Meeting Like This: Dramaturgies of Encounter in the Context of the Climate Crisis
This thesis studies four artists – Tim Crouch, David Finnigan, Zoë Svendsen, and Mojisola Adebayo – who offer alternatives to what the thesis will call ‘deficit models’ of climate-engaged theatre, and the unequal, unidirectional and explanatory dynamics they suppose. Through interviews with these artists, and inductive analysis of their work, the thesis uses the concept of ‘dramaturgies of encounter’ to articulate the relationships they propose between artist, audience and event. The thesis’s first chapter discusses the work of Tim Crouch, arguing that Crouch’s plays do not explain ideas, but invite their audiences to enact them – not presenting thoughts to the audience, but offering them novel ways in which to think. Through this process, the thesis will argue, Crouch’s play Superglue offers its spectators an intuitive means by which to grasp ecological entanglement. The second chapter explores the practice of David Finnigan, suggesting that he replaces the hierarchies of earlier science-based ‘climate theatre’ with humbler forms of address. Observing Finnigan’s repeated staging of his failure to ‘deal with’ climate change, the chapter argues that Finnigan rejects a heroic conception of the autonomous artist to identify possibilities for renewal in patterns of error and iteration. In its third chapter, the thesis turns to Zoë Svendsen, proposing that her work challenges colonial capitalism’s restriction of the contemporary imagination. The chapter suggests that rather than communicating ‘the way things are’, Svendsen’s work empowers its audiences to rehearse ways that the world might be, inviting them to practise dispositions that refuse colonial-capitalist structures of relation. The thesis’s final chapter considers the theatre of Mojisola Adebayo, noting that Adebayo not only rejects a didactic approach to ‘climate change’, but more broadly rejects ‘climate’ as a disavowedly white-coded historical frame. The chapter therefore proposes that the ecological work of Adebayo’s Family Tree lies in a deeper claim on the present, re-working the relationships between actors and spectators within ongoing histories of extractivist harm. In concluding, the thesis draws a principle for practice from these earlier discussions, beyond ideas of messaging and persuasion. The thesis’s closing argument is for a principle of metabolism, proposing a dependent, regenerative theatre that seeks not to transmit, but transform.
Theatre, Climate, Dramaturgy, Ecocriticism, Performance, Encounter, Finnigan, Adebayo, Crouch, Svendsen
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