Skip to navigation – Site map

HomeIssues73Special SectionAnthropogenic Climate Change Cond...

Special Section

Anthropogenic Climate Change Condensed: Creating Community in Very Short Plays

Nassim Winnie Balestrini
p. 121-134

Abstract

Contrairement aux tremblements de terre ou aux tsunamis, le climat en tant que tel ne se laisse pas cerner au travers d’événements singuliers. Néanmoins, le monde du théâtre ne s’est pas gardé de frayer, en matière de représentation, des voies expérimentales aptes à aborder la question du changement climatique, et ce bien souvent dans une perspective militante. Tous les deux ans depuis 2015, le Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA) subventionne cinquante pièces courtes auprès de dramaturges de tous horizons. Amateurs et professionnels ont ainsi pu s’inscrire auprès du CCTA pour participer aux représentations des œuvres sélectionnées partout dans le monde. Les textes brefs abordés ici, que l’on doit à des auteurs basés aux États-Unis, témoignent des stratégies dont ceux-ci font usage afin de porter sur scène des facteurs environnementaux et géographiques, de façon à mettre en avant la nécessité d’un effort collectif. Ces pièces courtes font un usage opérant de lieux allégoriques comme de cadres géographiques bien précis et redéfinissent les conceptions anthropocentriques de la communauté en brisant les barrières entre nature anthropisée et monde non-humain. Enfin, ces pièces expérimentent également avec l’échelle, tantôt élargie, tantôt contractée, à laquelle sont envisagés changement climatique et capacités d’action.

Top of page

Full text

Climate Change Drama and Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA)

1Research on ‘cli-fi’ or climate fiction is a growing field within ecocritical literary studies (see Leikam and Leyda; Löschnigg and Braunecker). Compared to the extensive research published on climate fiction, very little work has been done on drama and theater, even though ecocritical approaches have a strong foothold in theater studies (see Arons and May; Gray). In a condensed and early attempt at sketching several recurring features of climate change drama, Adeline Johns-Putra suggests that such plays tend to “refer to a disastrous climatic event,” depict “the psychological implications of climate change,” and “frame personal engagement with climate change in terms of intergenerational relationships” (for further discussion, see Balestrini, “Cli-fi Drama”). This does not, however, solve the central problem that distinguishes plays on specific environmental disasters from plays that address climate change. Una Chaudhuri and Shonnie Enelow write:

The first thing that makes climate change difficult to represent in art is the maddening fact that climate—unlike weather—can never be directly experienced. As the aggregation of numerous atmospheric and weather phenomena, climate does not manifest itself in any single moment, event, or location. The only way it can be apprehended is through data and modeling—through systems and mediations—all of which have to be processed cognitively and intellectually: have to, in short, be understood, rather than experienced, phenomenologically and temporally. (23)

2Similarly, Sylvia Mayer characterizes climate change as “intangible” and “invisible,” as “laten[t]” and “hidden” from view (103). The intermedial nature of drama and theater highlights the dilemma particularly clearly because the verbal text has to meet the challenges of representation as much as of the visual, aural, and kinetic elements of the performance.

3What, then, can climate change literature and, in particular, theater do? How can the limited scope of a literary work or a performance represent the immense time frame of what Rob Nixon designates as “slow violence” (14)? John M. Meyer argues that “[c]limate change and other global environmental changes are a deep challenge to our way of life. Yet they rarely resonate deeply with our everyday lives” (71). As it would be futile for artistic works to try and represent climate change per se, and as the real problem is to make climate change resonate with art consumers, Meyer suggests that artists need to illustrate how “environmental concerns” are inextricably interlaced with “social” concerns and that such interlacing characterizes “everyday” situations (75; also see 77). Complementing Meyer’s perspective, Julie Sze demands that we “inject a different way of looking at climate change, one that highlights different ways of knowing and different ways of being in the world” (“Environmental Justice” 93).

4As these scholars show, the impossibility of perceiving climate change challenges artists to do two things: first, to shift the work of representation towards showing the social, everyday dimensions of climate change. Second, to encourage their recipients to reconsider well-established practices of perception and to experiment with new practices of sensory experience. Both of these points cohere with Jacques Rancière’s definition of what he calls “[c]ritical art”:

art that aims to produce a new perception of the world, and therefore to create a commitment to its transformation. This schema, very simple in appearance, is actually the conjunction of three processes: first, the production of a sensory form of ‘strangeness’; second, the development of an awareness of the reason for that strangeness and third, a mobilization of individuals as a result of that awareness. (142)

5Rancière’s poignant triad appears rather suitable for climate change drama because he envisions an activist response that connects the sensory imaginary of art with, as he says, “the world,” which I choose to read as implying a community (of those affected by climate change in a specific location, of climate change activists, and so on) as well as an ecological system.

6The impossibility of representing climate change in any mimetic sense has led climate change-focused playwrights to try and foster awareness of climate change by providing new perceptions of who or what is affected in which way. The ability to produce “strangeness” through “new perceptions” in the theater is thus used as a trigger for further contemplation. And such contemplation is, sometimes very directly and sometimes more subtly, linked to agency and activism. Moreover, the impossibility of putting climate on the stage has resulted in foregrounding communication about climate change by portraying specific social situations in which dramatic characters present and exchange ideas and opinions about climate change. The plays in the corpus under scrutiny in this essay represent an extreme form of negotiating the immensity of climate change because they are very brief performances of approximately five minutes each. This has resulted in numerous monologues or dialogues which, as projected by some of the theorists discussed above, foreground everyday communicative situations and character constellations as well as the emotionally engaging strategy of beginning in medias res—more often than not right in the middle of a conflict situation.

7All of these plays are commissioned contributions to climate change theater activism that have been created since 2015. Artists in Canada and the United States jointly initiated a movement called Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA) in order to raise public awareness of the 2015 Paris Climate Conference (COP21). Between November 1 and December 12, 2015, more than eighty registrants in twenty-six countries presented readings, performances, and adaptations of the fifty short plays, performance poems, songs, etc., that artists from various countries provided for the purpose (CCTA 2015). CCTA events were hosted in public or private places, in educational institutions, at festivals, and at myriad other occasions. Between the beginning of October and the middle of November 2017, nearly 140 CCTA collaborators in twenty-three countries (among them organizers in forty-one out of the fifty states of the US) hosted dozens of events. Again, CCTA activists made selections from a corpus of fifty works provided by artists affiliated predominately with Canada and the United States, including indigenous peoples, but beyond North America also with Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, China, Columbia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Greece, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Nepal, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Poland, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and Zimbabwe (CCTA 2017). The CCTA plays 2017 were published as an anthology (Bilodeau, Where). The fall of 2019 saw the next iteration of CCTA. This time, playwrights were commissioned to focus on exemplary climate heroines and heroes who, as the theme reads, are “Lighting the Way” (CCTA) towards a hopefully sustainable future.

Communicating Climate Change

Characters: Beyond Anthropocentrism

8The first step in evoking strangeness, which climate change theater shares with other dramatic works that address environmental issues, consists in developing non-human dramatic characters such as future life forms, personified allegorical figures like Mother Earth, or animals. Seeing these characters as non-human demands from the audience the willingness to suspend their disbelief in order to perceive difference in anthropomorphic forms of representation.

  • 1 All CCTA plays of the years 2015 and 2019 are unpublished manuscripts at this point; thus, no page (...)

9It is difficult to create truly evocative and potentially perception-changing strangeness through, for instance, short plays in which a woman wearing a white coat embodies the last polar bear on this planet or in which a single bee presents itself as a spokesperson, or rather, spokes-insect for its species. The difficulty resides in the fact that these animals-played-by-humans assume verbal aesthetics derived from human contexts and human codes of self-expression. Thus, in Lenora Champagne’s “Interview with a Polar Bear” (2015), a polar bear named Priscilla speaks rather poetically, using numerous assonances and alliterations, and ultimately transforms into a constellation in the night sky.1 The lyrical qualities of her utterances and her ascension into the firmament may be intended to trigger a sense of awe and nostalgia. By contrast, in Mindi Dickstein’s “Starving to Death in Midtown” (2015), a bee addresses the audience as a representative of its “people,” paraphrases a newspaper report on a scientific paper that analyzes the plight of bees dying of various poisons, and primarily spouts sarcastically inflected jargon related to imperialism and warfare, referring to objects that bees “colonize” and to their “massive, soul-sucking suicide mission.” Ultimately, the somewhat heroic but simultaneously doomed vociferous insect eventually self-identifies as “the last bee standing.” Whether nostalgia or humor actually achieve the desired effect on the audience will presumably depend on how each short performance is contextualized. At the very least, the anthropomorphic physical appearance and language encourage viewers to draw parallels to human suffering.

10One strategy to avert responses that restrict themselves to nostalgia or laughter is self-reflexive drama. In Jessica Litwak’s “The Narcissism of Small Differences” (2018), the shortness of the mini play is echoed in the situation on stage: in the first half of the scene, an environmentalist is given three minutes to plead the case for two dying species in front of a disgruntled and fatalistic representative of the destructive capitalist economic system. The brevity of the presentation implicitly comments on the time constraints of CCTA plays in contrast to the vastness of the problem they address. The environmentalist’s futile plea also contrasts with the second section of the scene, which presents a dialogue between two endangered animals. Having concluded that humans “think we are not like them” (Litwak 191), the animals decide that they will set out to convince humans otherwise by spreading scientific knowledge, by fostering empathy with suffering animals, and by promoting new ways of seeing. Thus, the onus of raising awareness and of suggesting new sensory imaginaries is on the endangered creatures themselves who assume agency in cross-species communication for the sake of the common good.

11A rather innovative approach to addressing alienation strategies is central to Elaine Ávila’s “The Rookery: A Play for Steller Sea Lions” (2019). Both speaking characters are sea lions, but one—Brunhilda—has grown up and lives in the wild, whereas the other one—Sitka—was raised by humans and has been trained so that she can be used for research purposes. Whereas Sitka has a “weird . . . accent” and has never learned how to hunt for her own sustenance, she is aware of the dangers of plastics in the ocean and understands what human researchers are trying to do in order to rescue wild seals who are threatened by suffocation. Sitka’s liminal position of not knowing enough about the ways of seals in the wild and of knowing enough about humans to appreciate how they care for her effectively troubles categories of ostensibly given or at least stable naturalness and belonging as much as it softens the human–animal boundary. In terms of performance, a character like Sitka, the human-trained research-assistant seal, certainly encourages recipients to look beyond anthropomorphism and reductive dichotomies.

12Significantly, the CCTA 2019 corpus also includes Katie Pearl’s “Earth’s Blue Heart” which argues in favor of reading indigenous fishing rights not primarily as a matter of ownership and economics but rather as an ontological issue. Rejecting a solely market-oriented approach to fishing rights, the nameless characters promote a sense of cross-species relationality that they jointly experience once they have arrived in the symbolic core of Planet Earth. This relational focus is not, however, presented as emotional and philosophical only. It rather leads to the conclusion that “[h]ope is not something you feel, it’s something you do.” As a result, even a sense of ontological oneness with creation must be coupled with action if it is to propel the characters towards the future.

Forms of Dialogue

13In the CCTA plays discussed here and in tune with Meyer’s concept of “resonance” as a crucial factor in effective climate change communication through the arts, some plays focus on everyday communicative situations. Contemplating climate change communication and its desired impact on perception and behavior frequently relies on everyday constellations such as one-on-one conversations of two dramatic characters or, simulating the possibility of communicative exchange, monologues by a dramatic character with explicit references to audience members as specifically defined types of addressees. Thus, various plays present friends, lovers, or family members who, at first, are at odds with one another regarding a plan of action or inaction when contemplating climate change. More often than not, such scenes end with the shared resolution to become active together, thus confirming that activism works better if one has associates pursuant of the same goals.

  • 2 Similarly, Joan Lipkin’s “About That Chocolate Bar . . .” (2019) stages a surreal dialogue between (...)

14In contrast to optimistic calls for activism based on shared perceptions and social interdependence, Andrea Lepcio’s “Alone” (2015) juxtaposes an unnamed “Woman” who represents the socioeconomic status of the “1%” with disembodied “Voices” that partially echo her words or ask questions which indicate that they have given up the fight.2 This scene counteracts any murkily romanticized notions of community-building by claiming that this particular one-percenter mainly enjoys the relative safety of her isolation on both “high” and “dry” ground, and that her sense of entitlement shields her from feeling compassion or responsibility towards those who may be drowning in an unspecified realm of climate change-induced environmental disaster.

15In Chantal Bilodeau’s “Homo Sapiens” (2018), two representatives of more evolved humanoids stare at, comment on, and try to touch and feed the homines sapientes in the audience while observing them like rare animals exhibited in a zoo. The closing soliloquy of one of these more highly developed humans acknowledges the weirdness of looking at one’s own future or past (depending on the direction of the gaze) and consolingly adds that homines sapientes probably tried their best but were nevertheless wiped out, as predicted in Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2014 non-fiction monograph The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. In Bilodeau’s short play, audience members vicariously experience their transformation into members of a species that has lost out and is anything but powerful. The sensory form of pushing this awareness, then, is the alienating situation of encountering “humans” of a different kind and time frame while also becoming the observed rather than the observer.

16The illusion of communication in dialogue becomes clear in Brian Dykstra’s “Two Voices” (2019), a short piece of Spoken Word poetry that begins with a fifty-line solo by “First Voice” and subsequently alternates between “First Voice” and “Second Voice.” These alternating voices do not respond to one another. Instead, each one speaks a coherent text that evolves parallel to the other speaker’s text. This implicitly demands from listeners that they can process two verbal tracks by oscillating between them. In the final fifth of the scene, the voices come together by jointly speaking five verses and then enunciating lines that intersect closely in their trajectory, if not necessarily syntactically. Whereas before the set of five shared lines the “Second Voice” was decidedly more pessimistic than the “First Voice” and more dismissive of humans’ capacity to change for the better, the closing of the short play has both voices encourage activism.

17This same shift from contrasting perspectives to a shared determination to “[b]e revolutionaries” is also at the core of Bilodeau’s “It Starts with Me” (2019), albeit with a completely different method. Unnamed actors speak various lines by unnamed “Single Voice[s]” as well as “Multiple Voices,” repeating “[i]t starts with me!” and presenting an avalanche of causal sub-clauses (“Because . . .”). Eventually, each repetition of “[i]t starts with me!” and of “[m]e!” is accompanied by an emphatic “stomp.” After a silent caesura, a “Single Voice” articulates: “It starts with me / Because without me there is no salvation for anyone / or the planet,” and the scene concludes with the actors and—if deemed appropriate—audience members exchanging hugs. The emotional build-up merges a focus on the individual as the point of departure for action with a focus on community building around the data-driven awareness of the situation of women all over the globe. Similar to the permeable zone connecting different states of being, Dykstra and Bilodeau transfer the discursive activity and, by implication, the power of the dramatic voices to the audience in order to create activism-oriented momentum.

18The dialogues in these CCTA plays range from intimate conversations between twenty-first-century human earthlings to vistas of our own extinction as perceived from the future, via depictions of an ecological divide. Furthermore, dialogues depict simultaneously evolving discourses which only intersect aurally during the experience of the play. They also break the fourth-wall illusion and elicit participatory mechanisms for the sake of encouraging a sense of responsibility that can spark activism. These dramatic pieces thus already offer glimpses of the ways in which climate change plays negotiate the relations among the local, the regional, and the global, and how they address climate change as an issue in community formation.

Local, Regional, Global: Settings and Scales

19Applying René Dubos’s slogan “Think Globally, Act Locally” (qtd. in Di Chiro 206) to climate change drama makes us think about possible settings. Which types of settings are the most appropriate ones, if a play is to create resonance through depicting everyday social situations, to change perceptions, to de-naturalize engrained ways of seeing and understanding, and to inspire activism? How can a short play effectively address a global phenomenon as well as its local impacts in five minutes?

20Giovanna Di Chiro argues that awareness of multiple coexisting scales and of their competing perceptive frames can encourage holistic, non-anthropocentric perspectives in which Planet Earth, all living beings, and all elements (like air and water) are considered (204). By thinking in a “multiscalar” (206) way, she argues, we can overcome the limits of old-fashioned sustainability thinking. Thus, as encapsulated in ecocritic Ursula Heise’s notion of a “sense of planet,” Di Chiro explains, “we need to develop such a scale-crossing environmental consciousness in order to reduce or prevent global catastrophes like climate change” (206). Such thinking can lead to what she dubs “grassroots ecocosmopolitanism” (207)—a phrase that redefines cosmopolitanism as a descriptor of the pleasure travels of the rich. Its new meaning refers to multiscalar, simultaneously local and global, inherently intersectional thinking (Di Chiro 207).

21These concepts merge in Bilodeau’s monologue “Mother” (2015), in which a physically suffering Mother Earth addresses humankind as her offspring with whom she wants to re-establish an empathy-based relationship. Mother Earth contrasts the coincidental evolution of human beings with their characteristic of being strong-willed “beasts” full of hubris; she hints at how the immense age of the Earth reduces the era of humanity’s existence to a “geological flicker.” Thus, the Anthropocene is dwarfed by the evocation of a much more extensive scale. The solution that Mother Earth envisions is that humanity and Planet Earth should not be perceived as separate entities, but as forming an undivided household. Thus, this short monologue addresses scales of time and space that need to be perceived interdependently and simultaneously; in the process, Mother Earth aims at de-naturalizing dichotomies and perception-based practices in order to re-instate harmonious interrelations within the ecosystem.

22Another method of multiscalar thinking which occurs in several CCTA plays is to address the links between, on the one hand, anthropogenic climate change and, on the other hand, the abundance or lack of water in different locations. As Sze has claimed regarding fiction that addresses water-related conflicts in the California Central Valley and around the US-Mexican border, water rights are tightly linked with environmental justice issues that reveal intersectional fault lines, many of which were caused by neoliberal economic structures (“Boundaries” 132, 138, 140-42). Two performance pieces in the CCTA corpora pinpoint the centrality of water by selecting a private bathroom as a setting in order to present the clash between limited natural resources and the demands that Western civilization and its lifestyle make on water supplies and water usage in residential areas. On top of that, both pieces raise ethical questions regarding access, empathy, sharing, and survival.

23In Olivier Mayer’s pantomimed scene entitled “Water” (2015), a man comes home from work. He can neither wash his hands nor flush the toilet for lack of running water. He drinks some beer, and then repurposes his beverage for hand-washing—but not for flushing. When he manages to coax a single drop of water out of the faucet into a glass, he resists the urge to drink it and rather waters a plant with it. Cross-species empathy extending from human to plant is thus presented as a nutshell solution.

24By contrast, Arthur Kopit’s “Where Has All the Water Gone?” (2015) is set in an exaggeratedly luxurious bathroom in a Bel Air mansion. The titular allusion to the anti-war song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” (a song that began its career with Pete Seeger’s 1955 version and went through various expansions) implicitly calls to mind the drastic conflicts produced by the economics and politics of access to water. It thus may prepare audiences for the satirical bent of this one-man show, in which communication takes the form of a telephone conversation with a call-center employee located far, far away from the Bel Air setting.

25The protagonist’s sense of entitlement, of having “earned” the right to use and waste as much water as he wants, culminates in two potentially perception-changing details. First, the protagonist admittedly has no understanding of the decidedly underprivileged circumstances in which the person at the other end of the telephone line lives and simply insists on his own superior right to an essential, life-giving service like running water. Secondly, the desperate protagonist realizes that he cannot even commit suicide by swallowing a handful of pills because he does not have water to wash them down. Rather than suffocating, though, he decides to cough up the pills and go on living.

26More importantly, Kopit’s depiction of water as an essential necessity effectively evokes issues of environmental justice in which, for instance, the protracted impact of contaminated water on human populations is analogous to the long-term perspective needed to grasp climate change (Sze, “Boundaries” 132, 138, 140). As Sze writes,

[i]n crossing political boundaries, water symbolizes the contested politics and the geographic and cultural spaces between nations and communities that hold vastly unequal power. Water also represents complex forms of violence as a result of large-scale economic development and the cultural changes this development ushers in . . . (132)

27She continues,

[l]ike Wilson’s notion of “slow death” in discussing climate change . . . the persistent patterns of water contamination and destruction are not accidental but instead endemic and embedded in systems of exploitation, heightened in an era of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism idealizes market and capital, and consumer subjectivities over that of communitarian notions of belonging or justice. (142)

28Thus, even a scene set in a fictional bathroom can evoke large-scale interdependent predicaments and encourage changed perceptions about these predicaments and their implications.

An Aesthetics of Multiscalar Temporal Conciseness

29In his introduction to the conference proceedings of the 2002 annual convention of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English (CDE), Jochen Achilles comments on the conference theme, “Global Challenges and Regional Responses in Contemporary Drama in English”:

The conference . . . addressed the tensions and interrelations between globalizing and localizing tendencies in contemporary drama, between the economic and political drive towards uni(formi)ty and standardization on the one hand and, on the other, the resistance to such homogenization by specific regional, ethnic, gender or social groups . . . (9)

30Achilles also calls to mind Fredric Jameson’s arguments “that there are two major aspects of globalization which tend to collapse into each other and yet form dialectic contradictions, namely, the economic and the cultural aspect” (12) and that the rhetoric of globalization may oscillate between, reveal, and hide its economic or cultural implications.

31Nearly two decades later, we find ourselves in an era in which the corpus of climate change drama and theater is continuously expanding. At the same time, the gamut from local to global concerns has evolved into a growing awareness of the necessity to consider narrow and broad perspectives simultaneously as well as in all of their intersectional and, indeed, cross-species facets. Di Chiro’s “multiscalar” approach facilitates discussing climate change communication through theater as a form of artistic activism that fosters a sense of “ecocosmopolitanism” and thus links socioeconomics, environmental justice, and a call for activism. Boundary-crossings transcend the traditional triad of intersectionality by replacing anthropocentrism with a posthuman planetary outlook which requires recalibrating our definition of community.

32In this sense, climate change dramas like the ones discussed here enact what Rancière has described as being characteristic of the political: “Politics breaks with the sensory self-evidence of the ‘natural’ order that destines specific individuals and groups to occupy positions of rule or of being ruled, assigning them to private or public lives, pinning them down to a certain time and space, to specific ‘bodies,’ that is, to specific ways of being, seeing and saying” (139). By dissolving the dividing lines between the human and the non-human, between the powerful and the oppressed, and between the performers and the viewers/listeners, the brief climate change dramas of CCTA strive to de-naturalize socially constructed norms and to closely align theater aesthetics and ethics. They thus promote a new sense of community and belonging that acknowledges interdependence and multiscalar perception, and that situates the materially and sensorily elusive predicament of climate change within the social—ranging from the inner sanctum of a private home to the shared planet as a whole.

33In which sense, then, does the shortness of the CCTA plays contribute to making these plays trigger a sense of social community in a specific performance ecology? In her provocative monograph on how a new kind of formalism can allow scholars of literature and culture to grasp aesthetic and social/political forms simultaneously, Caroline Levine muses about the “affordances” of specific forms, namely, about their “particular constraints and possibilities . . . and the fact that . . . patterns and arrangements carry their affordances with them as they move across time and space” (6). In order to make it possible to perform the CCTA plays in a potentially unlimited number of locations (“across . . . space”), each respective set of the fifty plays would have to offer enough variety to accommodate the environments and communities in which they would potentially be presented. Audiences anywhere might possibly agree that the central affordance of five-minute plays is their time limit. And this brings us back to Levine’s interest in reading aesthetic and political forms simultaneously: She argues that studying “social models of institutional time” (66), such as conventions regarding business hours or the academic calendar, facilitates understanding the competition between different time regimes as well as their malleability in the long run.

34Minimalist art forms are a case in point. Detractors of very short plays have criticized them as insufficient in depth and development. In contrast, promoters have argued that “[t]he thinner the realistic slice of life, the more easily we see through it and catch glimmers of abstract or existential concerns” (Muse 9), and that “[w]hether microdramas cram proportionally more information into less time, or leave so much unsaid that they force spectators to supplement the play with their imaginations, they often demand concentrated and consistent attention” (13). Both the emphasis on matters of survival and the appeal to intensely focused engagement within a short time span apply to the short performance pieces discussed here. While they strive to be adaptable in the sense that the playwrights are encouraged to write with an unfathomable variety of sociopolitical performance contexts of local organizers in mind, the CCTA plays are also geared towards using climate change as the thematic point of departure for creating a sense of community—sharing the local/regional/global predicament and assuming responsibility for one’s actions.

Top of page

Bibliography

Achilles, Jochen. “Global Challenges and Regional Responses in Contemporary Drama in English: An Introduction.” Global Challenges and Regional Responses in Contemporary Drama in English. Eds. Jochen Achilles, Ina Bergmann and Birgit Däwes. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2003. 9-27. Print.

Arons, Wendy, and Theresa J. May. Readings in Performance and Ecology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print.

Ávila, Elaine. “The Rookery: A Play for Steller Sea Lions.” Unpublished manuscript, CCTA 2019.

Balestrini, Nassim. “Cli-fi Drama and Performance.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 62.1 (2017): 114-20. Print.

Bilodeau, Chantal. “Homo Sapiens.” Where Is the Hope? An Anthology of Short Climate Change Plays. Ed. Chantal Bilodeau. [Toronto]: The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, 2018. 86-90. Print.

---. “It Starts with me.” Unpublished manuscript, CCTA 2019.

---. “Mother.” Unpublished manuscript, CCTA 2015.

---, ed. Where Is the Hope? An Anthology of Short Climate Change Plays. [Toronto]: The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, 2018. Print.

Champagne, Lenora. “Interview with a Polar Bear.” Unpublished manuscript, CCTA 2015.

Chaudhuri, Una, and Shonni Enelow. “Theorizing Ecocide: The Theatre of Eco-cruelty.” Research Theatre, Climate Change, and the Ecocide Project: A Casebook. Eds. Una Chaudhuri and Shonni Enelow. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print.

CCTA 2015. Web. 22 July 2019.

CCTA 2017. Web. 22 July 2019.

Di Chiro, Giovanna. “Climate Justice Now!: Imagining Grassroots Ecocosmopolitanism.” American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship: Thinking and Acting in the Local and Global Commons. Eds. Joni Adamson and Kimberly N. Ruffin. New York: Routledge, 2012. 205-19. Print.

Dickstein, Mindi. “Starving to Death in Midtown.” Unpublished manuscript, CCTA 2015.

Dykstra, Brian. “Two Voices.” Unpublished manuscript, CCTA 2019.

Gray, Nelson. “The Dwelling Perspective in English-Canadian Drama.” Greening the Maple: Canadian Ecocriticism in Context. Eds. Ella Soper and Nicholas Bradley. Calgary: U of Calgary P, 2013. 511-26. Print.

Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

Johns-Putra, Adeline. “Climate Change in Literature and Literary Studies: From Cli-Fi, Climate Change Theater and Ecopoetry to Ecocriticism and Climate Change Criticism.” WIREs Climate Change 7.2 (April/March 2016). Web. 22 July 2019.

Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York: Henry Holt, 2014. Print.

Kopit, Arthur. “Where Has All the Water Gone?” Unpublished manuscript, CCTA 2015.

Leikam, Susanne, and Julia Leyda, eds. “What’s in a Name?”: Cli-fi and American Studies. Extended Forum. Amerikastudien/American Studies 62.1 (2017): 109-38. Print.

Lepcio, Andrea. “Alone.” Unpublished manuscript, CCTA 2015.

Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2015. Print.

“Lighting the Way.” CCTA. Web. 22 July 2019.

Lipkin, Joan. “About That Chocolate Bar . . .” Unpublished manuscript, CCTA 2019.

Litwak, Jessica. “The Narcissism of Small Differences.” Where Is the Hope? An Anthology of Short Climate Change Plays. Ed. Chantal Bilodeau. [Toronto]: The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, 2018. 186-92. Print.

Löschnigg, Maria, and Melanie Braunecker. Green Matters: Ecocultural Functions of Literature. Amsterdam: Brill, forthcoming. Print.

Mayer, Olivier. “Water.” Unpublished manuscript, CCTA 2015.

Mayer, Sylvia. “Risk Narratives: Climate Change, the American Novel, and the World Risk Society.” America After Nature: Democracy, Culture, Environment. Eds. Catrin Gersdorf and Juliane Braun. Heidelberg: Winter, 2016. 97-118. Print.

Meyer, John M. “Denialism versus the Resonance Dilemma in the US.” America After Nature: Democracy, Culture, Environment. Eds. Catrin Gersdorf and Juliane Braun. Heidelberg: Winter, 2016. 66-82. Print.

Muse, John H. Microdramas: Crucibles for Theater and Time. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2017. Print.

Nixon, Rob. “Slow Violence, Gender, and the Environmentalism of the Poor.” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 13.2-14.1 (2006-2007): 14-37. Web. 25 July 2019.

Pearl, Katie. “Earth’s Blue Heart.” Unpublished manuscript, CCTA 2019.

Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Ed. and trans. Stephen Corcoran. London: Continuum, 2010. Print.

Sze, Julie. “Boundaries of Violence: Water, Gender, and Development in Context.” American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship: Thinking and Acting in the Local and Global Commons. Eds. Joni Adamson and Kimberly N. Ruffin. New York: Routledge, 2012. 131-43. Print.

---. “Environmental Justice and Environmental Humanities in the Anthropocene.” America After Nature: Democracy, Culture, Environment. Eds. Catrin Gersdorf and Braun. Heidelberg: Winter, 2016. 83-96. Print.

Top of page

Notes

1 All CCTA plays of the years 2015 and 2019 are unpublished manuscripts at this point; thus, no page numbers can be provided. The author would like to thank playwright and CCTA co-founder Chantal Bilodeau for granting access to both corpora.

2 Similarly, Joan Lipkin’s “About That Chocolate Bar . . .” (2019) stages a surreal dialogue between a woman living on Earth in the present and a Spirit representing the Amazon River as a cocoa-producing region.

Top of page

References

Bibliographical reference

Nassim Winnie Balestrini, “Anthropogenic Climate Change Condensed: Creating Community in Very Short Plays”Journal of the Short Story in English, 73 | 2019, 121-134.

Electronic reference

Nassim Winnie Balestrini, “Anthropogenic Climate Change Condensed: Creating Community in Very Short Plays”Journal of the Short Story in English [Online], 73 | Autumn 2019, Online since 01 December 2021, connection on 16 April 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/2795

Top of page

About the author

Nassim Winnie Balestrini

Nassim Winnie Balestriniis Professor of American Studies and Intermediality at the University of Graz, Austria, and Director of the Centre for Intermediality Studies in Graz (CIMIG). Her publications and research interests include American literature and culture, adaptation and intermedial relations (as in her monograph From Fiction to Libretto: Irving, Hawthorne, and James as Opera, 2005, and in the edited volume Adaptation and American Studies, 2011), life writing across media (as in the essay collection Intermediality, Life Writing, and American Studies, 2018, edited with Ina Bergmann), intermedial hip-hop culture, climate change theater, US-American and Canadian theater and performance, contemporary poetry, and the poet laureate traditions in the United States and in Canada.

Top of page

Copyright

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

Top of page
Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search