GREENARTS

The collective experience of the pandemic made climate change more visible and tangible than ever: the urgency to tackle it from all sectors of society has stepped up and the arts and culture are no exception. In the field of the performing arts, artists, producers, and decision-makers are currently dealing not only with the sector’s pre-existent shortcomings but also trying to renegotiate the relationship with our planetary host (Latour, 2017). ‘Greening' the performing arts has become, thus, an expanding area of action, debate, and research.

The project GREENARTS will look into the transformations that such a colossal change as the one forecast by the green transition can bring into the performing arts.

In that quest towards the green transition, the arts have mostly been challenged to take on the role of raising awareness around the severity of the climate crisis, given that their ability to tell stories, to offer narratives which “make complex relationships between entangled (eco)systems understandable” (Skolczylas,2021:6) is increasingly confirmed by behavioural scientists (Banerjee and Shreedhar, 2021). On that account, this storytelling capacity has been the main case of advocacy campaigns, where culture is often portrayed as “the missing link to climate action” (Julie’s Bicycle, 2021).

However, the majority of the current initiatives, as well as the corresponding literature dealing with sustainability arising in the field of theatre/performance studies consistently display a number of vulnerabilities:

(a) they are more angled towards arts institutions (adaptations of cultural buildings or festivals) than towards independent artistic creation and production (Skolczylas, 2021: 9);

(b) they uphold pragmatic approaches but lack conceptual clarification and reflective analysis;

(c) they are mainly focused on the theatrical form itself, either paying attention to the different expressions and interpretative possibilities of anecologically self-aware theatre or underlining the power of the arts narratives, but not so much on changing the arts’ modes of production.

Diversely, GREENARTS argues that in this ‘theatre of ecology’ paradigm, theatrical experiments which are environmentally conscious should also be explored in terms of their specific modes of production. Whereas ‘thematic’ and ‘aesthetic/eco-poetic’ approaches (Sermon, 2017) remain indispensable, our research points to the need to critically address ‘operational ecology’ (Bilabel, 2021), i.e., elements such as scale, budget, material resources, touring plans, set design, travel or institutional relationships. Building on our previous research on the critical position of creative producers and arts managers in the modi operandi of the performing arts (Rodrigues, 2022), we posit that the ‘pragmatic’ aspects of artistic production are not, in fact, devoid of aesthetic implications (Sermon, 2017:12) - artistic creation and the production/managerial elements are profoundly interdependent (Rodrigues, 2021; Sampaio, 2020, Kay, 2014) -, hence the relevance of considering ecology materially and not only metaphorically (May, 2005:86).

Moreover, GREENARTS claims that the articulation between theatrical production and ecological requirements is more than an end in itself. It aims to explore whether the transition towards an eco-responsible paradigm – and the incorporation of concepts such ecodramaturgy and green production - can be imaginatively translated into creative production and arts management practices and to what extent can it even potentially accelerate the rise of new professions.

WEBSITE