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Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 Towards an Ecocritical Theatre : Playing the Anthropocene
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Towards an Ecocritical Theatre investigates contemporary theatre through the lens of Anthropocene-oriented ecocriticism. It assesses how Anthropocene thinking engages different modes of theatrical representation, as well as how the theatrical apparatus can rise to the representational challenges of changing interactions between humans and the nonhuman world.

'To explore these problems, the book investigates international Anglophone plays and performances by Caryl Churchill, Stephen Sewell, Andrew Bovell, E.M. Lewis, Chantal Bilodeau, Jordan Hall, and Miwa Matreyek, who have taken significant steps towards re-orienting theatre from its traditional focus on humans to an ecocritical attention to nonhumans and the environment in the Anthropocene. Their theatrical works show how an engagement with the problem of scale disrupts the humanist bias of theatre, provoking new modes of theatrical inquiry that envision a scale beyond the human and realign our ecological culture, art, and intimacy with geological time. Moreover, the plays and performances studied here, through their liveness, immediacy, physicality, and communality, examine such scalar shifts via the problem of agency in order to give expression to the stories of nonhuman actants. These theatrical works provoke reflections on the flourishing of multispecies responsibilities and sensitivities in aesthetic and ethical terms, providing a platform for research in the environmental humanities through imaginative conversations on the world’s iterative performativity in which all bodies, human and nonhuman, are cast horizontally as agential forces on the theatrical world stage.

'This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre studies, environmental humanities, and ecocritical studies.'(Publication summary)

Notes

  • Table of Contents

    Chapter One: Where Ecocriticism Meets Theatre in the Era of the Anthropocene

    Chapter Two: Setting the Stage for the Material Turn and Agential Bodies: Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker and Far Away

    Chapter Three: Setting the Stage for the End of the World: Stephen Sewell’s It Just Stopped and Andrew Bovell’s When the Rain Stops Falling

    Chapter Four: Setting the Stage for Material Expressions across Planetary Boundaries: E.M. Lewis’ Song of Extinction and Chantal Bilodeau’s Sila

    Chapter Five: Setting the Stage for Possibilities of Collaborative Survival: Jordan Hall’s A Brief History of Human Extinction and Miwa Matreyek’s This World Made Itself and Infinitely Yours

    Chapter Six: Conclusion: Anthropocenic Theatre: A Stage for Living in the Present and Imagining the Future

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Works about this Work

[Review] Towards an Ecocritical Theatre: Playing the Anthropocene Oliver Gough , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: Australasian Drama Studies , 1 October no. 83 2023; (p. 284-292)

— Review of Towards an Ecocritical Theatre : Playing the Anthropocene Mohebat Ahmadi , 2022 multi chapter work criticism
'Mohebat Ahmadi’s Towards an Ecocritical Theatre: Playing the Anthropocene offers a significant contribution to the rapidly expanding field of ecocriticism and scholarship on theatrical representations of the Anthropocene. The book argues for the ecocritical potential of theatre and performance that foregrounds the non-human via diverse and thorough formal innovations that ultimately destabilise anthropocentrism. This argument is supported by close textual and critical analysis of plays and performances from various contexts in the Anglophone sphere. Ahmadi examines works by Caryl Churchill, Stephen Sewell, Andrew Bovell, E.M. Lewis, Chantal Bilodeau, Jordan Hall and Miwa Matreyek, through an ecocritical lens, finding within them ‘a radical rethinking of some of the principal assumptions made about human–nonhuman relationship’ (4). For Ahmadi, interrogation of this relationship is at the core of truly ecocritical drama, and central to the ‘Anthropocentric turn in theatre and performance’ (200) which the book traces and contends.' 

(Introduction)

[Review] Towards an Ecocritical Theatre: Playing the Anthropocene Oliver Gough , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: Australasian Drama Studies , 1 October no. 83 2023; (p. 284-292)

— Review of Towards an Ecocritical Theatre : Playing the Anthropocene Mohebat Ahmadi , 2022 multi chapter work criticism
'Mohebat Ahmadi’s Towards an Ecocritical Theatre: Playing the Anthropocene offers a significant contribution to the rapidly expanding field of ecocriticism and scholarship on theatrical representations of the Anthropocene. The book argues for the ecocritical potential of theatre and performance that foregrounds the non-human via diverse and thorough formal innovations that ultimately destabilise anthropocentrism. This argument is supported by close textual and critical analysis of plays and performances from various contexts in the Anglophone sphere. Ahmadi examines works by Caryl Churchill, Stephen Sewell, Andrew Bovell, E.M. Lewis, Chantal Bilodeau, Jordan Hall and Miwa Matreyek, through an ecocritical lens, finding within them ‘a radical rethinking of some of the principal assumptions made about human–nonhuman relationship’ (4). For Ahmadi, interrogation of this relationship is at the core of truly ecocritical drama, and central to the ‘Anthropocentric turn in theatre and performance’ (200) which the book traces and contends.' 

(Introduction)

Last amended 9 Jan 2024 11:18:08
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