Internal barriers

Who educates the educators? Addressing internal barriers to change

In 2012, Bill Moskin and Katie Oman argued for environmental sustainability in the arts, pointing out that the arts “have not cohesively addressed environmental sustainability and its benefits, responsibilities, and opportunities for their communities.”^[1] A similar claim could be made about most theatre and performance training institutions in Canada today, despite calls for more ecologically-sound theatre since the 1990s.^[2] While individual eco-conscious theatremakers and educators have interwoven ecocritical and sustainable approaches to their core courses, and developed boutique upper-division courses in theatre and performance studies engaging the emerging field of eco-critical theatre criticism (see Appendix 4), structural changes to post-secondary theatre production, pedagogy and curriculum have only recently begun to emerge.^[3] This is not surprising in a landscape where educators might not have the environmental and climate literacy to navigate the complexities of sustainable theatre and performance practice and theory. And yet, as Ian Garrett notes, the formative years of training in universities, colleges, and other institutions establish the values that guide students’ future professional practice.^[4] Paul Brunner and Michael Mehler also note that academic settings can be “sites for experimentation that ease the burden of design and production for commercial and nonprofit theatres” (30).^[5]

A coordinated department-level commitment to sustainability, with time and financial support to support professional development and engagement with existing resources is necessary. Thus, we face a paradox: if an apprentice-style transfer of established practices is a core approach to many of our training programs, and relatively few members of the existing educational workforce know how to bring sustainability to practice, future theatre professionals will be trained into a system which “in certain aspects, is becoming obsolete.”^[6] Equally troublesome is Garrett’s observation that the opportunities to critically explore novel methods of production tend to diminish once working in the field.^[7] A coordinated department-level commitment to sustainability, with time and financial support to support professional development and engagement with existing resources is necessary.

In her review of the role of performing arts education in fostering sustainable theatre, Iphigenia Taxopoulou advises “educating the educators, creating dedicated positions for sustainability experts in academic institutions, and facilitating the sharing and exchange of existing educational tools and resources.”^[8] Valuable professional development activities could range from individualized learning around carbon literacy and different kinds of ecological thinking – from concerns about environmental degradation, resource depletion, toxic pollution and human health and well-being to ideas of circularity, cradle-to-cradle design, fossil-fuel dependency, decarbonization, systems thinking, degrowth, and sustainability as an intergenerational justice–to participation in the Creative Climate Leadership program (spearheaded by the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts) to departmental engagements with Creative Green Tools (CG Tooles) and workshops with Éco-scéno and the Canadian Green Alliance. Initiatives that simultaneously increase knowledge in environmentally sustainable arts practice and contribute to the ongoing work of decolonization and Indigenization are commendable.

On the one hand, fostering an ethos of environmental stewardship within theatrical training programs will require re-imagining the pedagogical purpose of sustainable performance. As Moskin and Oman note, “Taking action on environmental sustainability demands new ways of thinking and requires overcoming the inertia of the way things have always been done. Cultivating environmental literacy and implementing new or different activities are often seen as additional burdens, and as secondary to the support of existing organizational missions.”^[9] Negative perceptions about sustainable theatre being expensive, boring, time-consuming, and incompatible with high-quality aesthetics have been identified as contributing to environmental complacency.^[10] This is partly why Beer notes that ecological action needs to be “innovative, stimulating and deeply creative;” so practitioners will embrace “new ways of thinking that will overturn existing and intrinsically unsustainable modes of practice.”^[11]

This is not an easy task as it requires many of us to hold up our aesthetic preferences–like for spectacle and decadence–for examination alongside their ecological consequences and, in turn, face our perceived entitlements, and to engage our colleagues and collaborators in these difficult conversations that may involve feelings of loss. As the authors of After Oil assert, “Some of the challenges involved in intentional transition can be grasped by considering just one of its many dimensions: shifts in how desire is coordinated by and in relation to the use of fossil fuels.”^[12] A key part of this transformation, then, is around revising the aesthetic values of artistic creation, and how these shape audiences’ and students’ expectations of what they see and participate in.

On the other hand, there are many ways in which theatrical pedagogy is already preoccupied by the environmental and ecological, even if these concerns have yet to be framed as in relation to environmental stewardship and climate justice work. Theatre history and criticism is already concerned with relations between humans, other-than-human beings and environmental contexts.^[13] Educators who teach in this area are likely already prompting their students to pose questions regarding these relationships in the context of our time, yet they may not have framed the resulting conversations through an ecodramaturgical lens.^[14] The work of integrating environmental stewardship into theatrical education is not only a concern for those who teach pre-professional or community-engaged practice. Re-imagining the critical and historical areas of our field are also key to transformation.