Performing environmental change: MED Theatre and the changing face of community-based performance research

Abstract

This article examines a programme of work produced by community-based theatre company, Manaton and East Dartmoor (MED) Theatre, addressing issues of climate change as they impact on life in rural Devon, UK. After some discussion of MED Theatre's constitution as a community-based company and the group's long-term engagement with the place, history, ecology and folklore of Dartmoor National Park, the article introduces the performance programme specifically designed by MED to collectively explore aspects of environmental change. Hot Air (2008) and Snow (2009) are the two community plays drawn from the programme for analysis. The performance analyses that follow examine how a community theatre company tackles the multiply complex, contradictory and conflicting issues of climate change. At stake in this analysis is also an interrogation of the term ‘community’ itself – as a concept and as a basis for cultural practices directed towards social change. The work of French theorist Jean-Luc Nancy on ‘inoperative community’ and ‘being-in-common’ is explored and elaborated as a critical framework for the performance analysis. Such alternative critical concepts of community – as ‘inoperative’ or ‘projected’ – are then applied in the analysis of the community plays thus enabling further investigation into the changing environment of community-based performance research.