As climate awareness intensifies in the first decades of the twenty-first century, theatre and performance studies continues to reflect on and revise the depth of its engagement with ecology, understood broadly as the interrelationships between organisms and their environments. There is related recognition that theatre and performance are inseparable from the ‘conditions of existence’ as formulated by the nineteenth-century founder of modern ecology, Ernst Haeckel (in Stauffer Reference Stauffer1957: 140). With its origins in the ecologies of the northern hemisphere, we find it useful, even necessary, to reflect on our engagement with Euro-American ecocritical theory and criticism in order to broaden the base to include conditions in parts of the Asia Pacific. The journey to this point is worth recounting because the gradual shift from human-centred theory and criticism to ecological thinking in theatre and performance studies enables better answers to Carl Lavery’s apocryphal question: ‘What can theatre do?’ (Lavery Reference Lavery2016: 229). We propose a widening of the ‘brief’ to account for the diversity within and across countries and regions, oceans and hemispheres, which share a biosphere and weather systems but experience variations arising from geography, resources and disproportionate effects. The question becomes, ‘What can theatre do there?’ and ‘What can theatre do here?’ One of the many effects of extreme heat, for example, is a high probability of loss of livelihood and culture (IPCC Reference Lee and Romero2023: 6), as Pacific island peoples know so well.

While ecologists and climate scientists study a broad range of areas, including geophysics, conservation, biodiversity and sustainability, scholars of the humanities and creative arts examine the social, cultural, economic and political consequences of an escalating planetary crisis. The environmental humanities, for example, encompass ecocritical approaches to philosophy, history, literature and theatre and performance studies, often with an interdisciplinary orientation (Plumwood Reference Plumwood2002; Rose et al. Reference Rose2012: 2–5). The cumulative effects of visible and reported environmental phenomena have raised popular awareness that human activity has created a more dangerous world for all living species. In Australia in the 1950s, it was fear of radiation poisoning; in the 1980s, the depletion of the ozone layer. The 1990s saw the United Nations Kyoto Protocol, which raised public awareness of climate change. And in the 2000s, global warming, the accumulation of plastics and chemical waste, loss of biodiversity and unsustainable industrial production take us to a minute-and-a-half to midnight on the doomsday clock.

From Haeckel to Humanities

The nineteenth century saw early attempts to formulate a holistic or unified view of life at a general level. Zoologist and naturalist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) built on Charles Darwin’s call for the unity of existence (Haeckel 1966, in Stauffer Reference Stauffer1957: 138). As early as 1842, Darwin had theorised, ‘Let any singular change of climate (occur) here … a thousand wedges are being forced into the economy of nature’ (Darwin 1842, in Stauffer Reference Stauffer1957: 139; see also Haeckel Reference Haeckel and Lankester2018).

While we acknowledge the prejudicial composition of Haeckel’s social-Darwinistic views on humankind, he nonetheless theorised that the newly coined term Oecologie would bring together all the ‘conditions of existence’:

Haeckel’s ecology criticised how zoologists and botanists had not observed the relatedness of organisms, food sources and habitat and added greater emphasis on dynamic relations within the environment. Ecology would account for:

Haeckel’s ecology was secular and impartial, with an emphasis on the relation of organisms to the environment and continual motion in time and space.

The idea of the inalienable interface of the properties of matter would surface again in philosophy in the late twentieth century in Bruno Latour’s (Reference Lapelytė, Grainytė and Barzdžiukaitė1996) work on objects as actants and Jane Bennett’s (Reference Bennett2010) writings on the vitality and agency of nonhuman matter. Whereas Darwin’s groundbreaking concepts of natural selection, evolution and adaptation challenged both Western epistemological systems and religious doctrine, ecology began as a relatively benign term. It remained so until later in the century when, as historian Peder Anker notes, it became ‘a powerful frame for a whole set of questions from linguistics … to history … to the economy’ (Anker Reference Anker2001: 1). To that we add drama, theatre and performance.

Haeckel’s ecology now appears as a through line in the ecological turn in theatre and performance. Interpretation of the etymology of the word offers countless opportunities for symbolic connections with theatre and for parallels between the natural and theatrical worlds. Haeckel’s work provides a starting point for contemporary approaches as the momentum of the climate crisis calls for urgent action encompassing whole ecologies.

At the same time, we are attentive to the reality that ‘ecology’ is a human figuration, as if by naming the interconnection between humans and the environment, we reassert the power we assume over nature. Drawing on the etymology of Haeckel’s ecology, theatre-maker and theorist Baz Kershaw argues that the word implies ‘both “study of the house” and “study in the house” of nature’, meaning: what we do to nature, we do to ourselves (Kershaw Reference Kershaw2007: 16, italics in original). The importance of this interpretation is that metaphors such as ‘house’ matter in the way that concepts shape thinking, and dominant meanings endure until challenged. The multiple ecocritical dimensions of a theatrical performance can be attuned to demonstrating the relationality of theatre to the world. Indeed, the ‘survival of traditional drama and theatres’ depends, Kershaw points out, on whether theatre can ‘adapt’ to a changed and changing ‘environment’ (32).

Origins of Carbon Studies

Early atmospheric scientists observed that certain gases, such as carbon dioxide, were more efficient than others in absorbing and storing atmospheric heat. American scientist Eunice Foote (1819–88) was among the first to identify the mechanism whereby the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could have a warming effect on Earth’s temperature (Bell Reference Bell2024; Ortiz and Jackson Reference Ortiz and Jackson2020; Vaillant Reference Vaillant2023). In two scientific papers in 1856 and 1857, the first of which was called ‘Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays’, Foote (Reference Foote1856) theorised that ‘an atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature’. Her findings predated those of John Tyndall (1822–93), who for decades was credited with this discovery (Jackson Reference Jackson2019: 383).

In 1896, Svante Arrhenius (1859–1927) quantified the link between increased concentrations of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere and fossil fuel-powered energy production to propose that ‘future climate change’ could result. He called this phenomenon ‘the greenhouse effect’, thereby also producing a reliable metaphor for complex chemical processes (Rodhe et al. Reference Rodhe, Charlson and Crawford1997: 2). These discoveries came after James Watt had patented the steam engine, a moment that Tim Morton has described as an act of ‘world-historical’ importance and which marks ‘the inception of humanity as a geophysical force on a planetary scale’ (Morton Reference Morton2013: 7). But this is far from grandiose. The 2023 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declares that the science is now settled: ‘Continued greenhouse gas emissions will lead to increasing global warming, with the best estimate of reaching 1.5 °C in the near term’ (IPCC Reference Lee and Romero2023: 12). As the IPCC states:

The 2023 Emissions Gap Report explains that, even in the most optimistic scenario, the chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C is just 14 per cent, with various scenarios indicating a 90 per cent probability of warming between 2 °C and 3 °C by the end of the century (Gergis Reference Gergis2022: 18).

The effects of carbon emissions, rising temperatures and environmental degradation are increasingly part of ‘the infinitely complicated relations’ between organisms and the environment, not only locally but also on a global scale (Haeckel Reference Haeckel and Lankester2018). These effects challenge the supremacy of humans while also exposing the vulnerability and helplessness of all species. In theatre, an Australian playwright such as Andrew Bovell speaks on behalf of the many who perceive an ecological turn:

Since global warming is a human-created phenomenon and theatre has historically been an anthropocentric form, there is much to be learned from interrogating the dramatic representations of human interactions with, and dependence on, our environments.

Ecocriticism and Ecodramaturgy

Theatre and performance studies has been engaged with ecology for at least thirty years, since the Theater journal featured a special section on ‘Theatre and Ecology’, curated and led by Una Chaudhuri’s groundbreaking essay ‘“There Must Be a Lot of Fish in the Lake”: Toward an Ecological Theater’ (Chaudhuri Reference Chaudhuri1994). Focusing on Chekhov’s The Seagull and the play-within-a-play staged outdoors in front of a lake, Chaudhuri challenges readers and viewers to think about how the natural environment came to be used as a metaphor and backdrop for the human drama. This convention, she argues, effectively reinforces the ‘rupture between human beings and the natural environment’ (23). In the broader historical context, theatre’s human-centric naturalism and social realism concealed its ‘complicity with industrialization’s animus against nature’ (23, 24). Citing the bourgeois underpinnings of modern theatre and drama, Chaudhuri calls on scholars of theatre and performance to take a more radical stance by reviewing, rewriting and rethinking Western dramatic theatre in terms of the denial, neglect or indifference to the ecologies that sustain the natural world and on which human life is dependant.

The question of the relationship between humans and nature now animates much of the scholarship on ecology, theatre and performance. The image now is not the tranquillity of the gaze, but humankind caught out by fire or floods filled with agential power. These are no longer metaphors. The call for such a change in focus was evident in Erika Munk’s Reference Munk1994 editorial in Theater, in which she wrote that the intersection of performance and ecology is ‘a vast open field with histories to be rewritten, styles to rediscuss, contexts to reperceive’ (Munk Reference Munk1994: 5). The invitation seeped slowly into the field.

Alan Read takes up the call arguing that theatre’s content and expressive powers have capacity to stimulate deep concern for the ‘ecological deterioration’ of the Earth (Read Reference Read1995: 163). Drawing on semiotics, he contends that the interconnectedness of theatre’s sign systems makes it especially compatible with ecology’s view of the interrelatedness of the parts. In an ecocritical vein, Read cites a complex image from Peter Stein’s 1986–7 touring production of Eugene O’Neill’s 1923 play The Hairy Ape. Set on a transatlantic liner, Scene 3 begins below deck, among the ship’s furnaces and boilers. Stage directions indicate ‘a line of men, stripped to the waist, [is] before the furnace doors… [They] shovel with rhythmic motion, swinging as on a pivot from the coal which lies in heaps on the floor behind to hurl it into the flaming mouths before them’ (Read Reference Read1995: 168). Read’s discussion of the historical resonance between humans and coal draw attention to the way ‘a mineral that had provided a country with an industrial past’ and marked ‘the twilight of a declining future’ represented the coal as a nonhuman actant capable of generating meaning from the stage to the audience (169).

For a hypothetical Australian audience, aware that its country is the second-largest exporter of coal in the world, and that it continues to open new coal mines, there is much to consider. For one, the scene encapsulates mechanised human labour, out of sight below deck in the service of energy, and yet labourers need to work for a living. It can also be seen to expose the dirty secret of Australia’s continuing reliance on coal-fired power (Energy Institute 2024: 49). Expanding on Read’s example of the coal-fired boiler in relation to shipping and in combination with Latour’s thinking about a nonhuman actant, it becomes possible to interpret theatrical images, moments and constellations for their dialectical ecological resonance (see Corbett and Koehler Reference Corbett and Koehler2003; De Beukelaer Reference De Beukelaer2023).

Elinor Fuchs and Chaudhuri’s Land/Scape/Theater resists dramatic theatre’s focus on plot and character playing out in the enclosed space of a room, where the evocation of interiority is the central appeal and asset. Instead, the authors position ‘landscape’ as a ‘counter category’ that captures the spatial turn in theatre, which conceptual terms such as space and place do not quite capture (Chaudhuri Reference Chaudhuri, Fuchs and Chaudhuri2002: 2). With its origins in art history where it begins to depict human relationships with nature, by the twentieth century, they write, landscape includes ‘the multifarious interplay between the land and human adaptations to and indeed of it’ (3, italics in original). On this meaning, landscape is a critical category that captures ‘the complex spatial mediations within modern theatrical form and between modern theatre and the world’ (3). Landscape thus supports an ecological account of the interconnection between an active rather than passive environment in theatre and performance. As they argue, from the twentieth century ‘landscape held itself apart from character and became a figure on its own’ (3).

In our application, we use the term ‘land’ rather than landscape in order to account for settlers regarding Australian colonies as uncultivated – by European standards. Landscape is suggestive of European settlement, of demarcated borders and a degree of stability. In our understanding and application, land encompasses eco-performance and other hyphenated or hybrid performances that encompass the human and nonhuman in a way that makes nature more than merely inert background scenery.

Baz Kershaw’s Theatre Ecology develops an extended dialogue about theatre and performance that insists on theatre’s ‘unavoidable ecological engagement and/or disengagement’ with the environment (Kershaw Reference Kershaw2007: 10). This non-negotiable relationship produces both complexity and paradox. Theatre ecology develops a methodology by looking at ‘interrelationships between organisms and their environments’, especially their interdependence – humans included (15). Kershaw investigates ecologically derived concepts such as theatre and performance as immersed in reflexive ‘ecosystems’, including their organic and non-organic components, ranging from small to large (15–16). He suggests that phrases such as ‘ecology of the imaginary’, ‘ecological analysis’, ‘interconnections’ and the use of ‘vastly contrasting and contradictory logics’ can offer rich hermeneutics for artists and scholars (249). Perhaps, Kershaw writes with sudden modesty, the language of ecology might ‘reveal an overriding truth or two about performance’ (249–50).

In a more radical vein, towards the end of the book, Kershaw argues that ‘the primary productive purpose of theatre may be seen not as the staging of performances that represent “landscape” or “wilderness” or other constructs of “nature”, say, but the creation of spectatorship’ (306). This is not as circular or self-defeating as it might seem. If theatre can create a new kind of active, alert – even mindful – spectatorship of ecology, then that is a testament to its abiding influence. The whole complexity of applying ecology to theatre is laid out in practice and theory that remain as challenging now as then. Kershaw concludes by arguing that although performance is, by convention, beholden to social environments, the stage allows the art of performance to do its work in unsuspected ways.

Theatre director and academic Downing Cless describes ecology as a method, a science and an approach to the world that implies a critique of the nature–culture divide in favour of deep connections between nature and humanity (Cless Reference Cless2010: 4–5). He turns to Haeckel’s ecology to describe ‘a fundamental concern with a location for living and a way of life – a habitat and what goes on in it’ (3, italics in original). This conception of ecology opens a dual perspective on the interactions of independent human subjects in their private households and the illusory nature of their separation from other living and non-living matter, including plants, animals, microbes, the biosphere and light. Cless cites Val Plumwood’s conceptualisation of the ‘hyper-separation’ of humans from nature in characters who appear ‘highly sculpted in light and shadow’ and ‘set off’ from place and space (Cless Reference Cless2010: 166). Such separation can ironically express a depleted state of nature.

The coincidence of minimalist theatre setting with the degraded environment of mid twentieth-century Europe gestures, accordingly, to the alienation and denialism endemic in turbocharged industrial modernity. Cless develops an ecocritical approach that reads the lack of landscape, in the sense also developed by Fuchs and Chaudhuri, as indicative of a critique of the very absence it depicts. Carl Lavery and Claire Finburgh expand this argument in relation to re-reading the Theatre of the Absurd (Lavery and Finburgh Reference Lavery, Lavery and Finburgh2015).

Wendy Arons and Theresa May’s edited volume Readings in Performance and Ecology introduces ecodramaturgy as ‘theatre and performance making that puts ecological reciprocity and community at the centre of its theatrical and thematic intent’, where the emphasis is on ‘making’ new work that is environmentally engaged as well as local and global (Arons and May Reference Arons and May2012: 4). May’s Earth Matters on Stage undertakes an ecocritical reading of classic twentieth-century American realist drama, arguing for ‘the critical role of the performing arts as a site of counter discourse, resistance, and reimagining’, especially with regard to ‘generating new stories that help flesh out the possibilities of a just, humane and sustainable world’ (May Reference May2021: 279). On one view, theatre could look both ways: backwards to dismantle misinformation and denial about the effects of fossil fuels and loss of habitat, and forwards to renew ‘relational aliveness’ in the shared time and place of performance (281). May recognises that the effects of climate change are already being widely experienced by the world’s populations and that theatre’s role is to support ‘the lived experience’ of the climate crisis.

Live outdoor and open-air performance has engaged with actual ecologies over time from the twentieth century into the twenty-first. These performances tend to be interpreted along the lines of an ontology of performance concerned with ‘how materiality and space are always co-implicated in making beings, things and places’ and with an emphasis on ‘relationality and networks of interdependence’ (Bottoms et al. Reference Bottoms, Franks and Kramer2012: 1). This approach is differentiated from a more passive definition of environment as ‘surroundings’, or as ‘external conditions’ that implicitly reaffirm ‘humans as the centre of the conceptual equation’ (1). A practice-as-research project titled ‘Reflecting Environmental Change through Site-Based Performance’ focused on location-specific performance to explore environmental questions. In the Australian context, Jill Orr’s performances from the 1970s are situated on beaches, among trees, in deserts and next to mines in a way that highlights immersion in the natural and human-altered world.

Re-reading Beckett, Lavery proposes that ‘ecology is a mode of operating that seeks connections, and which attempts to problematise, without ever collapsing, the borders between the human and nonhuman, the socios and bios’ (Lavery Reference Lavery2018: 11–12, italics in original). Here the human is not quite incorporated into the world of living organisms – a world that Haeckel’s ecology reserved for the interrelations between plants and animals – but neither is it separated from it. The human dwells in and across the natural and social worlds and cannot always incorporate, know or understand itself, let alone the alterity of living organisms beyond and apart from human perception. Advancing earlier work, Lavery argues that theatre’s ‘ecological significance resided in the material charge of the theatrical medium itself’ (Lavery Reference Lavery2018: 14). Giving priority to form, he contends that an affective dramaturgical sculpting of time and space had the potential to disorder and reorder perception. For academics, as Vicky Angelaki and Elizabeth Sakellaridou put it recently, it is a matter of ‘actively reading environmentally’ (Angelaki and Sakellaridou Reference Angelaki and Sakellaridou2022).

Australian Ecological Issues

As we explore Australian theatre and performance with the intention of discovering its ecological content, we face the complexity of the nation’s interconnected but dispersed ecologies. Presentation of those ecologies on stage calls for place-based design, taking into account diverse flora and fauna, climate and geography and human alterities that attach themselves to an environment – even an urban sunset, for instance. As Peta Tait argues, theatrical performance helps people understand the sensory feeling of moving through environments and ‘weather worlds’ (Tait Reference Tait2022: 195–206). Hence, it is possible to claim that, over time, human-centred dramas do consider ecological context. This would seem to put into practice, as Timothy Clark notes, the human as ‘a creature of broader impersonal dynamics (geographical, biological, technologic and demographic) playing themselves out in the narratives of individual lives’ (Clark Reference Clark2015: 130). These dynamics are useful when considering the metonymic resonance of singular or isolated actions that reverberate with other texts across time and space. Where Clark notes that increasingly violent weather events force us (here artists and audiences) to pay more attention to the ‘expanded ecological scale’ of individual human lives, theatre gives form to the struggle to accommodate such an expanded vista (131). Representations of drought, flood and fire, for example, might move audiences to consider staging effects while also thinking in a Brechtian way about who would have thought of such a thing as removing vegetation for pasture, agriculture or mining and thereby exposing land to drought and fire. At the same time, the increasing scale and frequency of floods, drought and fire as well as the threat of habitat loss and extinction focus attention on the ‘broader context’ in which theatre and performance take place (131).

We seek to identify and elucidate consciously ecological works of theatre and performance, such as those we find in performance artist Jill Orr’s career-long interest in the environment, or in Bangarra Dance Theatre’s ontological connection to Country. An example of a collaborative approach in Australian theatre in the twenty-first century is Marrugeku, whose artistic co-directors, Yawuru/Bardi woman Dalisa Pigram and Rachael Swain, are outstanding leaders and practitioners of a process respectful of First Nations peoples and the concept and practice of care for Country. In ‘Traces in the Landscape’, Swain summarises the interconnection between ‘colonisation and environmental change’ in work influenced by First Nations performance as a source of improvisation and performance-making for all the company’s works (Swain Reference Swain, Gilbert, Pigram and Swain2021a: 234). Marrugeku’s practice-led research investigates new modes of performance that interweave aesthetic form, Country, bodies, ethics, protocols and respect, and it is as timely as it is painstaking.

Previous scholarly studies of Australian climate and environment in performance include a special issue of Performance Research that reiterates important parameters for the study of performance, including the history of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations, the recognition of Country as integral to culture and identity, and the coexistence of human, animal and plant life (Fensham et al. Reference Fensham, Paterson and Rae2018).

We write amid the central conundrum for Australia’s ecosystems: the strength of denial of climate change at the social and political levels by a minority of vested interests, including the mining lobby. As Australian climate scientist Joëlle Gergis points out, the Australian fossil fuel industry is still expanding in a way that is ‘entirely inconsistent’ with the nation’s obligations to reach the internationally agreed target of net-zero emissions by 2050 (Gergis Reference Gergis2022: 189).

Our study focuses on ecological awareness in Australian theatre by analysing selected works in the context of the escalating crisis in the nation’s ecological condition. We aim to identify how theatre contributes to public awareness of the dangers of climate change, environmental damage and loss of biodiversity. We are also mindful of Patrick Lonergan’s recent caution about a national study in the context of a global problem, and ‘whether it is possible to find space between the irrelevantly small and the unknowably vast’ (Lonergan Reference Lonergan2023: 3). Here, there needs to be a balance between narrowly construed case studies that lack wider consequence and claims that are of global relevance. Our approach to Australian theatre encompasses both the local and the global. We expect to find vacillations between local autonomy and global relatedness in uneasy relationships with the environment. We look for change in form and outlook, even as we grapple with the national reality of $44 billion invested in coal-fired power in 2022 amid targeted reductions by 2030 (Oil Change International et al. Reference Ngugi2022: 3).

The prominence of ecology in the twenty-first century might well be attributed to a quest for survival. As ethicist Clive Hamilton notes, ‘the question of the survival of the human species’ comes before other living yet life-sustaining elements (Hamilton Reference Hamilton, Latour and Leclercq2016: 230). Where Haeckel promoted ecology as the study of the complex interrelations between organisms, modern Western societies, as Hamilton puts it, have resisted the delicate balance among living and non-living entities. Indeed, neoliberal commitments to ‘human autonomy’, ‘self-determination’ and ‘relentless progress’ have seen human exceptionalism expand. This is especially visible in the rise of politicians who have vehemently denied climate change for decades.

We write with an acute historical sense that the addition of a new ecological study of theatre based in a settler-colonial country adds an important and revealing strand to the understanding of environmental exploitation and depletion. For the study of Australian theatre and performance, the category of settler is best applied as an indexic sign of commonly held attitudes among non-Indigenous people, such as theatrical characters whose actions ignore, deny or seek to cover up continuing Indigenous presence and prior sustainable land use. In these instances, the term ‘settler colonial’ (Konishi Reference Konishi2019) becomes a critical reference to acts that perpetrate the naturalisation of settler privilege and its ecosystemic occupation of the land. This perspective offers theatre the opportunity to critically expose the social dimension, and this exploitation includes the seizure and dispossession of Indigenous peoples in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this critical sense, the later colonial regime was more industrialised, more concentrated and more extensively recorded and identifiable. And yet for all that knowledge, a paradox endures and obstructs the large-scale restoration of natural ecosystems and reduction in Australia’s carbon emissions, whether measured in its own continental atmosphere or those in its major coal-export destinations of China and India. We need to understand what the performing arts can reveal of the ideological bedrock underpinning colonial and postcolonial expansion of land acquisition and commodities trade – how it sanitised that which May (Reference May2021) refers to as stories of sanctioned destruction, and the extent to which it challenges them. And then we need to understand how performance responds in a contemporary way to the contradictions of climate change policy and practice.

Reflecting on Haeckel, we note the historical coincidence of the steady rise in knowledge about ecology and the rise of global warming after which ‘a liveable and sustainable future’ for all cannot be secured (IPCC Reference Lee and Romero2023: 24). If ecology is the study of the interrelations between organisms and environments, ecology in theatre studies might focus on the interrelations of the theatrical and its referents in the politics of climate change and species extinction.

Ecocritical theatre stages the encounters of humans, animals and the environment from the perspective of damage induced by human activity, including industrialisation, deforestation and over-exploitation of resources. Theatre can contribute to debates about the future of the planet by means of its performativity, spectatorship, temporality and spatiality, as well as its aesthetic systems. Even then, as Bruce McConachie warns, theatre needs to approach ecological activism with humility and a frank recognition that, in the ecological matrix, humans are the problem: ‘Proposing that humans should “save the earth” is not only ridiculously arrogant but also clearly immoral; probably the best way to save nature would be to kill off humanity’ (McConachie Reference McConachie, Arons and May2012: 92). We might say therefore that theatrical engagement with ecology calls for an ironic perspective on human environmentalism while using theatre’s capacity to intervene in public debate about important issues.