Writing in the Green: Imperatives towards an Eco-n-temporary Theatre Canon

Abstract

This article reflects on the sociopolitical, cultural, and health landscape(s) of our current moment in time, addressing how intersecting crises have delivered us to an unprecedented moment for drama, theatre, and performance. As communities across the world have had to dispense with staples of everyday life – attending live theatre performances being one of these –, so art, in all its forms, has never been more significant in its capacity to bring us together, even if modes of togetherness have shifted in their referentiality and locationality. As the article proposes, we need to take an intuitive approach to the appreciation of how our ecologies – in their broadest iteration – have been impacted and realigned by the COVID-19 pandemic in such ways that we can expect that our future scholarship(s) on plays, place, and landscape will and, indeed, ought to reflect this experience. Dialogues on theatre and environment, which are already intersectional, are now receiving yet another focusing lens through the pandemic.The article also suggests that our understandings of how our ecologies have been adapted invite a consideration of new modes of engaging with the environment in our discourses – and of the very term itself and what it might encompass – and new economies in calibrating our discourses to reflect our radically redistributed individual and collective experiences. The text offers examples of categories that emerge particularly strongly where spatial liminality is key; in so doing, it asserts that in-betweenness is a central element towards understanding our contemporary role and responsibilities: from collapsing binaries (environment/economy) to the unmoored experience of our times.

Introduction: Environments and Interspaces

“…A natural link to the above considerations concerns the engagement of theatre studies with the environment. I have logged the most welcome flourishing of this field in earlier publications, which have also sought to contribute to its expansion (see Angelaki 2017Angelaki , 2019Angelaki , 2021Angelaki , 2022aAngelaki , 2022c. I have had the fortune of advancing such dialogues further in collaborative interdisciplinary publications, specifically the Special Issue of Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, which I co-edited with Elizabeth Sakellaridou under the topic of Theatre and Ecology (2022), and the Special Issue of Green Letters titled A New Poetics of Space (2022), co-edited with Lucy Jeffery.…”

The Room: Intimate Microcosms and World Formation

“…In 2019, Ella Hickson's ANNA problematised not only what can be expected and accomplished in a single room, but, also, how the theatre might begin to conceptualise and stage that very space. It is a production that I have discussed from different angles previously (Angelaki 2022(Angelaki , 2023 and will therefore not be expanding upon. Still, it is essential to acknowledge the play for factors including its use of binaural sound in the staging of a couple's apartment, of which we see predominantly the living room and adjacent kitchen, as the setup for the exposition and capture of a perpetrator, as the only set for the theatrical performance itself and as a mundane domestic context already exposed to external interference at a time of political surveillance and unfreedom in 1968 East Berlin.…”