P+ERL Team: Tanja Beer, Natalie Lazaroo & Linda Hassall (Griffith University, Australia)
CARPA9 has been a rich exchange of ideas. We have come to Helsinki to discuss urgent topics for the future of the performing arts in a climate changed world. We have shared our artistic research with a focus on pedagogies as a transformation of knowledge and practice.
The P+ERL team have taken notes over the course of the last three days with the impossible task of trying to create a summary of the key themes and take-aways from the CARPA9 conference across Strand One: Ecological Design (Tanja Beer), Strand 2: Ecological Performance Making (Natalie Lazaroo), and Strand 3: Ecological Storytelling (Linda Hassall). The result is a very much imperfect summary of insights, but we hope that they might offer a way forward for those working at the intersection of performance, ecology and pedagogy.
Strand One: Ecological Design (Tanja Beer)
The themes that emerged from the ecological design stream were centred around three key ideas:
The sustainability of the self is totally intertwined with the sustainability of the planet
We questioned the unsustainable culture of production and acknowledged that the ‘neoliberal’ capitalist system of how we make theatre is broken.
We asked, “what is a sustainable theatre for the age of burn out? How can we break the spell of continuous production?”.
It became clear that just like ‘fast food’, ‘fast theatre’ is not healthy or sustainable: We need to move towards mindfully producing, not just ‘bashing out’ another production.
Intercultural and ancestral perspectives provide important and renewed eco-perspectives
Indigenous and culturally specific place-based knowledge systems can highlight the important interconnections with the land and ancestry. We learnt how supporting careful and compassionate ways of working with materials and understanding and appreciating where things come from allows us to give value to things that are not often considered valuable.
It was clear that intercultural and ancestral perspectives offer us an invitation to go back to our own roots, to appreciate our own countries, including uncomfortable histories, and to seek out our own ecological connections and ‘tender relationships’ to place.
Playful embodied processes demonstrate hope and care (in spite of everything)
The presentations highlighted that there are many ways of knowing (quantitative, qualitative and embodied) that can offer expertise and nuance in ecological understanding. An integrated approach is clearly needed to tackle complex ecological issues.
Importantly, embracing the ‘fun’ side of sustainability is integral to our wellbeing. Playful care is recuperative care, and this can also have positive social and ecological benefits.
Moving from ‘toes to heels’, we can seek out playful attunements and entanglements to challenging conditions. We can learn to work with resistance, not against it.
While there is no doubt that ecological design can be challenging, it can also be fun, beautiful, stimulating, soothing and life-affirming.
Strand 2: Ecological Performance Making (Natalie Lazaroo)
The presentations in Strand 2 reflected the following inter-related themes/ideas:
Responsibility/Response-ability and accountability
This theme honoured the entanglements between us all – human to human and human to more-than-human. It honoured the entanglements with the sacred and intertwined belief systems. It explored sustainable co-existence with planet earth, asking us to question our legacies and what it is we leave behind. The presentations over the last 3 days considered the notion of interdependency and relationality, where performers, performance companies, and performance practices function as ecosystems, establishing a network of care like the mycelium that ensures the collective thriving and flourishing during times of (climate) crisis.
Mattering and the agency of matter
Presentations explored how matter matters. There were engagements with acoustic matter, microbial matter, plant matter through forests and gardens as well as matter such as sand dunes. We looked at planetary matter and how we might be guided by the planets that speak to us, beseeching us to connect through our senses in order to understand the world around us. Through this, we come to understand that there is a force of matter that moves beyond anthropocentric views of agency. All these matter intra-act in a dynamic process of becoming. We become with matter. We were also invited to embrace ‘mundane’ matters, to use what we already have, and where the politics of the mundane can offer ways to be more ecologically conscious in an anthropocentric world that applauds the spectacular, always wanting more.
Slowing Down
Finally, in a number of presentations, we were invited to embrace the principle of slowing down, to find the pauses. This principle of slowness and slowing down allows us to cultivate deep listening, deep perceiving and deep connectedness. Through slowing down, we work to reconfigure temporal (and spatial) processes, allowing us to sit with our place-thoughts and connection to the land and the planet. We discussed how lichen and moss offer us a more than human geological way of understanding time. Gardens and garden theatres were presented as examples of slow performance, thinking about how we can integrate land relationships into theatre and performance processes. Slowness and scaling down – and in some cases, shyness, a sense of being in the ‘hyper-within’– thus becomes an act of resistance; it resists commodification in a hypercapitalist world that often privileges individualism and human-centric visibility and presence.
Strand 3: Ecological Storytelling (Linda Hassall)
The presentations in Strand 3 reflected the following inter-related themes/ideas:
Earth and Water Dialogues
We acknowledged the power of storytelling in a climate changed world. We did this through two days of deep connection to the planet through extraordinary narratives of earth and water which reflected on our responses to living in a climate change world. It was three days of interaction, collaboration and meditation on how we live in and with the planet.
We heard about play building, and we explored new dramaturgical and play processes. This research and practice support strengthening intercultural dialogues with children and brings together multiple voices from across the seas to share climate change experiences and imagine a brighter future for all.
We explored the ways innovative science tools can be utilised in relationship with developing beautiful art works and together how they shape narratives about climate change to imagine the world from a fluid POV.
We were reminded to look back into the future to explore how ancient Pacifica history, knowledges, culture and art can intervene in international policy to ensure climate care in global oceanic navigation.
We engaged in deep listening processes which evoked earth sounds to encourage rich embodied place-based connections to the environment.
We were privy to poetic processes and behaviours which supported our making sense of the world through establishing alternative relationships with water.
Eco-Storytelling Workshops
We had interactive and collaborative experiences that privileged the art of storytelling to offer alternative narratives and meditated on making invisible urban water landscapes visible. In doing so we imagined our connection to water as flowing into our bodies, senses and memory to generate collaborative storytelling experiences.
We applied alternative and regenerative processes for voicing other than human ‘character’ through collaborative interactions with each other, the senses and the senses in a space.
We explored non-human elements in space to imagine and create collaborative dialogues and relationships with the other than human.
Eco-dramaturgies
We explored global eco-dramaturgical processes that informed unique stories about space and place. Bringing together international perspectives, the eco-dramaturgies explored became an umbrella under which many multi-modal stories were told to address escalating climate-scapes in and as performance.
We tackled acts of speculative world making, questioning the definition of what it means to be human in places and spaces that challenge natures purity.
We explored contemporary performance texts which privileged decolonising practices, and which highlight our experiences of living in a climate change world.
We asked questions about slow violence, and ecological time and the link between colonial practices, globalisation and ecological destruction.
Crafting and Reflecting on Storytelling Practice
Day three was a day of reflecting on ourselves as storytellers. We reflected on our inherent ability to communicate meanings, pose questions, translate knowledge, and craft narratives on sustainable development through sustainable performing arts practices and socially and environmentally relevant projects.
We considered reflexive dialogue and practices that weave together epistemologies and methodologies of multiple disciplines, in multi species art-science performance.
We reflected on technologies as not only agents of ecological surveillance but also participants in speculative, pluriversal practices that destabilise anthropocentric modes of being.
We explored poetic performative narratives, to convey systemic thinking through immersive sensory experiences.
We shared research that asks us to open ourselves to and reconsider the passivity of objects.
Now let’s hear from you