The term “catastrophe” has a complex history that has become deeply embedded in Western, and increasingly global, cultures. So it is natural enough, when confronted by a phenomenon as harrowing as climate change, to employ the concept and its attendant connotations. But the lens of catastrophe often distorts more than it reveals.

Traditional performance genres are inadequate to represent the climate crisis, whose proper narrative form is the epic. Using epic genres instrumentally can help create the cultural imaginaries that will move people to call for the revolution of our planet-destroying economic system, although at the same time it will be necessary to isolate and neutralize the ways that epic modes in popular entertainment entrench the power of fossil-fuel interests and normalize incipient ecofacism.

Considering correspondences between historical and dramatic imagination, how can we theatre and performance scholars find ways to represent the Capitalocene and offer a vision of a future other than that of decline or incessant growth?

The human species has the ability to understand complex systems such as planetary boundaries. But then it does not take action and destroys its existential basis, its global habitat. Whether the story ends here is up to us. A new relationship between science, art, and activism suggests a new paradigm to support a more sustainable existence.

The term “Anthropocene” is obfuscatory, and as an analytic framework it has a serious blind spot: the conflicts stemming from the uneven distribution of the costs and benefits of the “Age of Man,” which are the very eco-conflicts on which artists in our field should focus. We should be talking about the “Capitalocene,” a term that locates climate change within the history of capitalism and colonialism, and suggests stories that deserve time on our stages.

How might performance contribute to a reversal of the social values and political systems that have produced climate chaos, plunging countless species into crisis and catastrophe? What recognitions would such a reversal require? What misrecognitions must it defeat?

Using “climate change” to name a recent, unnatural, and rapid process of warming that is the result of pollution conceals the causal order of events. Those who generate this semantic confusion are in the service of those who produce the global warming at the root of accelerated climate change. Theatre can pass judgment on them, as a virtual, possible, and probable Areopagus of our age.

Two very different points of entry reflect on the issue of performance and climate change. The Covid-19 pandemic, though not directly related, looms as the unavoidable condition from which to rethink eco-cosmopolitanism.

Climate change was the defining issue in the 2022 Australian federal election. As a new administration takes power, all sectors, including the performing arts, need to keep up the pressure. An iconic moment of “coal theatrics” in Parliament House, so labeled by the Australian media, stands in contrast to artistic performances that continue to put pressure on the framers of political and cultural policy.

The strategy, tactics, and aesthetics of the global environmental movement Extinction Rebellion can serve as inspiration for the theatre and performance community to unleash its creativity in response to the climate crisis.

Since 2019, the lecture and discussion series Burning Futures: On Ecologies of Existence at Berlin’s HAU Hebbel am Ufer has been exploring the significance of environmental and climate destruction in the context of contemporary theatre. Combining positions of eco-Marxism and -feminism, black studies, and new materialism, panels examine political and cultural dimensions of the apocalyptic discourses that accompany current ecocatastrophes as well as possible ways out of the socioecological mess.

The complexity of current ecological crises, such as climate change, calls for new modes of knowledge production. Common Dreams — Flotation School (2017) by the Portuguese, Brussels-based artist Maria Lucia Cruz Correia is a construction site and a pedagogical prototype that challenges the linear transfer of knowledge in scientific research.

Inspired by Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, the short play Homo Sapiens humorously explores whether Homo sapiens caused their own demise or managed to evolve into a new, more enlightened species.

Now that decades-long efforts to convince diverse publics that anthropogenic climate change is real have largely succeeded, but efforts to avoid extreme climate change have not, what comes next? By understanding the performative nature of infrastructure, communities can bring critical and creative attention to physical structures and daily practices that compose normative ecological relations and cocreate more just and livable climates.

How is the climate crisis viewed by workers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, who reclaim recyclables on a garbage dump — a place long entangled with decay and death? The act of reclaiming waste is a reminder that it is impossible to understand the current crisis without considering its origins in the labor of racial capitalism and in the productivism that capitalism demands. Reclaiming requires staying with degradation, remaking a world that is seemingly always ending.

Understanding the Anthropocene in island environments means looking at the emotional entanglements between island populations and their metropolitan diasporas in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and the United States.

Climate change and resultant environmental catastrophes are a growing factor in the increased number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean. Some end up in Italian prisons where rehabilitation programs emphasize Italian culture production as a path toward inclusion in Italian society. These programs model how to address climate-induced eco-migration and new templates for tackling climate change through prison reform.

Any planet-wide solutions to climate change have to be enforced by nation-states. China and the United States, currently producing the most carbon dioxide, are competing with growing hostility. The interstate hostility, even in a new Cold War era, may push competing nations to implement climate-friendly actions for the sake of national security.

Discussion on environmental sustainability in the past two decades has often engendered more controversy than agreement. The Beijing Olympics in 2008 and 2022 are examples of state bureaucrats and international media outlets upholding polarized viewpoints on achieving carbon neutrality. The “original ecology” folk song of 21st-century China further demonstrates how anthropocentric interests could easily divert people’s attention away from issues critical to planetary wellness.