Greening Theatre Landscapes: Developing Sustainable Practice Futures in Theatre Graduates

This paper provides insight into how sustainability literacies can be embedded in theatre performance and production practices in a university context and consequently offers a model of sustainable theatre education that may adopted by others in the university and tertiary sector. The aim of this paper is to discuss sustainable theatre performance and production, practices in the Contemporary and Applied Theatre Department at Griffith University, Australia. Theatre production is resource vociferous and can be acknowledged as inefficient in its wastage and consumption of power. The negative impact of traditional theatre production practices upon the natural environment has seen inroads into policy change and practices within theatre companies at national and international levels. Further, the adaptation of green changes in higher education sectors suggests that there are initiatives being implemented in subjects other than science and environmental studies (Shephard 2008). The adoption of Greening the Theatre at Griffith University suggests the theatre department has a commitment to fostering environmentally sustainable societies through teaching and learning and campus operations. This paper specifically discusses one project: Dust (Hassall 2015) as being one of the major outcomes to date of the Greening the Theatre Project (Rowan 2015). The Greening the Theatre Project embeds green philosophies and practices within its university theatre production outputs. The qualitative practice-led research draws on theories of ecocriticism to generate the creative development methods that informed the development of the performance script. The production practices that were implemented in the staging of Dust were informed by Rowan’s (2015) case study research of sustainability practices in an independent theatre production context. Consequently, the paper discusses how ecocritical themes were investigated as creative process and further how the performance practice aligns with the adoption of a green philosophy for production, specifically in design considerations, staging realisation and administration.