Theatre ecology : environments and performance events / Baz Kershaw.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 327-345) and index.

Originally published in hardcover in 2007.

-- A kind of storm On theatre and performance ecology -- In the Present: Qualities of Theatre and Performance. Performance contexts: theatre at the end of its tether Performance archives: catching the Northern sublime Performance limits: steps to a paradoxology. -- Of the Past: Histories of Theatre and Performance. Economies of performance: theatre against democracy Audiences of performance: declining participation Spectacles of performance: excesses of power. -- For the Future: Ecologies of Theatre and Performance. Performance and black holes: on eco-activism Performance and energy: on free radicals Performance and biospheres: on hermetic theatre -- Listen up for the cracks.

Here the author presents this study into the relationships between performance, theatre and environmental ecology. What are the challenges to theatre and the purposes of performance in an ecologically threatened world? How might ecological understandings refigure the interactions of theatre and performance? Is there a future for theatre as an ethically and politically alert art through environmental action? This work gets to grips with such questions by investigating an eclectic international sample of environments and performance events, in theatres and beyond. It proposes that performance is a peculiarly twenty-first century addiction which may be at the root of global warming. Addressing this possibility head-on, it reaches for pathological hope in historical theatre at the end of its tether and rumbles the contemporary paradigm of performance for signs of eco-sanity. Recognising the future is always before its time, the book is a paradoxically ironic tract for survival at the start of a fresh ecological era.