Abstract
Australian landscapes both actual and perceptual can represent and enact space, and as such, can read, politicise and activate ways in which cultural geographies are imagined in contemporary theatre explorations (Carleton 2009). As a practice-led playwright researcher, I investigate theatrical landscapes to explore how cultural and environmental knowledge can effectively emerge through a play text or production. My creative research therefore contributes to debates in ecological and eco-critical fields through an analysis of how disappearing non-human nature may be attributed to cultural construction. The following discussion analyses a devised work which utilises an eco-critical framework to promote climate literacies in audience members â: Dust (Hassall 2015). The play explores and dismantles our Master Narratives â referred to within as âmiraclesâ - by exploring the negative impacts of human behaviour on non-human nature. The theatrical landscape is both physical and psychological, and generates the deconstruction of ideological perceptions of disappearing non-human nature as we know it. Dust aligns climate change themes with eco-critical debates and poses questions pertaining to contemporary custodianship of the landscape, environment and non-human nature. Further, the discussion provides an intersection between playwriting practice, politicised environmental themes and eco-critical dialogues, and identifies how contemporary environmental factors can stimulate climate change discussion in performance paradigms.
Highlights
Theatre productions such as Dust can investigate the encounter between people, place and disappearing natural landscapes and habitats
As the risks of catastrophic climate change accelerate, there is a growing understanding of the role creative research can play in making sense of the ecological transformations we encounter (Wiseman 2016)
We are able to respond to these issues by posing provocative questions to our audiences around the daily effects of climate change on our global environment
Summary
Theatre productions such as Dust can investigate the encounter between people, place and disappearing natural landscapes and habitats. TRIBE characters who are living with the Switching between questions posed by future generations and stories left behind by us – those of us living in this time of ecological unrest – the play suggests that in these present days, perhaps in these our very last days, in the days leading into the end of days as we know –, we could have done more because we had the knowledge and the opportunity to do so. During this discussion, excerpts from Dust are included to support an eco-critical analysis of the performance text. I saw her looking over the edge into the... into the what? What would you call it? Chasm? Emptiness? Hole?
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