Summary

This high-impact original devised physical theatre piece was created over four years of development. Rachel Bowditch (project director) and Karen Jean Martinson (project dramaturg) facilitated a series of devising labs, collaborating with a team of dozens of artists and students. Anthropocene seeks to ring the alarm bells about the climate crisis, making visible how the acceleration of our consumption had led us to our current unsustainable situation.

Climate change is inextricably linked with neoliberal capitalism, globalization, advertising and commodification, industrialization, extraction economies, and the historical legacies of colonization, enslavement, and the racial- and gender-based oppressions that justify these systems. Capitalism and its attendant scarcity

mindset cannot save us.

We need to tell a new story.

By using a performance vocabulary that resists anthropocentrism and its resultant hierarchies, the performance emphasizes how we are out of balance with ourselves, each other, and the earth. Rooted in deep dramaturgical research, Anthropocene tackles the climate crisis using non-traditional and non-linear storytelling approaches that emphasize the need for structural change.