Sustainability in technical theatre pedagogy and practice

Abstract

In March 2023, third-year Technical Theatre (Production and Design) students at the University of Salford produced a festival of environmentally engaged design-led performance pieces focused on the climate crisis. All four productions were based on plays from Lighting the Way: An Anthology of Short Plays about the Climate Crisis (Bilodeau and Peterson 2020) and were devised and developed by the students, who were encouraged to be as sustainable as possible in both their designs and their execution. The festival was part of the first stage of our collaborative online international learning (COIL) project with Humber College in Toronto, which continued into 2024. In devising the projects, students were encouraged to consider concepts of affectivity, relationality and materiality in relation to expanded scenography (McKinney and Palmer 2017), the practice of scenography as a political act (Elnile 2020), and the ethics of ecoscenography (Beer n.d.). Using principles from the ABTT Green Book for sustainable productions (2021), all materials and equipment used in the final performances were either drawn from in-house stock or borrowed, repurposed or upcycled, encouraging further conversations around accessibility and our collective carbon footprint.