The Climate Odyssey project intended to generate inspiration for transformative change through exploring local initiatives and the relationalities between a community and the natural world. Through this case study, we inquired into climate change through devised theatre, dance, and storytelling. We explored how embodied art forms can lead to a deeper understanding and connection to a topic that is commonly perceived as abstract and distant. In this section, we detail our process for creating Climate Odyssey and the impact of this process on the participants and discuss insights gained from this process.
Co-creating a performance
Five scenes emerged from the workshops. This material was arranged in a collage-like structure, giving the odyssey an abstract form. Each scene was independent from the others and yet all of them drew on the overarching theme of climate change, offering different viewpoints, images, and narratives. As such, these created an overarching storyline. The scenes were enacted in five different locations along a pathway, following the logic of a journey of discovery. A “guide”, played by one of the participant actors, led the audience on this odyssey to each of the five scenes that were located in public spaces within the neighborhood. The open-air settings were prepared with chairs for 30 spectators. To allow a larger audience to attend the performance, three consecutive showings were offered. The duration of the performance was around 80 min and was integrated within the program of a local festival.
Each of the five scenes grew out of a combination of devising exercises from the interactive workshops. For instance, the hybrid beings (Fig. 1) in Scene 1 were prompted by a creative writing exercise, in which participants wrote poetry from the perspective of endangered species (Non-human Stakeholders; Table 1). Offering an alternative to an anthropocentric view on climate change, the choreographed movements of the dancers illustrated the interrelationship and interconnectedness between humans and nature. Depicting the awakening of a single creature, the movements of its individual parts were shown to impact the whole of the being and vice versa through a choreographed sequence of a wave drawing lines against the wall behind the dancers in a harmonious ‘chain’ effect of movement (Fig. 1).
Then, as Scene 1 came to a close, the atmosphere began to change as the ‘chain of connection’ broke down and morphed into an image of survival and disconnection. The movements of the dancers were driven by the opposing forces of hope and desperation, control and rebellion, oppression, and subversion. The scene explored possible future scenarios in a warming world. It juxtaposed the specific impacts of climate change on a community as well as the community’s resilience.
In contrast to the abstract and imaginative quality of Scene 1, Scene 2 explored concrete past and present impacts related to extreme weather events. Staged as a ‘coffee table dialogue’, the scene was created from a storytelling exercise, where participants were asked to share experiences that made them aware of a changing climate. A more traditional theatre style was adopted as the performers' individual memories of how they first came to notice the impacts of climate change were structured into dialogue (Fig. 2).
Scene 3 centered on the inner conflict between engaging in climate action and the personal struggle to believe that a single person can make a change. The scene developed out of a monologue written by one of the participants expressing doubt about his individual actions to address climate change (e.g., composting, shorter showers) knowing that other actions (e.g., buying a new smartphone) would level out his efforts. This scene brought forward the reality that facing climate change requires profound individual and systemic changes. This monologue was contrasted with another performer, a pregnant woman, dancing in the background suggesting the possibility of a rebirth of humanity. Scene 3 hinged on the juxtaposition between her dance and his words, between sadness and hope, rational thinking, and intuitive knowing. The woman’s soft movements evoked the possibility of transformation and what is yet to come, contrasted with the technical language of measuring one’s own impact expressed in the young man´s monologue (Fig. 3).
In Scene 4, ‘humanity’ as a whole is depicted as being both responsible for climate change and as the victim of its impacts. The actors representing ‘humanity’ walk from one side to the other, representing a mass movement. From time to time, they stop to embody an image, a tableau, and then return to their walking state. These ‘frozen pictures’ drew on images collected by the participants as part of their individual research. The pictures depicted weather-related events (floods of Idaí, Mozambique, 2019; floods of Lisbon, 1967; fires of Pedrogão Grande, Portugal, 2017) that the participants considered important due their scale, impact, or symbolic value (Fig. 4).
In contrast to the dark tone of Scene 4, the final scene, Scene 5, ended the performance on a note of community building and connection. Set in a local green space this scene used music, specifically a drum circle, to foster the idea that resilience can be achieved with collaboration. Audience members were invited to become performers and take a participatory role in creating the final scene. Through a series of exercises based on listening and repeating, they created the music for the final scene (Fig. 5). This process moved the attention toward the ‘voice’ of the whole of the group and spoke to the profound human need for belonging and the desire to feel in harmony in a group. The co-creative approach of the drum circle related to the capacity of individuals to act consciously as a whole. The final act of planting a tree together concluded the performance through a symbol of hope.
The Climate Odyssey performance moved the audience to tears and laughter and was a powerful way to culminate this research. The positive reception of the performance was in part due to the commitment of the participants to the workshops and the creative process as a whole. Throughout the regular meetings, individuals took the risk to share their experiences and different ways of knowing. The group embraced this vulnerability and showed one another that these experiences were of value. From this, a sense of community emerged among the group. This could be seen in the increasing chatter among the participants at the beginning and after each workshop session, the hugging and kisses to greet and say good-bye, and in the overall supportive atmosphere during the sessions. Through fostering a safe space and a foundation of trust, participants were supported in taking personal and creative risks. This allowed each participant to overcome personal obstacles as performer-creators and to develop confidence both as individuals and as an ensemble. Taking part in the creation and performance of Climate Odyssey was an accomplishment for many of them. The overwhelmingly positive reaction of the audience reinforced this sense of achievement. It also empowered participants to see the value of taking action through creative means.
Exploring the transformative potential of embodied art forms
How do we determine if an action, such as creating Climate Odyssey, had a transformative impact? We will argue here that transformation may be made up of several subtle, yet profound, individual changes. Recognizing the challenges related to measuring these impacts, this article set out to explore the potential of performative arts practices for contributing to equitable and sustainable transformations. There is a knowledge–action gap for many people when it comes to moving beyond abstract notions of climate change and instead relating to sustainability in a way that empowers personal agency. Drawing on personal, embodied knowledges through art practices may be a way to address this gap and to create innovative solution spaces. Acknowledging the power of emotions and other ways of knowing, we used art to help us reevaluate our daily actions, challenge cultural norms, and realize the interconnection between body and mind.
The dataset, including qualitative interviews, feedback forms, and the survey a year after the performance, provided some insight on the new meanings and perspectives the project generated among the participants. Two themes that are particularly relevant for sustainability transformations were identified through this data. These were: a new sense of agency, and a different relationship to the topic of climate change. The deeper sense of personal agency may have emerged through the reflective exercises that were built into the project. Over the course of several months, participants and we as facilitators explored a set of questions around the relationships to self, others and nature and reflected upon one’s role in contributing to just and sustainable change. Possibly, this led to a greater sense of agency as the following quote from a participant interview suggests: “I think that the whole process of the [Climate] Odyssey workshops will help me to put things into practice. […] I mean it made me think deeper about my own role, or what I could do as an individual, a lot deeper than I did before. […] I think my experience will influence other people who did not participate in the workshop also.” This finding may relate to Freire’s insight that “responsibility cannot be acquired intellectually, but only through experience” (Freire 1974, p. 13) and highlights the importance of experiential, embodied learning to develop empowerment and agency.
Furthermore, this sense of agency extended to a deeper appreciation for building relationships and teamwork in community. In reflecting 1 year after the performance, the co-creative process was one of the aspects that stayed most strongly with the participants. In the follow-up survey, one participant wrote: “The greatest learning was the experience provided by the interaction with very different people. An almost ad-hoc team produced something greater than the sum of the parts.” This supports the premise that such co-creative processes featuring different actors have deeply inspiring and empowering effects. The co-creative process showed that, despite the challenge and messiness of engaging complexity and the unknown, it is possible to produce impactful, and even aesthetically satisfying work as a group.
Art’s ability to create agency among people can be attributed to its potential to provide moments of learning and inspiration (Bentz and O’Brien 2019). This naturally relates to the second theme we recognized in our data: the development of a different relationship to climate change by participants. One participant emphasized that the framing and metaphor of climate change transformations as a journey of discovery led to new perspectives: “For me it was a way to have a deeper understanding of climate change and to have also different solutions in mind. I would say, more collective ones. I think that I also became more optimistic. Because I was really pessimistic about it in the beginning.” This quote speaks to findings that the transformative potential of art is related to its capacity to attend to and transform emotions, creating positive emotions such as hope, responsibility, care, and solidarity (Ryan 2016). It can then activate the desire to engage and contribute to alternative futures. It may create a force and a desire to help close the gap between what we know and what we do about climate change (Galafassi et al. 2018).
Furthermore, engaging with art can help people to see things from new angles through its ability to “slow down” thinking (Stengers 2005). It is potentially in this “slowing down” that creative processes facilitate that participants have the opportunity to question their frames of reference and practice reflexivity. For instance, the photovoice exercise was an important tool within this process, as the following interview quote demonstrates: “I think it [the photovoice exercise] made you go a lot deeper into the questions […]. If I just had to write the answers, I would have probably answered all those questions in two minutes. But the challenge was to take a picture to answer that question, so that actually made me think about it.” The shift in perspective that is achieved through this exercise hinges on its openness, which allows for free thinking without expectation—and therefore the emergence of new knowledge.
Overall, the follow-up survey a year later showed that Climate Odyssey’s emphasis on experiential and embodied learning facilitated an atmosphere of “community, oneness, growth, path to self-awareness and awareness of the world” among the participants, and a sense of “becoming aware by experiencing the whole being, through the physical, emotional, mental and in the collective” (a participant’s quotes in follow-up survey). This supports the importance of dissolving the Cartesian belief of a mind body divide and, instead, engaging the innate knowledge that our senses perceive and hold when we address complex problems such as climate change. It provides insight into the potential of embodied art forms to facilitate spaces in which local transformations can take place.
Limitations
In retrospect, a potential limitation of our approach was a limited synergistic collaboration between the community and the local authorities. We believe that there is a need to closely collaborate with local authorities in a synergistic way to produce sustained impact and to shift systems. System shifts occur when the values and principles of two entities are aligned and when both are committed to sustainable change (Sharma 2017). We believe that, in the future, a stronger alignment can be fostered through value-based conversations focusing on the common ground between the project and the supporting institutions. As with many sustainability projects, there is a risk that the creative impulse may be lost without a supportive structure to advance the insights and energy generated by the project. Recognizing the need to nurture the newly created sense of community and agency, we planted three trees in the neighborhood that are native to the Iberian Peninsula, one at the end of each performance. This was an attempt to create a symbol for the generated sense of responsibility and care that required continuous commitment from the community members.