Approaches that encourage participant decision-making align with the argument that theatre can maximise the social benefit of collaborative processes while necessarily adhering to ethical limits in re-enacting recent disaster (Thompson 2011).
https://ausstage.kinsta.cloud/story/ecological-theatre-in-australia/
The ARC Project
Towards an Australian Ecological Theatre (DP210100720, 2021-24) investigates the ways in which natural ecologies and climate change are represented in drama and theatrical performance. It finds that natural environments are centrally configured within the representation of social and emotional worlds that span precolonial and colonial to postcolonial contexts. An Australian ecological theatre emerges over time from the depictions of social tension between short-sighted exploitation and age-old, far-sighted environmental conservation, a division that continues into twenty-first century climate change theatre.
This ecological theatre reflects a progressive shift in social values away from social acceptance of colonialising practices to beliefs that support land restoration and climate change redress, values that align with Australian Indigenous First Nations traditional beliefs about interdependency.
The research encompasses the ecological perspectives of Bangarra Dance Theatre and Marrugeku productions as well as performance such as Jill Orr’s outdoor works spanning decades. Theatrical performance captures everyday expressions of fear and despair and purposeful hope and a number of Australian plays have become internationally prominent. For example, Australian Andrew Bouvell’s futuristic play, When the Rain Stops Falling has had over 65 international productions and Nicola Gunn’s performance Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster that questions personal responsibility, has toured extensively throughout Europe (AusStage 2024).
The project outcomes encompass 100 plays and performances selected from the wider field for their national and international prominence, and for continuity about a particular aspect of the natural environment and/or weather and climate – with some receiving detailed analysis. This project has organised two conferences and is currently preparing an authored book and an edited book (under contracts). The first conference at the University of Melbourne in 2022 included scholars in the humanities and the sciences as well as climate change activists. The second conference in 2023 was held at CUNY Graduate Centre in New York in collaboration with the project’s Partner Investigators and attracted scholars and artists from England, Europe as well as the USA.
An Ethical Approach
Australian drama has long conveyed the danger of fire for rural communities; for example, fire is in the background in Millicent Armstrong’s 1924 one-act rural drama, Drought. Twenty-first-century Australian theatrical performance, however, focuses directly on catastrophic fire. A common approach, also used in the 2021 television series Fire, dramatizes what happens to a representative small group of fictional individuals often within family relationships, following a pattern of twentieth-century drama about a bush fire and family rifts. For example, catastrophic fire coincides with family upheaval in Fleur Murphy’s Hearth from 2022, which is set during the Black Saturday fires on 7 February 2009 that killed 173 people in Victoria (Brindley 2022).
In contrast, the award-winning play, Embers by Campion Decent offers multiple perspectives on fire’s devastation including lines from official statements and government reports. Based on devasting fires in Victoria and NSW in 2003, Embers is verbatim theatre, crafted from the words of a large number of fire-affected community members to comprehensively document the perspectives of fire fighters, impacted residents and farmers, emergency responders, Red Cross volunteers, and politicians. Members of the community were interviewed and selective descriptions combined to comprehensively convey fire’s impact on their lives.
The threat of fire is one of the few areas connected to climate change where communities regularly prepare action plans. At its best, the theatrical approach captures the gravitas of facing a bush fire while distancing real events so as to avoid triggering traumatic memories.
Drama about fire requires sensitive treatment because of fatalities and the lasting psychological effects within communities living with the aftermath of shock (Cushing 2020). Theatre might be assumed to be eliciting empathy, but James Thompson questions therapeutic claims about the emotional benefit for individuals and communities of retelling traumatic circumstances even though there are benefits to collaborative processes (2011, p. 5). Concern about ‘who owns the story’ also emerges in Australian theatre. Embers allowed community members to decide to share their experience of fire as it curtailed the emotional impact through participant choice, episodic composition and distancing techniques.
At the beginning of Embers, which was produced by Hothouse Theatre and the Sydney Theatre Company in 2006, the fire is variously described as like a volcano, an atomic bomb, a war. ‘Part one, Context’, frames people at a barbeque remembering where they were and what they were doing as the 2003 fire approached. ‘Part two, Community’, gives accounts of what happened to key community members during the extreme circumstances of the fires, and ‘Part three, Conflict’, reveals disagreements in the aftermath over where and how the resources were allocated to fight the fires, and disagreement over preventive burning to reduce fire fuel loads (Decent 2008, p. 71, 74). Some personae declare orchestrated burning is no longer adequate against severe fire. (Tree spacing and low undergrowth was maintained by First Nations peoples in the precolonial world to protect against severe fire (Pascoe and Gammage 2021).) ‘Part four, Consequence’, encompasses fortuitous survival and the loss of homes and farms along with the lasting psychological consequences of people thinking they were going to die. Sue recounts that people still ring her in distress three years later and James explains ‘you don’t truly understand … until you’ve been through it yourself’ (Decent 2008, p. 85).
Jim recounts the 2003 fire in Victoria being measured as travelling at 172 kilometres an hour by a satellite when it created a blast that threw him to the ground as embers and grit got onto the skin and into his beard (2008, p. 45). His group fought the fire desperately for ‘an hour and three quarters in horrendous heat’, and a kangaroo came and stood in the sprinklers (Decent 2008, p. 45). The enormity of animal loss estimated in the billions, has become a source of public grief and despair. The fire sucks the oxygen out of the air and out of animal and human lungs as it passes through (Decent 2008, p. 47).
The ethical issue confronting theatre is how to depict a disaster such as fire when it is part of recent memory and ongoing threat. An affected community may welcome a communal expression and public attention after several years while expressing reservations about reviving feelings about events. Disaster remains a contradictory emotional experience even when shared within an innovative use of theatrical form.
Theatrical performance that imagines a disaster can also encompass being prepared. Refuge was a performative multi-arts event held annually at Arts House in Melbourne from 2016 to 2021, in which participants engaged with a scenario for a major emergency such as fire and prepared accordingly. In 2018, two years before the COVID-19 pandemic, artists made masks and rehearsed what to do in a pandemic, and how to establish communication channels with multicultural groups in the city. Refuge was developed by Angharad Wynne-Jones, the Artistic Director of Arts House in 2016 who envisaged social upheaval connected to climatic shifts, and sought to ‘build a community around a problem’ for such a future (Pledger 2021, p. 40, italics in original). The project brought together First Nations Elders, art and performance makers, activists, producers, cooks, emergency managers, scholars, children and animals and plants in a community rehearsal for a crisis (Wynne-Jones 2021, p. 9). Significantly, Refuge was developed in collaboration with organisations that respond to emergencies such as the Australian Red Cross, Emergency Management Victoria and the State Emergency Services (SES).
This was a participatory arts event in which the disaster is in the future and involves participants envisaging how to prepare physically and psychologically. It is not reliving a past event, which means the process gives the participants control over what happens imaginatively and emotionally – and therefore better able to face such events. The guiding principles that emerged from the process of emergency simulation in Refuge reflect a social shift in belief that climate change must be redressed as they propose a way forward for other groups seeking to engage in performative activism for the future.
References
Arts House. 2022. https://www.artshouse.com.au/events/talking-in-the-time-of-refuge/#:~:text=In%20the%20Time%20of%20Refuge%20is%20the%20culmination%20of%20more,part%20in%20this%20ambitious%20project. Last accessed 22 February 2024.
AusStage, The Australian Live Performance Database. AusStage.edu.au. Last, accessed 15 August 2024.
Brindley, Michael. 2022. Hearth. Stage Whispers. https://www.stagewhispers.com.au/reviews/hearth
Cushing, Nancy. 2020. Even for an Air Pollution Historian Like Me, These Past Few Weeks Have Been A Shock. The Conversation, 13 January. https://theconversation.com/even-for-an-air-pollution-historian-like-me-these-past-weeks-have-been-a-shock-129141
Decent, Campion. 2009. Embers. Brisbane: Playlab Press.
Fires. 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fires_(TV_series)
Gammage, Bill and Pascoe, Bruce. 2021. Country: Future Fire, Future Farming. Melbourne: Thames and Hudson.
Pledger, David. 2021. Witness. In In The Time of Refuge: A Collection of Writings and Reflections on Art, Disaster and Communities, edited by Pledger, David and Papastergiadis, Nikos. Melbourne Art House Melbourne, City of Melbourne and Research Unit of Public Cultures, University of Melbourne, 35–61. https://www.artshouse.com.au/events/in-the-time-of-refuge-collection/
Thompson, James. 2011. Performance Affects. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wynne-Jones, Angharad. 2021. Introduction from an Intermediary. In In The Time of Refuge: A Collection of Writings and Reflections on Art, Disaster and Communities, edited by Pledger, David and Papastergiadis, Nikos. Melbourne: Art House Melbourne, City of Melbourne and Research Unit of Public Cultures, University of Melbourne, 6–9.
This article has been prepared by CI Emeritus Professor Peta Tait (La Trobe University), also on behalf of CI Professor Denise Varney (University of Melbourne), postdoctoral Research Associate Lara Stephens (Charles Sturt University), and PI’s, Professor Peter Eckersall, (Sydney Cohn Chair of Theatre, CUNY Graduate Center), and Professor Jennifer Parker Starbuck (University of London).
Peta Tait FAHA is an academic scholar and playwright with an extensive background in theatre, dramatic literature, performance theory and creative arts practice. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and her interdisciplinary fields include emotion, body theory, the nonhuman and cultural identity. She has written and edited 12 books and over 70 articles and chapters.
Main Image Credit: Refuge, Arts House, 2016-2021