In Australia, these impacts are felt acutely, where climate-related disasters– storms, fires, floods –now appear to be on constant rotation around the country. Climate change has become a catalyst for reflection and critique on Australian society’s ideals, values and way of life, and is giving expression to anxiety about the uncertain ecological future we might leave behind for generations to come. It is widely acknowledged that increasing levels of mental health distress and eco-anxiety are being experienced by young people, who often feel helpless and overwhelmed by the scope and scale of the problem (Gunasiri et al. 2022).
In the face of these threats, youth theatre and performance offers young people empowering communal experiences that can mitigate some of the negative impacts of living through disasters first-hand, or witnessing their devastation through constant media exposure.
We conducted a small pilot study (Woodland et al. 2023, 2024) interviewing 12 practitioners from youth performance organisations across Australia whose work represents a diversity of young people in terms of age, culture, geography and socioeconomic background.
Practitioners were working both at the coal face of climate disaster in areas that have recently experienced catastrophic bushfires and floods; and those working at a distance, that is, watching the disasters unfold in the media. Though, due to the intensity of these and other crises like the pandemic occurring nationally and globally, such distinctions began to collapse. We asked practitioners to reflect on their direct engagement (or not) with climate change and disaster recovery, and how their work might support young people in navigating the effects of the climate crisis.
The study enabled us to see how youth theatre can address the climate crisis across four intersecting domains: from disaster preparedness, through first response, to disaster recovery, to climate activism. Crucially, the ways that performance work across these domains traverse artistic practice and everyday actions that contribute to children and young people’s sense of critical hope, agency, community, and – at the risk of sounding dramatic – their very survival.
Disaster preparedness, response, and recovery
Youth performance organisations and projects can play a vital role in disaster-affected communities, offering creative approaches to preparedness, response, and recovery processes. Studies on the role of performing arts in disaster preparedness are relatively new, however, the project Refuge, produced by Arts House Melbourne, was focused on building community and fostering participatory art projects to imaginatively explore responses to climate disaster and recovery before the disasters occurred (Pledger et al. 2021; Davidson et al. 2024).
Kate Sulan, a lead practitioner on the project, worked with children to reimagine and create an ideal disaster relief centre according to their own needs, building their collaborative capacities and engaging them in ‘playful preparedness’.
Post-disaster, once the essentials of food and shelter have been secured, we found that youth arts organisations can facilitate safe communal connections, support community reflection and recovery, and provide platforms for expressing experiences. Spaghetti Circus acted as a community recovery hub immediately following the 2022 floods, working with displaced people, offering mental health first aid, and providing food and internet access to the community. In Bairnsdale, Upstage Youth Theatre stepped in quickly to provide an ‘escape’ for kids through a pirate day at the local library while parents and carers dealt with the 2020 bushfire crisis. This reflects similar projects from around the world, including the ‘Teaspoon of Light’ project that worked creatively with school children in response to the Christchurch earthquake (Gibbs et al. 2013).
Sue Giles spoke about Polyglot’s project We Built This City inviting children and communities to imaginatively ‘rebuild’ using cardboard boxes. This was deployed in Healesville, Victoria, after the Black Saturday Bushfires of 2009 and Minami Sanriku Japan after the 2011 Tsunami (Polyglot Theatre 2023). Giles spoke of the importance of children and young people being given opportunities to contribute and reclaim a sense of agency in the aftermath of disaster. Josh Maxwell from Jopuka Productions (himself a young artist) wrote his play for young people Very Happy Children with Bright and Wonderful Futures (Maxwell 2022) first as a response to the youth climate strikes, but then it became a way for him to deal with the unfolding fire emergency that was occurring around him. Youth participation in the context of disaster is important, ‘Because when young people participate, it draws upon their expertise, enables them to exercise their rights as citizens, and contributes to a more democratic society’ (Checkoway 2011).
Climate Activism
Children and young people saw climate activism as inseparable from their artistic practice. Young people from Backbone Youth Arts, Jopuka Productions, Spaghetti Circus, and Byron Youth Theatre were at times simultaneously involved in climate protests and marches, performing works about climate change, and engaging in advocacy with local politicians. When Backbone went on tour to London, one of their young members elected to stay and join the Extinction Rebellion marches instead of returning home with the group. Young people feel the need to be responsible, to act, while also creating a balance between directly addressing the threat and all the eco-anxiety it entails and maintaining a sense of hope for the future.
We found specific qualities within youth theatre that contribute to the outcomes we’ve described here.
These include the facilitation of supportive spaces where young people could both escape from and critically explore through artistry the magnitude of the crisis; the presence of care, love, and nurturing, the importance of joy and enjoyment; and the vital quality of ‘unmediatised liveness’ that supported young people to respond in immediate and embodied ways.
Unmediatised liveness
This term suggests a communal, agentic, and dynamic entanglement between self, other, and environment that produces, enables, and shapes the experiences of young people. The term is derived from the work of Philip Auslander (2012, 2023) and refers to experiences that are not filtered through the tools of digital technology. We suggest that while mediatised interactions remain a critical element of contemporary youth culture and performance, the potency of unmediatised co-presence, artistic collaboration, community action, and activism are vital to supporting youth theatre in response to climate change.
It was evident when the kids from Spaghetti Circus took ownership of the circus space and organised themselves after the floods. They came together, scraped the flood mud from the sprung floor, escorted politicians around the venue pointing out the work they’d done during the clean-up, and salvaged important historical costume pieces that had been in the company for generations. In salvaging the costumes, the kids formed a production line, passing the costumes hand-to-hand from the shed, the teenagers in charge and the little ones following their lead. This action reflected their circus training that is dependent on peer support and physical co-operation (Cadwell 2013).
Polyglot’s Sue Giles highlighted social live engagement as important to the disaster recovery process:
[The children’s] willingness to be involved in [a] task after [the event] is an indication of how healthy that community is and how well they can recover… the process of [re]creating the houses, communities and the streets that had burnt down… was just fun for those kids… it was a way of them really talking about it and unpacking it visually.
A question of survival
Our research begins to uncover just how crucial live, embodied, collaborative participation has become for children and young people to be equipped not only to respond to crises when they occur, but also to engage in acts and actions towards survival. Perhaps nowhere is this most obvious than in the sense of responsibility and caring for Country that has been embedded in Australian First Nations Cultures for millennia. Nazaree Dickerson who leads the ILBIJERRI Theatre Company’s youth ensemble acknowledged that enabling young people to embody cultural practices and stories is integral to any ecological focus in theatre and performance for First Nations communities.
Keeping these alive is critical not only to maintaining culture, but also to maintaining the live, embodied ecological connection between ourselves and our world that will be essential to survival.
Survival and the existential threat of planetary extinction is also deeply affecting practitioners, who reported intense emotional labour associated with leading youth performance in response to the climate crisis.
We had a bunch of near misses… that image of young people standing in a boat offshore… that will always be burnt in my mind and blow my mind that our government let that happen. We let the country get to where the… only option children had not to be burnt to death was to get in a boat and drive into the ocean… how is that OK? (Josh Maxwell, Jopuka Productions)
There was a moment when one of [the kids] said, ‘Well, I’m very sure that climate change is either going to kill me or my children or my grandchildren.’ That was such a chilling thought to have a gorgeous 15-year-old say – it was really severe. (Alice Cadwell, Spaghetti Circus)
In just a few years, we have seen the language in youth theatre and performance expanding beyond its previous focus on empowering young people, giving them a voice and a sense of belonging and identity, to also becoming focused on performing resistance and survival in the face of existential threat. While successive governments and policy makers emphasise the need for resilience, there is now resistance to this term and against the neoliberal forces that continue to demand we ‘bounce back’ from disaster, rather than change its course entirely. As compounding crises of pandemic, climate disaster and economic upheaval continue to affect Australia, youth arts and performance are themselves in a fight for their survival due to years of under-resourcing, while the emotional capacity of practitioners who support young people in this work is increasingly being threatened. Youth theatre and performance organisations at every level must therefore be resourced and nurtured so that this vital work can continue.
References
Auslander, P. 2012. Digital liveness: A historico-philosophical perspective. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 34 (3): 3–11. https://doi.org/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00106
Auslander, P. 2023. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. 3rd ed. Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Liveness-Performance-in-a-Mediatized-Culture/Auslander/p/book/9780367468170.
Cadwell, S. J. 2018. Falling Together: An Examination of Trust-Building in Youth and Social Circus Training. Theatre, Dance and Performance Training vol. 9, no. 1: 19–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2017.1384755.
Checkoway, B. 2011. What is youth participation? Children and Youth Services Review, vol. 33, no. 2: 340–45.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2010.09.017
Davidson, J. W., Woodland, S., Grehan, H., Pengelly, S., & Hassall, L. 2024. Moving Beyond Recovery and Reconstruction: Imagining Extreme Event Preparedness Through Performing Arts. In Climate Disaster Preparedness: Reimagining Extreme Events through Art and Technology, edited by Dennis del Favero, Susanne Thurow, Michael J. Ostwald, and Ursula Frohne. Springer Nature Switzerland: 79-92.
Gibbs, L., Mutch, C., O’Connor, P., & MacDougall, C. 2013. Research with, by, for and about Children: Lessons from Disaster Contexts. Global Studies of Childhood vol. 3, no. 2: 129–141. https://doi.org/10.2304/gsch.2013.3.2.129
Gunasiri, H., Wang, Y., Watkins, E., Capetola, T., Henderson-Wilson, C., & Patrick, R. 2022. Hope, Coping and Eco-Anxiety: Young People’s Mental Health in a Climate-Impacted Australia. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health vol. 19, no. 9: 5528. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19095528.
Maxwell, J. 2022. Very Happy Children with Bright and Wonderful Futures. Playlab Theatre.
Pledger, D., & Papastergiadis, N. eds. 2021. In the Time of Refuge: A collection of writings and reflections on art, disaster and communities. University of Melbourne. https://www.artshouse.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/In-the-Time-of-Refuge.pdf
Polyglot Theatre. 2023. Show: We Built This City. https://polyglot.org.au/show/we-built-this-city/
Woodland, S., Hassall, L., & Kennedy-Borissow, A. 2023. Embodying Resistance and Survival: How Youth Theatre and Drama can Address Eco-Anxiety and Promote Recovery in Disaster Affected Communities. University of Melbourne. https://research.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/4564872/Woodland-CAWRIFinalReport.pdf
Woodland, S., Hassall, L., & Kennedy-Borissow, A. 2024. Youth theatre and the climate crisis in Australia: the role of ‘unmediatised liveness’ in performing recovery, resistance, and survival. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance vol. 29, no. 2: 382-391. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2024.2312184
World Health Organization. 2023. Climate Change. World Health Organization. Published October 12, 2023. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-and-health
Sarah Woodland is a researcher, practitioner and educator in applied theatre, participatory arts and socially engaged performance. She has recently completed a three-year Dean’s Fellowship in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, The University of Melbourne (2020-2023), investigating how the performing arts can promote social justice and wellbeing in institutions and communities. Sarah is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts and has published widely in theatre and interdisciplinary arts.
Linda Hassall is a researcher, theatre maker and educator in applied performance and performance studies. She explores the intersection between theatre and social justice themes derived from climate change, recently publishing Theatres of Dust: Climate Gothic Analysis in Contemporary Performance. A co-director of Performance and Ecologies Research Lab (P+ERL), she has recently received an ARC Linkage to investigate sustainability transformations in the performing arts. She is Deputy Program Advisor Bachelor Arts Griffith University, Australia.
Main Image Credit: Spaghetti Circus, Floods, Mullumbimby Showground, 2022