive, non-exploitative economy in which it is standard practice to notice where materials come from and the impact of your actions beyond your immediate horizon. As Australian author Richard Flanagan said recently when returning prize money for his new book, Question 7:
‘We live in an age that is under this illusion that the only path to truth is through metrics, through numbers, but it’s not so. We are the stories we tell about ourselves, we live within them, and we’re created by them.’xi
When allowing climate attention to reinvent artistic process, then, it’s not about how much you ‘save’, but what story we want to tell about how art exists in the world. Playwright and permaculture specialist Mojisola Adebayo (Queen Mary University of London) precisely articulates what is at stake, asking at the start of her play, Family Tree (2023), which explores the intergenerational trauma of environmental racism, for makers to be careful in their use of resources, otherwise ‘the staging will contradict the content’.xii
4. Letting go of perfectionism. Climate dramaturgy venerates theatre’s capacity to get the show on, no matter what obstacles lie in its path – the same mentality that can be applied to meeting the challenges of creating theatre in the context of climate crisis. But it requires letting go of the illusion that there’s a ‘right’ solution that will fix the problem. Instead, it’s about using the need for a conversation about environmental parameters to keep clear about the purpose and aims of the art. And it further requires constant vigilance to ensure that practices remain consistent with principles, because any theatre’s attempt to change their practice is taking place in a culture – political and social – that remains in denial with regard to the urgency and scale of transformation required (IPCC Report 2022). The challenges for theatre include: ‘not knowing how to start implementing changes’; ‘a lack of unified thinking across the sector’ and ‘contradictory information available’; the need for ‘a clear value statement’, ‘public recognition of values’; ‘feeling alone’, ‘time constraints’ and ‘lack of funding or budget’.xiii
What has become clear is how much it matters in every conversation about environmental impacts to acknowledge these and any other ‘challenges’, both cultural and practical, which the sector faces, and then to couple them with ‘antidotes’, which outline ways of facing and responding to those challenges.xiv Due to the variability of these challenges, there can be no checklist of one-size-fits-all ‘solutions’. Instead, climate dramaturgy invites collaborative conversations about what the challenges are in each specific set of circumstances – and how to meet those challenges with creativity and care. This might not always lead to the ‘perfect’ environmental outcome, but it means artistic and environmental values are always entwined, each fostering the other through engaging with the core question of ‘why’. Why is this particular material needed? Is this the clearest, most beautiful way to tell this story? In the context of climate crisis, how does this particular story ‘speak’ to audiences? What does it assume about our world? And does the way it is made relate to the story it is trying to tell?
5. Climate dramaturgy recognises that the form of a work always has a politics, and that the social cannot be divorced from aesthetics. Considering how stories are told enables us to reveal assumptions and model different ways of acting, being, and relating to one another and the living world. There are no prescriptions in climate dramaturgy, just a call for consciousness – what is the work actually saying? Theatre – as a reflection of modern industrial norms – has a long history of relegating nature to decorative backdrop or symbolic metaphor.xv Does the work exclude the living world and presume only human agency? If so, is it simply conforming to that convention – or critiquing it? How might the living world figure? Is the action centred on a single hero? Is the play organised around his (or her, but usually his) desires and success or failure at achieving them? Does the hero act ‘in’ the world (in interconnection with other agents or beings) or ‘on’ it (his/her ability to impact others being the primary focus). I see this preoccupation with the hero as individual, isolated and preoccupied with internal desire, as leading to dramaturgies of ‘winning and losing’ – a manifestation of our cultural embeddedness in capitalism.xvi Does the work’s dramaturgy normalise such individualism? Does it venerate exceptionalism? Or does the work explore interrelations between multiple characters/capacities and capabilities? Are timescales single and linear – or multiple and refracted? Is there an implication that economic ‘progress’ is inevitable – and rational? Or does the work count the cost of that progress for others? Is it presumed that life will continue on as it has always done – or is this presumption questioned? (In this sense, Chekhov’s searing vision of a dying Russian aristocracy holds portents for climate breakdown.) It is the act of posing such questions – and many others like them, and exploring what they mean for what the work is saying, that matters for climate dramaturgy – rather than there being a ‘correct’ answer. Climate dramaturgy should lead to a divergence and proliferation of forms, styles and modes of story-telling: not convergence on a single narrative type.xvii
Ultimately, climate dramaturgy invites a holistic approach that is artist-led and continually seeks workarounds to obstacles, while recognising the contradictions that make this work particularly challenging. Climate dramaturgy leads with artistic practice, rather than hard-and-fast rules, and might be as much about the form or a story as the materials used. Equally, it is designed to enable theatre practitioners to bring the values of climate care to all aspects of their work, and therefore to enable the whole creative and technical team for any production or season to make effective use of Theatre Green Book guidelines for reducing environmental harm. British new writing theatre company HighTide are using climate dramaturgy to enable their aim of becoming carbon neutral by 2030. To this end, HighTide have developed the ’10 steps’ of climate dramaturgy, which you can find here. A new generation of practitioners in the mainstream British theatre are starting to work with these principles – bringing the mainstream closer to the ecological imagining that has long been going on in the avant-garde and experimental realms of performance.
Indeed, the point is, in a way, that none of this is ‘new’ – in fact, the idea of the ‘new’ might be a ‘selling point’ the culture might have to let go of: ‘new’, ‘first’, ‘better’, ‘best’ – these are ways of making a climate-attentive practice seem exclusive, morally superior or impossible to achieve for most practitioners. But nor is it about ‘less’; it doesn’t have to be about ‘sacrifice’ or ‘salvage’ or ‘survival’. To attend to the world in which we find ourselves, in all its pain, contradiction and extremity, is how we as artists can reconnect, even when the going is tough, to why we make theatre in the first place. Climate dramaturgy can’t offer a single answer to the question of how to make art in the context of climate crisis, but it can help us ask it.
i Ben Okri, ‘Artists Must Confront the Climate Crisis’, The Guardian, 12 November 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/12/artists-climate-crisis-write-creativity-imagination
ii NT Theatre Green Book, ‘Making Theatre in a Time of Climate Crisis: The Challenges’. Proceedings of the conference ‘Making Theatre in a Time of Climate Crisis’, National Theatre, 29 September 2023. https://theatregreenbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/5.-NT-Making-Theatre-in-a-Time-of-Climate-Crisis-The-Challenges.pdf
iii Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2017), p.71.
iv Cf. Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021); Malcolm Ferdinand, A Decolonial Ecology: Thinking From The Caribbean World (2019), p. 1–35; Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011); Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism (2021).
v Aimée Césaire uses the term ‘boomerang’ to demonstrate how European colonial violence returns to affect Europeans themselves in Discourse on Colonialism (1951).
vi Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think like a 21st–Century Economist (2017).
vii Ben Okri, ‘Artists Must Confront the Climate Crisis’, The Guardian, 12 November 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/12/artists-climate-crisis-write-creativity-imagination
viii Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism (2021).
ix See Svendsen, ‘Climate Contexts: Some Principles for Theatre in an Era of Ecological Chaos’ (2021), https://medium.com/@zoesvendsen/climate-contexts-some-principles-for-theatre-in-an-era-of-ecological-chaos-3269d0e7530a
x The second edition, published earlier this year, retains the same hierarchy of questioning/imagining – an extremely useful cascade of questions about value, necessity and possibility, but now titles it with ‘think differently’; Theatre Green Book v2 (2024), p. 2. https://theatregreenbook.com/
xi Quoted in, Alex Clark, ‘”I fly, I drive. We’re all complicit”: Richard Flanagan on vanishing species and refusing the Baillie Gifford prize money’, The Guardian, 20 November 2024. https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/20/richard-flanagan-baillie-gifford-refusing-prize-money-death-railwa
xii Adebayo, Mojisola. Family Tree (London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023), p. 2.
xiii Roberta Mock, Transitioning to Sustainable Production across the UK Theatre Sector (May 2023).
xiv The method of identifying ‘antidotes’ alongside ‘challenges’ is owed to the antiracist guidance open-source document ‘White Supremacy Culture in Organizations’, which demonstrates the power of offering pathways forward as well as identifying obstacles and harmful practices. It was introduced by theatre director and antiracism practitioner Nicole Brewer. https://coco-net.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Coco-WhiteSupCulture-ENG4.pdf
xv See Una Chaudhuri’s seminal article, ‘There Must Be a Lot of Fish in that Lake: Toward an Ecological Theater’, Theater 25.1 (1994), pp. 23–31
xvi See Svendsen, Theatre & Dramaturgy (2023)
xvii There are a range of practitioners and theorists who have drawn together questions for undertaking climate dramaturgical kinds of artistic process, which offer useful guidelines. These include Teresa J. May’s ‘Some Green Questions to Ask a Play’ (2007), Katalin Trencsényi’s ‘Leave No Trace Dramaturgy’ (2022), and Una Chaudhuri, with members of CLIMATE LENS, Dis-Anthropocentric Performance: The CLIMATE LENS PLAYBOOK’ (2023).
Zoë Svendsen is a UK-based dramaturg and theatre director, who makes participatory theatre performances and installations exploring ecological crisis and capitalism, including: Love Letters to a Liveable Future (Cambridge Junction), Ness (Estuary Festival), Factory of the Future (Oslo Architecture Triennale); WE KNOW NOT WHAT WE MAY BE (Barbican), World Factory (New Wolsey/Young Vic/UK tour); 3rd Ring Out, (UK tour). Zoë also works as dramaturg to reimagine classic texts for the contemporary stage with London theatres including the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, The Globe, the National Theatre, the Young Vic and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Zoë has recently completed a research project with the Donmar Warehouse, developing the concept of ‘climate dramaturgy’, leading to becoming Associate Artist at Hightide new writing theatre company, to embed the practice in every aspect of Hightide’s work. Zoë is also Associate Artist with Cambridge Junction and lectures on dramaturgy at the University of Cambridge.
