By 2024, the British director Katie Mitchell’s latest project “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction,” will have been shown in 10 countries. Yet neither Mitchell, nor any cast or crew, will cross a single border.
The experiment is part of “Sustainable Theater?”, an initiative of the Vidy-Lausanne Theater in Lausanne, Switzerland, in conjunction with a network of 10 European producers. Mitchell has created a “touring score” — an online handbook with detailed instructions on every aspect of the production — that is handed to local artists in theaters at each stop. But those artists have creative control, too: “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction,” a monologue by the American playwright Miranda Rose Hall about a young theater worker reckoning with man-made damage to the environment, will have a different director and look everywhere it goes.
This commitment to zero travel is part of the theater’s efforts to adapt for climate change. In recent years, a growing number of artists and venues have started to rethink their reliance on easy, yet environmentally costly, international travel.
At the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, where the show opens Thursday, Mitchell’s vision has been reinterpreted by the Rome-based collective lacasadargilla. “You have the artistic freedom to make your own show,” Mitchell’s instructions read, “while working within the parameters outlined below.” Those include casting, music and technical requirements — down to a video tutorial explaining how to build a power meter.
Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli, a member of lacasadargilla who directed the Milan version, called Mitchell’s production, which she saw over Zoom when it was presented in Lausanne, “Model Zero.” Now, it felt as if she and Mitchell were co-directing from a distance, she said.
It is an unusual production model in European theater, where directors tend to have the final word on every iteration of their work. The goal, Mitchell explained in a video interview, was to figure out new avenues for theater-making in the face of an environmental threat. “In the light of climate change, you can’t have the normal hierarchies, systems, structures, or control, because the subject is so much bigger and so much more important,” she said. “You have to relinquish artistic control.”
Mitchell, who is 57 and renowned across Europe as a theater and opera director, said that she could afford to experiment with what she called “eco-dramaturgy.” “I’m at the end of my career, not at the beginning, so I don’t have anything to lose if I mess up artistically. I’d like to keep the young generation free of that, and they just get the outcome.”
The “Sustainable Theater?” program started with virtual conversations. To come up with a feasible production model, Mitchell and another environmentally conscious artist, the French director and choreographer Jérôme Bel, held online meetings twice a month for nearly a year with Vincent Baudriller, the artistic director of Vidy-Lausanne Theater, and Caroline Barneaud, its director of international projects.
The team also linked up with researchers from the University of Lausanne to evaluate the theater’s carbon footprint. Completing a similar self-evaluation process is a requirement for the Vidy-Lausanne’s European partners, which include theaters in Ghent, Belgium; Maribor, Slovenia; Vilnius, Lithuania; Zagreb, Croatia; Lisbon; and Stockholm. (Taiwan’s National Theater and Concert Hall has also signed up.)
Production-wise, the partners signed on sight unseen: At the time, Mitchell and Bel thought they might create a single production (and script) together. Instead, each theater will get two: In addition to “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction,” a work by Bel, called “Jérôme Bel,” will also be restaged by participating theaters.
Mitchell’s work has been responding to the climate crisis for a decade, onstage and off. She stopped flying entirely in 2012, she said, after meeting the British scientist Stephen Emmott and hearing him talk about the need for radical behavior change. The zero-travel rule for “Sustainable Theater?” was her idea — and “irritated people, definitely, to begin with,” she said. Since she is based in Britain, she directed “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction” entirely over Zoom ahead of its Lausanne premiere last September (which she attended virtually).
Cameras were positioned inside the theater to relay rehearsals to Mitchell, and operated by a dedicated technician. “It’s not entirely easy to read a room, and you can’t pick up the little micro-conversations that are going on. We had to have a different protocol of communication,” she said. “You could view everything as a problem. Me and my team, we chose not to.”
Barneaud, from the Vidy-Lausanne, said that the experience was a positive one for the theater’s in-house team. “It gave everyone a greater sense of responsibility. The sound engineer, for instance, had to act as ‘ears’ for the composer, Paul Clark, since he wasn’t in the room.”
Out of the instructions in the script that Milan’s Piccolo Teatro and other theaters received after the premiere, only a few are set in stone. One is to take performances entirely off the electrical grid. Instead, to generate electricity, Mitchell positioned stationary bikes onstage that performers ride throughout the show. Mitchell said this was about “showing the effort of electricity.” (There are tutorials in the touring score on how to build the bikes, too.)
The Milan version, made for a larger stage than in Switzerland, and with more elaborate sets, employs four bikes instead of two. While climate change has been a recurring theme in lacasadargilla’s work since its inception in 2005, the show’s requirements still forced its members to rethink some habits, Ferlazzo Natoli said: “Normally, we work much more with video, but video consumes a lot, and it requires a stable quantity of energy.”
Working with constraints had proved stimulating, she added. “It’s so exciting, because we discovered that we can work with devices, lights and instruments that we didn’t know before.”
The artists and producers involved all stressed that the model they had developed was just one option to limit theater’s impact on global warming, rather than a one-and-done answer. “I think we’re really at the beginning of this journey,” Claudio Longhi, the director of the Teatro Piccolo, said. “This project is a way to ask questions, a provocation.”
When the Italian version of “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction” premieres on Thursday, Mitchell will be watching — over Zoom, of course. But there will be no notes from her afterward, she said. “It belongs to the local artists in Milan. They’re free to do whatever they want.”
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
