Process and practice

What is the value of art in the climate crisis? When rising temperatures threaten the health and livelihood of workers and erratic weather disrupts the supplies of our basic needs like food and water, it can be difficult to imagine what art can bring to the conversation. Individual projects, such as Wild Rice’s riotous 2022 production Pulau Ujong, a kaleidoscopic voyage through the human and non-human history of Singapore, or Checkpoint Theatre’s recent production exploring the perspectives of workers in the petrochemical industry, Playing With Fire (2024) can spotlight the perspectives and issues that sit at the heart of the climate crisis, but climate change is a socio-environmental crisis more than a hundred years in the making, whose effects will reverberate generations from now. What kind of conversation can we cultivate around the practices of theatre in a fundamentally altered world?  

This was the discussion that evolved amongst practitioners and professionals at Green Stages 2024, the first of an annual symposium initiated by The Theatre Practice, that sought the perspectives of artists, producers, lighting and sound designers, arts managers, and more. This first edition was organised in collaboration with Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay. Moving away from theatre as a product, the conversations that spun out over a single evening dug deeper into theatre as artmaking, as a process embedded and entangled not just with the climate crisis, but with the use-and-discard conditions that produce it. The eventual goal of the symposium would be to co-create a Theatre Green Book for Singapore, a documentation of sustainable theatre practice. This extends work that started in the United Kingdom and has since spread to multiple countries.

While theatre is not a major contributor to environmental degradation at the moment, there is a high turnover rate for materials that go into the many productions that happen each year. In a space-constrained country like Singapore, the cost of storing objects after the end of a production is significant. Many props and set pieces end up being discarded for this reason, which is an unfortunate waste of material resources. With the first Global Plastics Treaty set to be finalised this year—and in a world where plastics are estimated to cover about forty percent of the Earth’s ocean surface—the need to consider our impact on the environment around us is more urgent than ever. 

Reuse and revalue

One thing I have picked up in the short time I have spent as a climate activist is that it never really is just about the climate. The climate crisis has been described as a wicked problem, multifaceted and rooted within the complex social, political and economic systems in our modern world. Thus, it is a crisis that will not be meaningfully resolved unless its root cause of unequal, unjust and exploitative practices is also challenged and addressed. In this sense, art and the climate crisis are rooted in the same system and its attendant problems. Creating a more sustainable way of theatremaking, cuts to the heart of the value society places on art, including the necessity of art that does not exploit its makers.

For instance, one idea floated during the symposium was the possibility of reusing and sharing materials such as props and sets to reduce wastage and incorporate sustainable practices into theatre making. However, participants in the symposium also pointed out that such solutions carried an implicit assumption that a recycling culture would help to cut operational costs, when this misvalues the skill and craft required to repurpose objects across projects that each possess their own distinct aesthetic vision.

The concepts of borrowing, recycling and reusing are easy to understand intuitively. We can see these ecological principles in the bio-physical world around us, such as how dead leaves and detritus are decomposed and used as nutrients for plant growth. These plants, in turn, feed, nourish and house us with fruit, fabrics and wood. And yet, when a tree is felled for timber, this alchemical transformation is ignored. The market value of timber accounts for the cost of human labour and machinery in felling the tree and transporting its logs, but the value of metabolic labour that a tree has generated, over years and decades, to convert waste into useable biomass, is completely taken for granted. In the same way, treating repurposing and recycling as “cutting corners” is far too reductive.

A society that operates in an extractive mode will misunderstand the significance of a salvage economy. When a production reuses materials from past projects, time is needed to experiment and formulate innovative ways to repurpose objects. This becomes doubly punishing in a time-poor society like the one we live in. The skill and craft involved in a scavenging act cannot be understated. Recognising and changing this not only restores the rightful value of non-humans like trees and their products, but also the labour of theatre projects that reuse not as a way to be cheap, but as an expression of our unique capacity to use our bodies and our energies to enact powerful transformations.

This sentiment was reflected by Tanja Beer, an Australian stage designer and scenographer who has a PhD in Ecoscenography and has worked on projects such as The Living Stage, a multi-location, multi-country endeavour that combines elements of stage design, permaculture and community engagement to create a biodegradable and edible stage. In the opening of Green Stages 2024, Beer presented on the topic of Ecoscenography and asked the question, “In an age of environmental awareness, how can we reconsider theatre production in a way that aligns with our eco-cultural values? This is an opportunity, not a constraint.” 

Time and money

Another factor exacerbating the challenges to sustainable theatremaking in Singapore is, therefore, the relatively short run times of shows here, reducing the lifespan of set pieces that were designed and created for each show, and necessitating that objects be created at a higher frequency due to the breakneck pace at which new productions and new seasons follow one another. At the same time, theatre practitioners are similarly subjected to the time crunch. More shows translate to more revenue, and given how underpaid the arts are here, maximising the number of productions in a season becomes a necessary strategy for covering costs.

In her essay Imagination and Reality, Jeanette Winterson writes, “For the artist, any artist, poet, painter, musician, time in plenty and an abundance of ideas are the necessary basics of creativity... The artist cannot perform between 9 and 6, five days a week… Money culture hates that. It must know what it is getting, when it is getting it, and how much it will cost.” I can think of so many times when my thought processes have been hijacked by money culture, where I’ve grown restless and impatient and the voice in my head demands something now, now, now!

It is in money culture that I hear echoes of an archetypal survivalist Singaporean, droning on about how an arts career here is not a financially viable pathway. While this is an overgeneralisation, it certainly harbours a kernel of truth. Our arts workers are overworked and underpaid, and this must be stated because it is a real structural obstacle faced by artists here.

Capitalism—money culture—buys our labour, and that labour is paid out in the currency of time. But time is so much more powerful a resource than just something to be bought. As Winterson noted, “The artist does not turn time into money, the artist turns time into energy, time into intensity, time into vision.” Is this not the same ecological alchemy that transmutes raw substrate into the sweetness of fruit, the comfort of shadow, and the playfulness of the wind in the leaves? To move towards a culture of theatre-making that is truly regenerative—for both the environment and for the people whose labour evolves culture—is to recognise the limits of organising our time and our lives in an extractive mode.

Root and node

Maybe to many of us, theatre is marginal. After all, the most pressing agenda in a climate transition would be a committed (inter)national strategy towards divesting from fossil fuels and reducing carbon emissions. In my experience, nobody has publicly called for better accountability in the theatre and performing arts sector for its carbon footprint with the same urgency as demands to cease operations of petrochemical refineries.

And yet, this does not mean that theatre, or any arts practice, exists separate from the collective action of a transition towards a more sustainable and fossil fuel-free world. As I have tried to show above, the challenges in moving towards sustainable theatre are rooted in the same structural issues surrounding how society values and cherishes art and arts workers.

As individuals, we may not be able to achieve much in the shift away from fossil fuels, but we are more than just individuals. The trees that produce the timber and the fruit that we depend on so greatly do not function in isolation, but as multispecies assemblages that trade nutrients with their root mycorrhizae in the soil, and even alert neighbouring trees to ecological changes such as the presence of pests through molecular signals. Likewise, we, as individuals, are also members of communities, collectives and industries—nodes of densely interwoven connections that hold the potential for a cascade of change.

And what comes after the transition? Envisioning and actualising the world of tomorrow is a vital salve to overcoming the mind-numbing catastrophes of today. If the here and now of our current crisis is afflicted with doom and anxiety, then it becomes all the more pertinent to hold space for its antithesis, for the then and there of a regenerative future, and to me, that is one filled with a love for theatre, drama and performance. In my personal sketches of another world—one where the worst impacts of climate change have been averted—there is always a space for the stage, for collective storytelling and cathartic, joyful artmaking. And joy is not marginal.