6. Expand course offerings and community engagement opportunities. 

The commitment to ecological thought and environmental stewardship may also mean that a range of new and established ecological and post-dramatic forms—from site-responsive performance to more immersive, durational and participatory performance with eco-dramaturgical and eco-scenographic approaches—gain greater traction within programs, inspiring other shifts in pedagogical approaches (towards land-based learning, for example) to curriculum and production away from Eurocentric theatre practices and towards expanded opportunities for transdisciplinary study in context-responsive and collaborative practice with communities. The “Who Survives? Who Decides?” project at Cornell University offers an inspiring example of community-based plays about climate change while teaching students about living newspapers, story circles, devising practices, and facilitation of post-show community conversations. Similarly, the University of the Fraser Valley has embedded the Climate Change Theatre Action festival, presented in conjunction with the biannual United Nation Climate Change Talks, into their biannual seasonal programming, and rooted it in course offerings in movement, digital performance, and acting skills for work and life. These projects illustrate how existing core courses like acting for everyday life, applied theatre and theatre for social change can be approached in ways that bring together community members and students from a wide range of disciplines.

While for some, systemic changes of this nature might feel like the collapse of established ways of working and making, shifts away from existing core curriculum and normalized practices could be more generously and generatively seen as decompositional. Decomposition, as Annalisa Dias has pointed out, is a natural process, ultimately part of a healthy life cycle wherein that which has died is digested, and nutrients are recycled and released back into the ecological system to create new life.^[1]

Working group member Zhuohao Li suggested a comparative study of understandings of the body in different cultural communities, in traditional and contemporary contexts, could offer valuable insight into traditions of ecological thought. She writes, in classical Chinese philosophy, the body is regarded as a psychosomatic process. Since the body is the natural mechanism of humans, which embodies the laws of nature, and the mind develops on the basis of the natural mechanism. In order to prevent the mind from deviating from nature and losing its roots in its activities, humans must cultivate their minds and nurture their nature, and be in harmony with nature, that is, return to nature so that the mind and its activities do not deviate from the foundation of perceptual life. Thus, self-cultivation has become a fundamental project for one’s whole life, no matter for Daoist tradition, Confucius teaching, Buddist influence, or the intermingling of  the three pertaining to the conception of the contemporary body. The core of the self-cultivation registers in the practice of shen 神 xing 形, and ti 体. Shen refers to one’s entire psychosomatic person 身  and “spirit” 神. It also means “to stretch out” or “to extend” 伸. Such a performance course – or lecture / workshop series – on the psychosomatic understanding of the body in nature from Chinese classic philosophy would in turn foreground culturally-specific dimensions of dis-connecting with environment and ecology. As Roger T. Ames summarized, a person is seen as an “extending” or “presencing,” having correlation to the physical and spiritual.^[2] The early notion of  body is xing 形, which refers to the form or shape— the three dimensional disposition or configuration of the human process. The most revealing aspect of ti 体 usually correlates to ritual action li 礼. Both body (ti) and ritual action (li) are frequently defined by the character ti 体, meaning order in the sense of “sequence” or “arrangement.”^[3] Therefore, the Chinese conception of body is integrally related to the fundamental project – cultivating oneself xiu shen 修身. Through the practice of ritual, the playing of music, the writing of calligraphy, and the composition of literature, the body realizes its unified nature, and conversely conducts its behavior in accordance with the natural world. Such a performance course – or lecture / workshop series – on the psychosomatic understanding of the body in nature from Chinese classic philosophy would in turn foreground culturally-specific dimensions of dis-connecting with environment and ecology.