Paper short abstract:

Integrating performing arts research into the environmental humanities frame, the aim of this paper is to highlight spatiotemporality in relation to environmental issues across ecotheatrical performances in Latvia.

Paper long abstract:

One of the human challenges in deepening ecological awareness is the weak human capacity to think across spatiotemporal scales [Morton 2018]. Humans organize their dominant imaginaries, practices, and politics around a human-scaled existence [Neimanis et al. 2015]. However, ecodramaturgical approach connects human and non-human stories to the longterm cause of climate change through multivocal, multitemporal, and transspecies stories [ May 2021]. In order to address intangibility of environmental issues is needed ability to imagine our implication in pasts, futures and worlds at scales different to our own [Neimanis et al. 2015].

Environmental historians point out that natural world is not a passive background to human dramas [Bird Rose et al. 2012]; in turn, theatre scholars highlight that nature for a long time has been just a background for social conflicts in modern drama, so theatre is required to resist the use of nature only as a metaphor [Chaudhuri 1994].

Taking into account that theatre is a practice of collaborative imagination and at the same time affective experience, it gives a platform for rewriting narratives shaping human and non-human relations in the context of climate urgencies and creates place and space for ecological, also environmental imaginaries.

Integrating performing arts research into the environmental humanities frame, the aim of this paper is to highlight spatiotemporality in relation to environmental issues across ecotheatrical performances in Latvia.