Theatre for a Changing Climate: A Lecturer’s Portfolio

Abstract

The intra-ventions described in this chapter offer diffractive readings of my own—often clumsy—attempts to bring posthuman ideas into the seminar room and studio while teaching on two different modules over the course of a term at a UK University in 2017. Grasping at a diffracted form of autoethnography, the chapter aims to disclose and expose my attempts to craft a curriculum that eschews human exceptionalism in attendance to more-than-human matters and materials in dramatic writing concerned with anthropogenic climate change, theatrical performance and spaces of learning. I share patches of my creative and critical portfolio from the term, attending to the affects, accidents, discoveries and limits of posthuman pedagogy in these theatre teaching contexts. My proposition-in-the-making is for a posthuman pedagogy that notices its own intra-active ‘becomings-with’ (Haraway in Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the chthulucene. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2016) as ‘entangled phenomena’ (Barad in Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2007) aspiring to reach toward ‘ethico-onto-epistemological’ possibilities of creative learning in a becoming-world. A posthuman pedagogy might begin to move away from human exceptionalism in a way that is simultaneously humbling and empowering, performing the rediscovery of ourselves as weather-bodies, stuck with others in the trouble (whether we “think” we’re entangled with it or not).