Introductory Note: Toward Ecologies of Action
Roberta Levitow*, Chantal Bilodeau** and Aikaterini Delikonstantinidou***
Prelude
From ancient ritual drama to contemporary documentary performance, the performing arts have long been entwined with the human need to make meaning in times of crisis. Whether responding to war, colonization, revolution or diverse forms of social injustice, performance has historically served as a space of reflection but also of resistance, negotiation and re-imagining. In transitional contexts—from post-apartheid South Africa to Northern Ireland’s peace process—the stage has offered a platform for dialogue and for envisioning new futures.
Today, we are once again living in a time of profound disruption. The climate crisis—arguably the defining global emergency of our age—intersects with long-standing socio-political and economic conflicts. It exacerbates inequalities, displaces communities, provokes resource-based tensions and deepens global insecurities in ways we have never seen before. However, climate change is more than a crisis of science or policy; it is a crisis of culture, a crisis of imagination.
This special topic explores the role of the performing arts, and theatre in particular, in engaging with this entangled crisis, where environmental degradation and sociopolitical conflict are co-constitutive forces. We ask: what unique role can live performance play in catalyzing climate awareness, fostering resilience, transforming conflict? How can the theatrical event—ephemeral and situated, embodied and metaphorical—create spaces of emotional resonance, ethical reckoning and political engagement?
Performance and Conflict Transformation
The performing arts have always been powerful tools for navigating conflict and sparking transformation. In the wake of trauma, performance can serve as testimony. In the midst of division, it can offer shared narrative space. In the context of injustice, it can provoke ethical reflection and action. Drawing on approaches such as Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and John Paul Lederach’s peacebuilding models, scholars and practitioners have recognized performance as a mode of intervention.
Examples abound: in Rwanda, post-genocide community theatre has been used to foster reconciliation; in Colombia, theatre initiatives have been central to peace dialogues; in Palestine and Israel, intercultural performances have opened fragile channels of communication. Such work does not offer easy solutions. However, it might reveal complexity, demand empathy, and insist on co-presence.
This long-standing connection between performance and conflict transformation provides a potent lens through which to understand the current climate crisis not merely as environmental but as deeply relational, historical and, of course, political.
Climate Crisis as a Crisis of Narrative
The environmental crisis is not an isolated phenomenon. It is inextricably tied to histories of colonialism, extraction and exploitation. Climate vulnerability maps onto existing inequalities—geographic, ethnoracial, economic, gendered, sexual . . . Rising sea levels are displacing Indigenous communities; drought is fueling armed conflict; extractivist policies are interlaced with corporate interests and neocolonial legacies. These overlapping crises reveal climate change both as a material threat and as a deeply entangled social, political and ethical challenge—one that resists simple solutions.
In this sense, the climate emergency is also a crisis of narrative. Dominant stories of control and mastery have brought us to this point. It seems we need new stories that might help us live differently. But how do we tell the story of a changing planet in ways that mobilize rather than paralyze? How do we acknowledge grief and fear without collapsing into fatalism? How do we shift the paradigm from technocratic solutions to ecobiological as well as psychocultural transformation?
Performance, with its capacity to tolerate ambiguity, hold paradox, embody both critique and hope, and forge imaginative solidarities—however embattled—is uniquely positioned to intervene.
Performance and Climate Solutions
In recent years, a growing body of climate-conscious theatre and ecoperformance has emerged globally, ranging from immersive climate operas and speculative climate fiction on stage, to grassroots performances by youth and Indigenous activists. These works “raise awareness,” but they go even further, creating affective engagement and connection with nature, especially when emerging from at-risk communities; they foster collective experience alongside collaboration across scientific disciplines; they inspire behavioral change by modeling sustainable ecological practices; and thus, they contribute to community-based change.
This special topic seeks to highlight performances about and with/in climate, performances shaped by its urgencies, feeling into and working through them. These include projects that blur the lines between artistic practice and activism, research and ritual, documentation and imagination. All of them show, each in a unique way, that the performing arts are far from ancillary to climate solutions—they are essential. To perform in a time of crisis, or even collapse, is not to distract from urgency—it is to give it rhythm and resonance, give it meaning differently. Performance, here, is not a luxury; it is a necessity. It is how we remember what matters. It is how we cultivate capacities for resilience, for endurance, for care, for trust . . . Performance, as we understand it in this collection, offers what the sciences alone cannot: knowledge that is genuinely lived, profoundly felt, generously shared, and a communal rehearsal of futures not yet authored.
Overview of the Contributions
This special topic, Performance, Climate and Conflict Transformation, gathers diverse voices and projects from across the globe that illuminate how performative acts engage with the realities of the climate crisis while also offering pathways for repair, renewal and even justice. It opens in Florida, a state often lampooned in U.S. environmental discourse yet uniquely positioned as a harbinger of climate realities; it then moves along rivers, coastlines, deltas, deserts and gardens, tracing a constellation of practices across geographies and genres. It maps environmental impact zones as well as the fertile ground where creative possibility takes root.
In her essay “Florida EcoPerformance Manifesto: Producing Climate Forward Live Arts in the State of the Future,” Elizabeth Doud positions Florida as a vibrant testing ground for ecological innovation through the arts. Elizabeth introduces ecoperformance as a historical framework, a critical lens and a visionary methodology that brings together the speculative mode, live arts, environmental awareness and community. As she presents it, ecoperformance is not merely illustrative, it is experiential, making the climate emergency palpable through the visceral force of site-specific performance and the sensory immediacy of embodied storytelling. By fusing scientific insight with artistic expression, ecoperformance creates a space where data becomes felt knowledge, and where imagination becomes a tool for ecological engagement. In this fusion, audiences are informed and invited into transformative possibilities.
Elizabeth shows how performance can reconfigure our relationship to public space, galvanize civic consciousness and spark a recalibration of what collective action might look like in the face of planetary crisis. Her call for cultural investment as a pillar of sustainability challenges the conventional hierarchies of environmental response, asserting that art is not an accessory to action—it is action. In amplifying the potential of live arts to seed localized, courageous responses in places often overlooked, Elizabeth reminds us that performance is not only a mirror to ecological rupture but a rehearsal for more just and resilient futures.
From Florida’s coasts, we move to the Rio Grande in New Mexico, where sound, memory and data converge in the performance project There Must Be Other Names for the River. In her contribution, “Connecting the Dots from the River to the Gulf: Turning River Data Flow into Sound Performance Speaks Volumes for Rio Grande Ecology,” Marya Errin Jones traces how performers transform decades of environmental change into an immersive sonic experience. By making the river’s story audible—its rhythms, ruptures, residues—this work invites a listening practice rooted in care, ecological cohabitation and attunement to more-than-human histories. The concept of intentional stewardship resonates throughout: this is a call to hear differently, to inhabit our roles not as passive observers of environmental decline but as active custodians of shared, living systems. In amplifying the connections and contradictions between modern borders and ancient waterways, the project—and Marya—reminds us that how we listen shapes how we act, as stewardship begins in the quality of our attention.
We next arrive in Bulbancha—the place of many tongues—in Southeast Louisiana, where a rich, place-based conversation unfolds between Monique Verdin, Nick Slie and Lisa D’Amour in the piece titled “‘We come from the place of many tongues’: The Land Memory Bank, Mondo Bizarro and the Mississippi.” This dialogue traces over two decades of collaborative performance and community engagement rooted in the disappearing delta of the Mississippi River. In a region shaped by mounting ecological risks, cultural complexity and deep historical entanglements, Bulbancha emerges as both context, text and metaphor—a living testament to cultural and ecological plurality. As climate change accelerates displacement and deepens the precarity of coastal life, the conversation highlights how art and collective imagination can resist erasure and offer pathways for adaptation and resilience while honoring many voices, human and more-than-human.
From the U.S.—a country emblematic of both environmental power and precarity—we turn to Egypt, a nation facing acute climate pressures, including an escalating water crisis and record-breaking temperatures. In “It Is Our Fault: Theatre on the Climate Catastrophe in Egypt,” Jillian Campana explores how ecotheatre can animate urgent environmental concerns through regionally grounded storytelling. Set against the backdrop of Egypt’s shifting environmental and political landscape, Da Zanbokom (It’s Your Fault), a project conceived and curated by Jillian, unfolds through a series of short plays by various playwrights, staged in different regions, dramatizing the uneven and human-centered impacts of ecological change. The author makes a compelling case for the necessity of collaboration between artists and professionals across disciplines, emphasizing that narrative is key to translating climate data into felt understanding. Notably, this piece draws on reflections from both audience members and artistic collaborators, offering valuable insights into how ecoperformance is received in real time.
Just across the Mediterranean, in neighboring Greece—a country with its own environmental burdens, ranging from intensified wildfires to pollution—we find another artistic response to the ecological crisis that is both embodied and reflective. In “The Absurdity of Collapse: Ecosomatics, Memory, and Bioethics in Project Abyssos,” Eva Gkadri offers an insider’s perspective on the titular piece, Abyssos, an experimental performance, shaped as “a paradoxical transit ritual.” This work turns to the human body as both site and sensor of environmental trauma, drawing on somatic methodologies and absurdist aesthetics to probe the strange and often disorienting textures of ecological collapse. Indeed, Abyssos frames the body as a kinesthetic archive—capturing vulnerability but also endurance and adaptation—through which the narrative unfolds in breath, motion and transformation, rather than in words alone. Abyssos’s understanding and treatment of the body explains why the author situates the project within the realm of ecosomatics, a practice where bodily awareness and ecological consciousness are deeply entwined.
She also argues that the play’s absurdist tone reflects a deliberate aesthetic response to the incomprehensible scale of the crisis. In fact, Eva touches on a view hinted at by other contributors to this issue: in spaces where collapse resists coherence, performance becomes a way to feel what cannot yet be fully understood, drawing audiences into a shared reckoning with the absurdity of survival given the scale, contradiction and psychic toll of planetary crisis. Perhaps the only way to grasp the gravity of collapse is to learn to navigate its paradoxes.
Across some of the essays and conversations, a compelling throughline emerges: in the face of severe environmental disruption, the arts offer capacities—to feel, to imagine, to endure. Eva’s thoughts on Abyssos point to the deliberate use of absurdity as a strategy for grasping the ungraspable. This resonates powerfully with Elizabeth’s assertion that artists must reclaim their space in climate discourse by embracing the mythic, the radical, the unreasonable, not to produce tidy solutions but to serve as what she calls sites of “psycho-emotional triage,” laboratories where futures are felt into being. Nick deepens this thread, reminding us that it is the dominance of reason that has helped engineer the present catastrophe; therefore, it is not more reason but rather the wild, the whispered, the nonlinear, that will guide us toward new paths. In these visions, performance, instead of presuming to resolve the crisis, is tasked with holding its paradoxes, making room for incoherence, for collective emotional metabolization free of the bounds of reasonableness. It is in these cracks—of absurdity and irrational beauty—that the seeds of transformation begin to take root.
One such seed takes root in a bathtub in Australia. Moira Finucane’s Rapture Bathtub is a genre-defying, eco-theatrical work born in lockdown and broadcast via Zoom, transforming a domestic bathtub into a site of magic realism, mourning and radical hope. Emerging from Finucane’s Art vs. Extinction suite, the performance honors mass mortality events—including the drowning of 10,000 emperor penguin chicks in Antarctica—while inviting audiences to engage in transformative acts of creative resistance. At once intimate and global, absurd and sincere, Rapture Bathtub interweaves memoir, climate science, performance art and participatory ritual. With each handmade penguin submitted by viewers, a tree is planted, crafting a living, growing memorial across continents. Part call to action, part fairy tale, indeed unclassifiable, Moira’s “Say Yes to Me. Or Penguins, Propaganda and Bulging Hope,” in which she reflects on this work,insists that even small acts—like saying yes—can shift the world.
Where Moira offers whimsical defiance and tender surrealism, the Flipflopi Project channels playfulness into collective ingenuity, turning environmental urgency into bold, buoyant activism. In this spirit, we turn to a boat built from discarded flip-flops—a brightly colored beacon of grassroots environmental imagination. What might seem improbable—or even comical at first glance—is in fact a powerful metaphor for the kind of creativity our moment demands: resourceful, community-powered, radically hopeful. This is the bold, joyous oddity of collective action that rewrites what counts as possible.
Further north, then, along the African continent, to the shores of Lake Victoria, the Flipflopi Project redefines the intersection of environmentalism, creativity and community. In his essay, “Riding the Waves of Change: Sailing with the Flipflopi Project,” Mick Warwick recounts a transformative journey from a career in the British military to environmental advocacy through art, chronicling his involvement in this grassroots East African initiative that tackles plastic pollution by building a functional dhow boat entirely from recycled flip-flops. The Flipflopi’s voyage through Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania is more than a spectacle; the dhow serves as a mobile platform for environmental education, civic engagement and policy dialogue. Through workshops and artistic interventions, including performances, the project cultivates spaces where local communities can build environmental literacy and develop the competencies needed to participate in climate-responsive change.
At the heart of this initiative is a commitment to community-powered action, a recognition that sustainable change begins with those who are most immediately affected. By harnessing the power of grassroots creativity, the Flipflopi Project demonstrates how art can serve as a catalyst for both awareness and empowerment—giving people agency to see themselves as part of the solution, not just as victims of environmental harm. Moreover, the project’s international collaborations underscore the importance of transnational solidarity: long-term improvement depends partly on local innovation and partly on global networks of support, exchange and on mutual learning. In tracing the evolution of the author’s role within this movement, the essay reveals how meaningful environmental progress is seeded through shared purpose, sustained through collective care and, ultimately, realized when creative practices meet community-led leadership.
The idea of performance as a mode of environmental intervention that is central to the Flipflopi Project also finds powerful, visceral expression in the high-altitude region of Ladakh, India, a place of extraordinary beauty and acute vulnerability, where rising temperatures accelerate glacial melt, intensify water scarcity and push fertile land toward desertification. Despite growing awareness of the problem, officially endorsed climate adaptation measures fail to include local Indigenous knowledge and many remain unimplemented, deepening frustrations. In this context, climate fasts emerge as a radical form of embodied protest. As Nikhil Katara explains in his piece, “Theatre of Hunger: Climate Fasts and Protests in Ladakh,” climate fasts operate as stark performances not of spectacle but of sacrifice. Drawing from India’s rich history of peaceful protests, activists use their own bodies as sites of resistance, staging highly visible, emotionally charged performances that speak to the urgency of the crisis, highlight the failure of policy responses and elicit empathy and support from fellow citizens thousands of kilometers away. These acts of political theatre collapse the boundaries between survival and ethics, redefining endurance as a language of resistance and resistance as a plea for recognition—of lives, of landscapes, of a future still within reach. In the age of climate crisis, the theatre of protest is so much more than symbolic—it is a matter of survival.
As this journey through performance, climate and conflict transformation draws to a close, we arrive in Sausalito, California, where the work of eco-Hip Hop artist, environmental educator and vegan chef Dr. Ietef “DJ CAVEM” Vita offers a vibrant counterpoint to the somber urgency of protest. “Culinary Climate Action, Food Justice and the Revolution in Our Gardens: Excerpts from an Exclusive Interview with DJ Cavem by Sway on Sway’s Universe,” edited by DJ Cavem with assistance from Daniel Banks, gives us a window into DJ Cavem’s multimedia movement rooted in what he calls Culinary Climate Action. Vegetables feature prominently in his rap performances; he hands out seed packets during his shows. He blends beats with tools for regenerative food culture, ecological repair and climate justice. His work reclaims joy as a revolutionary force while, at the same time, tapping into ancestral agricultural knowledge and Indigenous principles of reciprocity and reverence for the Earth. Rather than framing food access in abstract terms, DJ Cavem cultivates tangible empowerment through shared practices of growing, healing and honoring cultural memory.
This is activism that feeds, literally and metaphorically, offering sustenance through learning and sonic connection. Positioned at the intersection of art, health and environmental justice, DJ Cavem’s contribution amplifies a core truth of this collection: that the climate crisis demands awareness but also wildly diverse, culturally rooted responses—and that performance, in all its forms, can be both a wake-up call and a seedbed for change.
Taken together, these contributions map a constellation of practices that span continents, media, methodologies and epistemologies. They show that climate performance is a living ecology of interventions—intimate and public, poetic and practical, traditional and experimental. In the face of severe environmental stress that exacerbates social and political tensions, performance emerges as a generative and potentially healing force for reimagining how we relate to place, to each other, and to the more-than-human world. These creative acts invite us into new modes of ecological thinking—ones that embrace complexity, contradiction, interconnectedness, and refuse the illusion of separation between culture and nature.
In a time when the future feels increasingly volatile—environmentally, politically, culturally, and in so many other respects—the performances whose testimonies we have collected here function as vital resources of sense-making equipment and present alternative languages for communication within and across divided communities. They show us how to listen differently, how to move with uncertainty, how to act with care, imagination and, perhaps most importantly, radical hope. Through their urgency and diversity, they affirm that performance is a space for cultivating the sensibilities needed to not only navigate but also shape the futures to come.
Cover Photo: Cry You One performers on the levee with masks featuring (from bottom left): Rebecca Mwase, Sean LaRocca, Will Bowling, and Nick Slie. Photo: Melisa Cardona. From the conversation with Monique Verdin and Nick Slie led by Lisa D’Amour, “We come from the place of many tongues”: The Land Memory Bank, Mondo Bizarro and the Mississippi.”

*Roberta Levitow – director, dramaturg, teacher and producer – directed over fifty productions in NYC, LA, and nationally. Co-founder and co-director of Theatre Without Borders, with a current focus on performance and the climate crisis. Co-initiated the Climate Change Theatre Action in partnership with the Arts & Climate Initiative. Co-initiated The Acting Together on the World Stage Project at Brandeis University. From 2004-2019, Senior Artistic Associate, Sundance Institute Theatre Program’s East Africaand Middle East/North Africa initiatives. Co-creator, with Kenyan musician Eric Wainaina, of the Nairobi Musical Theatre Initiative (NBOMTI), with faculty from NYU’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. Honoree at 2003 Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre and the 1992 Alan Schneider Award. Fulbright Specialist teaching assignments Ethiopia 2018, Uganda 2007, Romania 2005, and Hong Kong 2003. Work featured in The New York Times, American Theatre Magazine, Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century, Writing the World: On Globalization and RoundUp (League of Professional Theatre Women in NYC). Stanford University graduate. Faculty at UCLA and Bennington College. Member of The Think Tank of The Lab for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University. www.robertalevitow.com

**Chantal Bilodeau is a Montreal-born, New York-based playwright whose work focuses on the intersection of storytelling, live performance, and the climate crisis. In her capacity as founding artistic director of the Arts & Climate Initiative, she has spearheaded projects for nearly two decades, engaging communities in the U.S. and abroad in climate action through live events, talks, publications, workshops, artist convenings, and a worldwide distributed theatre festival. Her plays have been presented in a dozen countries and translated into French, Norwegian, Greek, and Portuguese. She is currently working on a series of eight plays that look at the social and environmental changes facing the eight Arctic states. She is a Creative Core member of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics and an incoming PhD student in English at the University of Victoria in Canada. In 2019, she was named one of “8 Trailblazers Who Are Changing the Climate Conversation” by Audubon Magazine.

***Aikaterini Delikonstantinidou is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, where she specializes in contemporary Anglophone theatre. She earned her PhD. from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki with a dissertation on the reception of ancient Greek tragic myth in Latino/american theatre. She later conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Athens’ Department of Theatre Studies, focusing on the use of myth-based digital theatre in adult education. Delikonstantinidou has co-edited special issues of academic journals and published extensively in both Greek and international journals and edited volumes. She has also presented her work at numerous conferences in Greece and abroad. Her monograph, Latinx Reception of Greek Tragic Myth: Healing (and) Radical Politics, was published by Peter Lang in 2020. Her latest paper, “Emotional Literacy via the System for Digital Theatre in Education,” appears in the forthcoming volume Stanislavsky and Emotion: Approaches Through Language & Culture (Routledge). Her research interests include contemporary theatre, reception studies, digital humanities and ecocriticism.
Copyright © 2025 Roberta Levitow, Chantal Bilodeau and Aikaterini Delikonstantinidou
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #31, June 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.