Between Literature and Activism: Environmental Theatres as Discursive Interspace

The RJ Sabbatical project ’Performing Interspaces: Social Fluidities in Contemporary Theatre / Föreställning av mellanrum: social flyktighet i samtidens teater’ resulted in an Open-Access monograph *Staging Interspaces in Contemporary British Theatre:

Environment and Fluidity* (Palgrave Macmillan / Springer, 2024, available at: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-54892-5).

The research builds a transdisciplinary, intersectional framework drawing on: theatre history and historiography, especially contemporary playwriting/theatremaking traditions and production conditions; literary theory and philosophy, especially investigations of space and perception; sociology, especially questions of class, gender, locationality and technology, including AI; human geography, especially cultural spatial analyses and mobilities.

Liminality as captured in the term ‘interspace’ denotes a state of flux and transience. The research probes how we are defined by the in-between, as we are both part of our communities and ensconced in individual worlds, the tensions between private and public urgently requiring new critical discourses, not least in the context of how the COVID-19 pandemic redefined them.

The primary concern of the research is, through critical methods identified above, to address how new ways of relating to our complex non-human and human environments and ecologies are emerging. Its main aim, then, is to identify how theatre can mobilise an awareness and performance of agency vis-à-vis our new spatialities and modes of inhabitance with a focus on community and collective intervention towards managing the climate crisis.