On Enclosed Spaces and the Great Outdoors

Warning: this show is cancelled to help contain the spread of the new coronavirus. 

We live in an age in which human activity has a profound impact on our physical and ecological surroundings. How can we create stories, aesthetics, and spaces of experience to deal with this situation reflexively and critically? What role can the performing arts play in the debate on climate crisis?

What remains of the theatre as we know it when its walls crumble and the outside world creeps in? Perhaps we discover a landscape in which humans are no longer in the foreground and where various life-forms and agents claim their place. Do we need to develop different modes of attention to appreciate these more-than-human actors as well as our intertwining with them? How do we relate to the material witnesses and ghosts of oppression and extinction that linger in these emergent ecosystems?

Grounding follows a group of people embodying the theatre, a wandering community confused if not ‘uprooted’ by climate change. Where can we – artists, researchers, citizens – find a ground to land, to encounter one another and the environment, present ourselves and reflect upon urgent matters?

On Enclosed Spaces and the Great Outdoors – 4. Grounding  is the fourth in a series of performative conferences curated by David Weber-Krebs and Jeroen Peeters. A variety of hybrid artistic and theoretical interventions are specially created for this project and will constitute a dramaturgy of an entire day. Lunch is included. On Sunday there is room for further reflection in conversation with all the guests.