This book asks what are the challenges to theatre and the purposes of performance in an ecologically threatened world? Is there a future for theatre as an ethically and politically alert art through environmental action? How might ecological understandings refigure the natural virtues of theatre and performance? Theatre Ecology gets to grips with such questions by investigating an eclectic cosmopolitan sample of environments and performance events, in theatres and beyond. It proposes that performance is a peculiarly twenty-first century addiction at the root global warming. Encountering this prospect head-on, it searches for pathological hope in historical theatre at the end of its tether and rumbles the contemporary paradigm of performance for signs of eco-sanity. Recognising the future is always before its time, Theatre Ecology is a paradoxical tract for survival past the final ecological era.
List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Prologue. A kind of storm: 1. An introduction to theatre and performance ecology; Part I. In the Present: Qualities of Theatre and Performance: Preamble; 2. Performance contexts: theatre at the end of its tether; 3. Performance archives: catching the Northern sublime; 4. Performance limits: steps to a paradoxology; Part II. Of the Past: Histories of Theatre and Performance: Preamble; 5. Economies of performance: theatre against democracy; 6. Audiences of performance: declining participation; 7. Spectacles of performance: excesses of power; Part III. For the Future: Ecologies of Theatre and Performance: Preamble; 8. Performance and black holes: on eco-activism; 9. Performance and energy: on free radicals; 10. Performance and biospheres: on hermetic theatre; Epilogue: listen up for the cracks; Appendix. A chronology of chapter sources; Bibliography, multimedia, websites; Index.
