Theatre depicts the way the socio-climate of so it reads Theatre depicts the way the socio-climate of drought intenstified in Australia as settler farmers drought intensified in Australia as settler farmers cleared land to plant imported food crops and, in particular, rain-dependent wheat. Local ecologies were drastically changed by colonial occupation. Dryness and dust increased where there had previously been the biodiverse sources of food depicted in Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander First Nations (First Nations) performance and drama. Different meanings for meanings for home and homeland exemplify the genocidal conflict between First Nations Country and settler farmsteads. Plays by, for example, Noongar writer Jack Davis and the pre-eminent Dorothy Hewett feature ecologies drastically altered by wheat farming in conjunction with oppressive race and gender relations. Drama about mining similarly shows a combination of ecological damage and social inequity. As Jill Orr performs in a vast monocrop of wheat and amidst gypsum mine waste, her bird-like action evokes in a vast monocrop field of wheat grief over an ecocidal loss of multispecies habitats.

Theatrical performance engages with the material consequences of rising hot temperatures and severe bush fires as it continues to reflect changing beliefs about the weather. Verbatim theatre outlines some of the contradictions surrounding fire, which both regenerates and destroys as it conveys the gradual realisation that fire changes weather. Theatre points to how temperature-reducing tree preservation paradoxically becomes blamed for increasing the bush fire risk. The discussion foregrounds the clash of values in a liberal democratic society between the ongoing exploitation of environmental resources for economic gain and the longstanding efforts of activists and protestors to protect forests that store carbon and counteract rising temperatures. As characters and personae confront the life and death dilemmas posed by hot weather and fire including those from the social risk of arson, theatrical performance must grapple with ethical constraints surrounding the depiction of these events that cause fatalities.

The Introduction explains the purpose of this book about the way natural ecologies are centrally configured in twentieth- and twenty-first century drama and innovative theatrical performance. It explains the book’s argument that ecology and climate need to be understood as consequences of a combination of social and natural forces, and that drama and theatrical performance often stage such entangled ecologies. We find that weather-related events function like protagonists in twentieth-century and twenty-first century Australian theatrical work, reflecting contemporaneous human attitudes towards nature. The plays and performances discussed in this book reveal a paradigm shift from a white settler belief in a righteous human dominance over nature to a more contemporary understanding of mutual entanglement and reciprocity in multispecies ecologies.

Fear-inducing tragedy encompasses the deadly consequences of contaminating the atmosphere, including through nuclear radiation. Theatrical works juxtapose the threat of extinction with the benefits of energy obtained from nuclear, coal and oil power sources as they indicate that the earth’s atmosphere can no longer be regarded as an exploitable resource. The degradation of breathable air is life-threatening for human and nonhuman species alike. The depiction of human-induced contamination from mid twentieth-century theatre encompasses life-threatening atmospheric nuclear bomb testing in the Pacific Ocean region and on mainland Australia. First Nations theatrical performance about nuclear-damaged ecological systems broadens the emotional commons of climate change theatre in which characters confront atmospheric contamination and the threat of annihilation.

This chapter reflects on the book’s exploration of drama and performance that reveal the entanglements of natural phenomena and human behaviours in society, each shaping one another in dynamic interplay. The book concludes by considering how artists continue to want to make work about anthropogenic ecological change. We suggest here that performative actions of dissent can offer shared optimistic moments. This chapter looks at the tactics of tactics of artists and activists who perform actions to physically resist, slow or block ecological damage, attempting to hold big corporations and politicians to account and keep urgent ecological issues under public scrutiny.

As anthropogenic actions are causing the Earth’s temperatures to rise, the oceans too are warming, accelerating the melting of the polar icecaps, which in turn affects rising sea levels on a global scale. In the Pacific region, higher sea levels cause increasingly severe and frequent flooding from high for king tides add encroaching so it reads from high tides encroaching on islands and coastal areas king tides to islands and coastal areas. The theatrical performances considered in this chapter are chosen for their representations of melting ice, rising sea levels and changing coastal ecosystems. Considering i-Land X-isle and The Last Resort by performance artist Latai Taumoepeau and Thaw by physical theatre group Legs On The Wall, we explore how 'performance can highlight Australian beach and coastal ecologies that exacerbate existing social and economic inequalities. We ask: what does performance show us about which social and cultural groups are most affected by melting Antarctic ice and rising and warming seas? This chapter explores international attitudes to beaches.

Characters curse storms, power blackouts and climate change sceptics in twenty-first century drama as the destructive force of climate change is theatrically represented across comic farce, realist tragedy and dystopian horror. While these theatrical forms differ in their affective and emotional impact, they commonly predict ecological disaster in the future. Disaster is broadly understood as the combination of historical and social determinants interacting with natural hazards and forces over time. Climate change disaster is framed in scenarios that range from humorous to terrifying and with a growing dramatic genre of futuristic climate fiction (cli-fi) about ecological collapse and political dystopia. Twenty-first century dramatisation presents both the absurdity of humanity’s inability to reduce carbon emissions and global warming and the tragedy of predicted disaster on a geological scale in the Anthropocene. At the same time, contemporary performance illuminates turning points in time turning points in time including a different outcome within the present including within the present.

This chapter considers how Australian theatre responds to, represents and stages floods, and how those representations have changed over the last half-century and more. Beginning with Eunice Hanger’s Flood and Mona Brand’s Flood Tide from the 1950s, the chapter traces how dramatic characters are fashioned in response to increasingly extreme climates. Alana Valentine’s (2008) Watermark, a work of community/verbatim theatre, draws on the oral testimony of survivors of a fast-moving flood that in 1998 swept through the town and surrounding areas of Katherine in the Northern Territory. In Jackie Smith’s (2009) The Flood, rising flood waters have a materiality and agential capacity to provoke fear and anger in the three characters of three dramatic characters trapped inside a run-down farmhouse. Between Two Waves by Ian Meadows (2012) is a politically engaged climate change drama that represents the increasing hysteria of a climate scientist’s warnings as they this to these are distorted and denied by conservative politicians and media.

The land now called Australia was settled by humans between 50,000 and 65,000 years ago, and the lands and waterways sustained balanced life until 1788 when a fleet of British soldiers, settlers and convicts landed on the central east coast. This chapter traces the ways theatrical works stage ‘land’ that has been transformed and depleted by the interrelated actions of colonialism, deforestation and pastoralism. It features the ecological content and staging of three works: Yanagai! Yanagai! by Yorta Yorta and Gunaikurnai woman Andrea James (2003), Louis Nowra’s (1985) The Golden Age and The White Earth by Andrew McGahan and Shaun Charles (2009). These depict violent land-grabs violent land-grabs, massacres, stubborn farming practices and ignorance of the environment as an ecosystem with a long history of human habitation. This chapter looks at the problem of ongoing ecological damage and struggles to develop sustainable land practices.

Theatrical presentation encompasses diverging perspectives on water ecologies, ecological divisions and extremes of wet and dry in tropical and desert climates. While twentieth-century drama points to how water sources in Australia have been divided up to restrict access through land proprietorship, polarising attitudes and racial injustice, innovative twenty-first century performance emphasises the interconnectedness of water flows, seepage and below ground storage. An appreciation of water flow is particularly evident in First Nations performance, which includes the influential work of Bangarra Dance Theatre. Performance explores values and practices that resist the way water is polluted and detrimentally reconfigured in binary divisions to restrict access and divert flows and highlights the need for water availability for all species in a climate change era. Australian theatrical performance points to emotional feelings and values that protect and preserve water and its river flows even as human impact on the climate means its patterns are no longer predictable.

The increasing intensity of industrialisation is taking its toll on nonhuman animals, leading to what is now described as the ‘the sixth mass extinction’ cause by Homo Sapiens. Since European settlement in 1788, the Australian continent has recorded the highest rate of mammal extinction in the world, currently a ten percent loss since pre-colonial times, with hundreds of other endangered species at high risk of disappearing. The Australian plays and performances considered in this chapter, which include Extinction by Hannie Rayson, Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster and Green Screen by Nicola Gunn and Whale by Fleur Kilpatrick, explore what it means for humans to practice an ethical obligation of care for individual species, their place within particular habitats and ecosystems as well as the entanglement of human-nonhuman well-being and survival.

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. ‘From Ecology to Ecocriticism’ covers the rise of ecology first as a science then its gradual shift to the humanities and onto theatre and performance studies. The question of the relationship between humans and nature now animates much of the scholarship on ecology, theatre and performance. Hence, if ecology is the study of the interrelations between organisms and environments, then ecology in theatre studies focuses on the interrelations of the theatrical and its referents in the politics of sentence at climate change. The chapter concludes by arguing that ecocriticism in Australia expands to encompass the impact of settler colonialism and the continuing dependence on fossil fuel consumption and exports.