Appendix 3: Workshop insights

Insights from the “Ecologize Your Syllabi” Workshop

As part of our working group’s event Re-Imagining the Future: A Teach-in on Fostering Environmental Stewardship in Theatre and Performance Education, we held a series of workshops called “Ecologize Your Syllabi.” Inspired by movements to “decolonize the syllabus,”^[1] we gathered with educators from across the country to brainstorm ways to incorporate principles and practices of environmental stewardship into our participants’ classroom syllabi. The full notes and resources guides from these workshops can be found at: https://catracrt.ca/resources/environmental-theatre-resources/.

The workshops were clustered into four subject areas: Acting, Directing/Devising, New Play Development, and Theory & Theatre History.

The Acting workshop participants discussed the importance of integration and resistance. There is a need to integrate sustainability even if it is not the topic of a course, as well as integrating other departments supporting the department productions (i.e. design and production). In terms of resistance, how to counter or navigate this in students was explored, as well as resistance as a cultural practice. One offer was to lean into imagination in performance. Syllabi components suggested included:

• a climate acknowledgement as well as a land acknowledgement or a sustainability statement/commitment;
• incorporating ways to connect with community outside of the campus; room agreements with ecological frameworks and specifics on how to do it;
• ecological traditions from other cultural backgrounds; use of plays such as 100 Plays to Save the World, What We Do For Love, Climate Change Theatre Action anthologies;
• working outside with Elders;
• land tour with Indigenous organization to start off a class and situate students in the location;
• and other ways of working outdoors.

Finally, some suggested next steps were to create a green rider for actors and directors (using the one that already exists for designers as a model) and sharing resources (like examples of a sustainability statement or climate acknowledgement on course outlines).

In the Directing/Devising workshop, participants considered the question: What would it mean to teach students to direct any/all work with an ecotheatre/ecodramaturgical frame? This group considered the different challenges and opportunities that arise from modeling directing practices (when instructors direct students) and teaching directing as a craft (when students direct one another). Three recurrent opportunities emerged, wherein directing can be understood as the analysis/enforcement of power, positionality, and perspective. Directing and devising coursework can be an opportunity for students to identify intra-human and inter-species hierarchy, interrogate how cultural knowledge guides their modes of storytelling, and experiment with different ways of aestheticizing relationships. Valuing our more-than-human relations must extend beyond representation on the stage – student directors also need opportunities to practice discussing environmental stewardship with actors, designers, technicians, and producers.

The New Play development workshop began with a grounding breathing exercise and an invitation to imagine a place that was important to each participant with an emphasis on the sensorial experience of that place. This followed with a prompt to use that place and manifest it in movement, writing, drawing or any other form. They then introduced Holly Derr’s “Addressing Environmental Topics in Theatre by Using Greenturgy” Howlround, January 2018, which includes these questions:

• What is the broader environment of our works, whether manifested onstage or not?
• What are the parallels between the natural world of the play and where the play is being produced?
• What are the environmental impacts of the choices made by characters, intentional, anticipated or otherwise?
• What are the connections, literal and metaphorical, between the natural world of our plays and the various natural worlds of our audience?

Participants discussed a number of other resources that demonstrate playwrights invested in answering Greenturgy questions.^[2] These resources model how playwrights and dramaturgy can take into account diverse ecological metaphors, improvisation techniques, mutual aid practices and Indigenous ecological thought while crafting story.

Finally, in the Theory & Theatre workshop, participants considered the question: What are the pros of teaching theatre history through an ecocritical approach that considers nature and its staging at the centre of our current experience? Ideas included:

1. Introduce and apply ecological thinking and aesthetics to the study of theatre history.
2. Situate place and placeness at the centre of an historical discourse about theatre.
3. Explore how theatre has staged the natural world through plays, staging practices, theatrical theories, dramaturgies, etc.
4. Develop an awareness of how theatre embodied cultural and philosophical conceptions of the natural world through time.
5. Motivate students to draw on eco-critical approaches and aesthetics in their studies and artistic practices.
6. Locate today’s climate crisis within humans’ evolving human relationship with nature.

Ecologizing a Theatre History Syllabus (Stefano Muneroni and Selena Couture)