BA Drama

This unit considers the various ways in which theatre and performance practices engage with ecology and the natural environment. It examines critical issues and key concepts for understanding the relationship between theatre and ecology, particularly in relation to climate change and the precarious environmental context of the twenty-first century. The unit also includes training in professional skills for sustainable theatre-making. The scope of the unit is global and it considers key case studies drawn from a variety of theatre styles and geographical contexts, connecting these with intersecting issues, for example decoloniality, gender and disability. 

Any Level 1 Drama study unit (DRAM10001 or DRAM10002) or Level 1 Creative and Cultural Industries course unit.

• To demonstrate knowledge of the imaginative means through which theatre address issues concerning ecology and climate disasters.
• To read, analyse and critique plays and performances from across the world that offer figurations of anthropogenic climate change
• To engage with ideas, theories and critical approaches that have emerged to shape debates in global climate crises.

• Identify the role played by theatre in combatting the existential catastrophe brought about by climate change.
• Identify the intersection of performance and climate change.
• Understand how new modes and aesthetics of performance are constantly invented in response to the ever-shifting conditions of global climate change.
• Identify theatre’s function in the social and political sphere and understand the principle and concepts that facilitate its insertion for public agency and activism.

• Develop critical knowledge about plays and performances that address issues concerning climate change.
• Develop theoretical and critical awareness about debates concerning global climate change, and its interactions with performance, to form written and oral argument.
• Demonstrate facility for artistic intervention in climate action through creative approaches to imaginative reviews, climate change campaigns and other forms of advocacy and public activism.

• Demonstrate effective participation in a creatively sustaining research-oriented group.
• Demonstrate theoretical understanding and awareness of the role that performance plays in tackling climate catastrophe.
• Apply creative, and socially-engaged theatrical practices from a range of global contexts to explore developments in lived environmental experiences.

• Develop advanced ability for modes of critical self-reflection, research skills and initiative for long-lasting social change.
• Develop advance ability to communicate research materials in written and oral forms.

Group practical research presentation:  40%

Essay:  60% 

Angelacki, Vicky. Theatre & Environment, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2019

Arons, Wendy. and Theresa. J. May (eds)  Readings in Performance and Ecology, Palgrave: Basingstoke and New York, 2012

Chaudhuri, Una, “Anthropo-Scenes: Theater and Climate Change,” Journal of Contemporary Drama in English. Volume 3, Issue 1, May 2015

Chaudhuri, Una, & Shonni Enelow,  Research Theatre, Climate Change, and the Ecocide Project. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2014

Hudson, Julie. The Environment on Stage: Scenery or Shapeshifter. New York: Routledge, 2019   

May, Theresa. J.  “Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene .” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, 29

Scott-Bottoms, Stephen. “The Rise and Fall of Modern Water: From Staging Abstraction to Performing Place” Theatre Journal, Volume 71, Number 4, December 2019

Woynarski, Lisa. Ecodramaturgies: Theatre, Performance and Climate Change, Cham: Palgrave, 2020