A Preliminary Directory of Procedural Dramaturgies for Climate Change

Studies in arts and educational sciences show the potential of participatory arts to deal with questions on climate change, i.e. they identify arts that invite audience participation as a mobiliser for reimagining human agency in the world. Although the significance of participatory arts is acknowledged, research to date fails to offer a systematic overview of the ways participatory arts deal with climate issues. Such overview would enable us to better orientate contemporary arts practices and support climate change educators who want to deploy aesthetic and participatory strategies in their education. Therefore, this paper provides a preliminary directory of procedural dramaturgies in current participatory arts on climate change.

A procedural dramaturgy is characteristic of participatory arts, i.e. performances and installations that integrate the audience’s actions into the artwork’s dramaturgy. Such dramaturgy consists of scenes that facilitate audience participation via its (un)spoken rules. This paper’s focus on procedural dramaturgy builds on the premise that it is indicative of how participatory art engages audiences in issues of climate change, e.g. as creators of a new climate vocabulary or as jury members of a climate trial. To this end, we conducted performance analysis and analysed interviews with practitioners in participatory arts, such as Coney (UK), Playfield (BE), and Théâtre à l'Envers (FR). A first indication is that procedural dramaturgies commonly incorporate strategies of audience engagement such as ‘witnessing', 'sensing', 'becoming, and 'worldmaking' and are underwritten by the cultural climate competences 'systems thinking', 'ecological thinking', and 'ecological sensemaking'.