TY - BOOK AU - Kershaw,Baz ED - Cambridge University Press. TI - Theatre ecology: environments and performance events SN - 9780521120746 AV - PN1643 .K48 2009 PY - 2009///, 2007 CY - Cambridge, England, New York PB - Cambridge University Press KW - Performing arts KW - Political aspects KW - Environmental aspects N1 - Originally published in hardcover in 2007; Includes bibliographical references (pages 327-345) and index; -- 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 N2 - 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 ER -