Democracy works but democracy is hard work. It demands involvement from the entire civil society in order to make its way. This is not just my understanding but is that of virtually everyone who was in Paris for the COP21.
The UN agreement hammered out with much intensity and urgency could just as easily have failed but for the tremendous populist energy outside the hall, the clamor and the push of the many thousands of non-delegates, ordinary people, activists and artists, many from the most threatened lands, come to Paris on their own or their nonprofit’s dime, because we shared a sense that without our demands, the delegates inside the hall might flounder and fail.
Instead, 195 nations signed at least part of what we asked them to: recognition that temperature rise has to be kept below 1.5 degrees, with money for the poorer nations to off-set damages already incurred and aid for development of renewables.
Still, the UN agreement is without teeth. What each nation proposes to do to cut emissions ensures that temperature will still rise 3.6 degrees, creating a mainly uninhabitable earth.
And the agreement could not be ratified as a legally binding treaty because of the US Congress, on record as denying climate change. Instead, nations say they “should” reduce emissions to keep the world climate livable over much of the globe; they do not say that they “shall”.
Yet, an unenforceable, flawed agreement by 195 nations of the world is far, far better than no agreement at all. On this just about everyone agrees. (Though world renowned climate scientist James Hansen, for reasons outlined above has been shouting “fraud” before and after the Cop21. Hansen wants a fee on carbon and he’s correct.)
Nevertheless, this agreement puts the governments of the world on record as cognizant of the severity of the massive threats a fossil fuel driven economy poses to collective life on earth.
And for these reasons, the people did prevail in Paris, and must continue to prevail.
The civil society presence that dominated Paris these last two weeks, those thousands of us who took to the streets in defiance of the French ban on public protest on Saturday, Dec. 12, succeeded. It felt palpable in Paris that without our meetings in conference halls, cafes, performance spaces, and on the streets all over the city, the talks might well have utterly failed.
In the hands of its people alive right now lies the fate of the earth and all her creatures for the rest of time.
Only human beings can and must reverse the deadly trajectory upon which human kind has launched itself, with colonialism, the slave trade, the Descartesean illusion that nature is dead, and the industrial revolution, and all of our wars, for the sake of an idea of progress based on oil consumption and monetary gain. Now, it is clear: we must utterly change course.
My theater partners from the US and I stayed for eight days at Place to B near in the North of Paris with 20,000 others who came and went during the two weeks. We were of all ages and from all places: the Maldives, Australia, the Philippines, and China, the African continent and North and South American. We met over breakfasts, dinners, drinks, clattering away on our computers, exchanging energy, plans, and stories.
My partners and I had come to Paris to do my play, “Extreme Whether”. How foolish. What do stage plays have to do with climate negotiations anyway? And yet, and yet, we would not not have done this work. “Important” was the word I heard from virtually every audience member at our three public readings. “Important and great” “Resonant” “Important and beautiful.” “Like a classic.”
And those of us engaged in the rehearsal process, eight actors from Switzerland, France and the U.S., who did not know one another before, would not have foregone the fellowship we found over the shared effort to speak the story of the play which in many ways is the story of the world’s struggle to arrive at the understanding to which we have now come: That humans beings must change and we are the generations of artists tasked with fostering this transformation.
What is the role of theater in this time of necessary activism?
I was recently asked by a young interviewer if writing, with all the time it takes and its use of paper (though I compose on a computer) is not antithetical to what is needed now, the speed that is, to push a speedy change of consciousness and behavior. I answered: “But it’s the writers who reflect on what it means to be alive now, and who leave a record, if there is any to be left.” And it is the experience of story-telling that encourages and creates empathy.
Before I left for Paris my students, of many races and nations, at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, had put four short climate change plays on radio 568, the campus station, along with discussions of the resonant meanings of each. The plays were among 50 newly written short climate change plays gathered from playwrights around the world for Climate Theater Action by three women playwrights, Chantal Bilodeau, Caridid Svich and Elaine Avila,. My “Hermes in the Anthropocene: A Dogologue” is one of these plays and has now been performed at Reed College, the Boston Conservatory, in Melbourne, Australia and is part of a film made in Italy. My students chose four plays to perform, about: endangered bees “Death in Midtown” by Mindy Dickstein; the quarrel between generations, “The Cow Is Dead” by Deborah Laufer; food production, “Portuguese Tomato” by Elaine Avila, and environmental injustice, “The Same Bullshit” by Koffi Kwahulé
Participation in the Climate Action Theater project became the most transformative work my multi-cultural students did all semester in our classes on Environmental Justice and Theater and Justice. Those who acted were enlivened by their ability to use their voices to say what they want to say. Mohammad Habib, who played the endangered bee had been inspired by the verse in the Koran about the importance of bees; likewise, black and brown students wanted to speak to the injustice visited against poor people (so often) of color in “The Same Bullshit”. Those who were announcers, two of them veterans and one of those a beekeeper, were pushed to put their knowledge into communicable form, and all of the students joined in play selection, creation of the music and sound effects, and in spirited classroom discussion of the issues. My students now have the option to write their own climate change plays (for their finals next week) and at many of the colleges where some of the 50 plays have been performed original student plays were also presented.
What, then, is the role of climate change theater as we move forward? Theater provides the visceral experience that spoken language alone can give. Language spoken from the stage originates in the corporeal, sentient bodies of the actors and enters the corporeal, sentient bodies of the audience, binding self to self through breath. In a good performance, one can feel this exchange as audience and actors breathe together encouraging and expanding meaning.
The audiences who leaned forward in their chairs at each of the readings of “Extreme Whether” in Paris in order to catch each resonant meaning now landing inside of them also on their next breath handed back to the actors their palpable reality of being changed, affirmed and made more whole. The actors received this information and found deeper meaning still to give. So, the living audience inspires the living actors.
This is true of all meaningful theater in every moment since the theater was first invented in ancient Athens where it was mandated every citizen of the nascent democracy attend, but it is nevermore true than now when climate change theater has to give form to similarly profound and very necessary changes in human consciousness.
Like the Greek theater that defined democracy, or the Shakespearean that gave us entry into the unconscious, climate change theater is classic in position and intent. Like the Greek and Renaissance theaters, climate change theater stands at the nexus of two realities—an old, wasteful, violent known world, and a newly felt, and sometimes already lived, sustainable world of insight and connection between self and others across racial, national and species boundaries, a remaking of the individual as newly responsible for a living world. (In the other ages of classical drama, that the natural world would survive to have its way with humankind was a given. This, however, most significantly, is no longer true. We are the custodians, now, not simply of our individual fates, but of the fate of the natural world. A great drama ensues.)
Aristotle defined Action as the essence of drama, and Action, he famously said, is “movement of the spirit.” Such a movement of the individual and collective spirit toward a sustainable, cherished and embodied living world (in which animals and all of nature speak to us and we hear) is the necessary work of climate action theater. This is a theater that recreates consciousness itself. Only the poetry of spoken language has ever been able to accomplish such a turn.
Yet, in this country, the theater is severely censored and the climate change theater projects I’ve mentioned take place as “poor theater” without large institutional support. “Who sits on the boards of our regional theaters but those who make their money from fossil fuels?” “You’re right,” replied a well-known film and stage actor completely taken with “Extreme Whether” in Paris and asking about its future production plans. When James Hanson saw my play “Extreme Whether” last year after its premier performance in New York, he commented that “love of nature” was his favorite part of the play, and that he hoped we could “get this to a broader audience.
Still and all the fact that playwrights are writing climate change plays means a literary theater culture is growing up against and despite of the economic censorship that makes our task far more difficult.
Just like the citizen actions at the Cop21, theater and literary artists will continue to recreate the culture in the nick of time, in order to light the path that turns us away from angry, alienated, sexist, classist, racist, domineering, murderous extractivism, toward an understanding of the more complex and fascinating dimensions of our struggles with compassion and connection to-protection-of the web of life.