Intermedial Meaning-Making in Climate Change Theater

What if theatre wants to affect people in ways that will let them leave the theatre not simply as people that appreciate art, but as people open to perceiving theatre as an intervention in social discourse and ethical debates? 

Numerous playwrights who address climate change struggle to make us hear and see ideas such as dissolving the dividing lines between the human and the non-human. They experiment with staging the unrepresentable long-term aggregation of data that we call climate. This talk on (anglophone) climate change theatre proposes a range of intermedial methods through which theatre-makers may help us re-think our perspectives on surviving on Planet Earth.  

• Nassim W. Balestrini is Full Professor of American Studies and Intermediality at the University of Graz, Austria, where she also heads the Centre for Intermediality Studies in Graz (CIMIG). Contemplating borders and mobility – be it between nations, cultures, languages, or media – informs much of her research. More recently, climate change theater has played a major role in her research and teaching. In this context, she has been exploring ways of collaborating with artists in order to integrate creative work into literary and cultural studies classroom. 

This lecture was originally planned during VUB's weKONEKT.week and is a collaboration between Kaaitheater and the Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings (CLIC). The lecture will be held in English but, during the Q&A, questions can be asked in Dutch, English, and German.