Welcome to DT2215 Theatre and the Environment!

I'm very happy to be teaching this course this year and I look forward to working with you. As you know, this course focuses on very topical, indeed challengingly current, issues and raises questions about the environment, politics, ethics, and theatre’s contributions to current debates, behaviours and practices. Together we will be reading plays, watching performances, workshopping plays, discussing our responses, scrutinising scholarly writings, and making performances.

A lot has been published in recent years on the topic of Theatre and the Environment and/ or Ecology and you will find it helpful to have a look at Vicky Angelaki’s Theatre & Environment, Basingstoke: Macmillan, Red Globe Press, 2019, listed in the course bibliography, which offers an introductory discussion to the challenges and debates we will be examining. I hope, like me, you will become galvanised by the subject of Theatre and the Environment but within the class we may well have a wide range of attitudes and approaches to navigate and explore!

In the first half of the course, we will examine a range of approaches to theatre, performance and film in relation to environmental debates. We will also develop an appreciation of the theoretical implications and historical traditions of environmental debates in relation to performance, film and literature. In the second half of term, the focus will be on preparing the assessed group performances, and discussions in preparation for the essays you will be writing during the Christmas vacation. Throughout the term, we will explore theatre and the environment both critically (through discussion, presentations, and essay writing), and creatively.

Please keep in touch and let me know if you have any thoughts, ideas, or questions. I'd particularly love to hear suggestions about texts to add to reading lists and performances that would be worth us all looking at! I hope you enjoy the course and find it useful it terms of theatre practice, theory and activism today!

Liz Schafer