Theatre Pedagogy In The Era Of Climate Crisis

This volume explores whether theatre pedagogy can and should be transformed in response to the global climate crisis. Conrad Alexandrowicz and David Fancy present an innovative re-imagining of the ways in which the art of theatre, and the pedagogical apparatus that feeds and supports it, might contribute to global efforts in climate protest and action. Comprised of contributions from a broad range of scholars and practitioners, the volume explores whether an adherence to aesthetic values can be preserved when art is instrumentalized as protest and considers theatre as a tool to be employed by the School Strike for Climate movement. Considering perspectives from areas including performance, directing, production, design, theory and history, this book will prompt vital discussions which could transform curricular design and implementation in the light of the climate crisis. Theatre Pedagogy in the Era of Climate Crisis will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners of climate change and theatre and performance studies.

This book demonstrates how humans can become sensitized to, and intervene in, environmental degradation by writing, reading, analyzing, and teaching poetry. It offers both theoretical and practice-based essays, providing a diversity of approaches and voices that will be useful in the classroom and beyond. The chapters in this edited collection explore how poetry can make readers climate-ready and climate-responsive through creativity, empathy, and empowerment. The book encompasses work from or about Oceania, Africa, Europe, North America, Asia, and Antarctica, integrating poetry into discussions of specific local and global issues, including the value of Indigenous responses to climate change; the dynamics of climate migration; the shifting boundaries between the human and more-than-human world; the ecopoetics of the prison-industrial complex; and the ongoing environmental effects of colonialism, racism, and sexism. With numerous examples of how poetry reading, teaching, and learning can enhance or modify mindsets, the book focuses on offering creative, practical approaches and tools that educators can implement into their teaching and equipping them with the theoretical knowledge to support these. This volume will appeal to educational professionals engaged in teaching environmental, sustainability, and development topics, particularly from a humanities-led perspective.

This book lays out the principles and practices of transformative sustainability education using a relational way of thinking and being. Elizabeth A. Lange advocates for a new approach to environmental and sustainability education, that of rethinking the Western way of knowing and being and engendering a frank discussion about the societal elements that are generating climate, environmental, economic, and social issues. Highlighting the importance of Indigenous and life-giving cultures, the book covers educational theory, transformation stories of adult learners, social and economic critique, and visions of changemakers. Each chapter also has a strong pedagogical element, with entry points for learners and embodied practices and examples of taking action at micro/meso/macro levels woven throughout. Overall, this book enacts a relational approach to transformative sustainability education that draws from post humanist theory, process thought, relational ontology, decolonization theory, Indigenous philosophy, and a spirituality that builds a sense of sacred towards the living world. Written in an imaginative, storytelling manner, this book will be a great resource for formal and nonformal environmental and sustainability educators.

The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature is the first authoritative and definitive edited collection on absurdist literature. As a field-defining volume, the editor and the contributors are world leaders in this ever-exciting genre that includes some of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century, including Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Albert Camus. Ever puzzling and always refusing to be pinned down, this book does not attempt to define absurdist literature, but attempts to examine its major and minor players. As such, the field is indirectly defined by examining its constituent writers. Not only investigating the so-called “Theatre of the Absurd,” this volume wades deeply into absurdist fiction and absurdist poetry, expanding much of our previous sense of what constitutes absurdist literature. Furthermore, long overdue, approximately one-third of the book is devoted to marginalized writers: black, Latin/x, female, LGBTQ+, and non-Western voices.

In Staging and Re- cycling , John Keefe and Knut Ove Arntzen re-visit and reappraise a selection of their work to explore how the retrieval, re-approaching and re-framing of material can offer pathways for new work and new thinking. The book includes a collection of reprinted and first-published (although previously presented) textual material interspersed with editorial material – reflective essays from John and Knut on these pieces from the archives and original essays from invited scholars that explore the theme of repetition and re-cycling. The project has a number of aims: to suggest how the status of ‘new’ with regard to academic and staged dramaturgical materials may be reframed; to re-examine these through certain lenses and concepts (re-cycling; re-working; the spectator; landscape, post- and other dramaturgies); to explore the possibilities of critique offered by particular modes of juxtaposition, dialogue and dialectic; to offer further provocations to received ideas; and to retrieve and re-approach material, once published or presented, that becomes ‘lost’ in archives or on library shelves. As shown here, the role of the hyphen acts as an indicator to the status of ‘re-’ in relation to the ‘new’. Written for scholars and academics, researchers, undergraduate and postgraduate students, and practitioners working in all forms for theatre and performance, Staging and Re-cycling suggests a new form of dialogue between work, authors and readers, and draws out threads that extend back into the past and potentially forward into the future.

Institutionalizing Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity fills a gap in the current literature by systematizing and comparing a wide international scope of case studies illustrating varied ways of institutionalizing theory and practice. This collection comprises three parts. After an introduction of overall themes, Part I presents case studies on institutionalizing. Part II focuses on transdisciplinary examples, while Part III includes cross-cutting themes, such as funding, evaluation, and intersections between epistemic cultures. With expert contributions from authors representing projects and programs in Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, Russia and South Caucuses, Latin and North America, this book brings together comparative perspectives on theory and practice, while also describing strategies and models of change. Each chapter identifies dimensions inherent in fostering effective and sustainable practices. Together they advance both analysis and action-related challenges. The proposed conceptual framework that emerges supports innovative practices that are alternatives to dominant academic cultures and approaches in pertinent disciplines, fields, professionals, and members of government, industry, and communities. Applying a comparative perspective throughout, the contributors reflect on aspects of institutionalizing interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity as well as insights applicable to further contexts. This innovative volume will be of great interest to students, scholars, practitioners, and members of organizations promoting and facilitating interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research.

This ground-breaking book is the first to bring an ecological focus to theatre and performance design, both in scholarship and in practice. Ecoscenography weaves environmental philosophies and practices across genres and fields to provide a captivating vision for the future of sustainable theatre production. The book forefronts leading designers that are driving this emerging field into the mainstream through their relational and reciprocal engagement with place, audiences, materials, and processes. Beyond its radical philosophy and framework, Ecoscenography makes a compelling case for pursuing an ecological ethic in theatre and performance design, not only as a moral imperative, but for the extraordinary possibilities that it offers for more-than-human engagement. Based on her personal insights as a leading ecological researcher and practitioner, Beer offers a rich resource for scholars, students and practitioners alike, opening up new processes and aesthetics of theatrical design that enhance the environmental and social advocacy of the field.

How does the world of theatre and the performing arts intersect with the climate and environmental crisis? This timely book is the first comprehensive account of the sector's response to the defining issue of our time. The book documents a sector in transition and presents theatre professionals, practitioners and organizations with a synthesis of information, knowledge and expertise to guide them to their own endorsement of sustainable thinking and practice. It is illustrated with inspiring case studies and interviews, from London's National Theatre, to Sydney Theatre Company, to the Göteborg Opera and the American Repertory Theatre. These foreground the work of pioneering institutions and individual practitioners whose artistic ingenuity, creative activism and sense of public mission have given shape, content and purpose to what we can now call 'sustainable theatre'. Spanning almost three decades, the book approaches the topic from multiple angles and through an international perspective, recording how climate and environmental concerns have been expressed in cultural policy, arts leadership and organizational ethics; in the greening of infrastructure and daily operations; in the individual and institutional practice of sustainable theatre-making; in performing arts education; and in touring practices and international collaboration. It investigates, too, how the climate crisis influences theatre as a story-teller – on stage and beyond. Written by a leading expert in the field of culture and environmental sustainability and distilling many years of research and hands-on experience, Sustainable Theatre: Theory, Context, Practice is intended to be relevant and useful to professionals involved in the theatre and performing arts sector in many different capacities: from policy-makers, arts leaders and managers to administrators, technicians, artists, scholars and educators.