ABSTRACT
In May of 2019, Whale, a participatory work of climate fiction, premiered at Northcote Town Hall. At the core of this play and our research is the following question: how can theatremakers communicate climate crisis in a manner that elicits a proactive response? The work utilised fiction, participation, frustration and play to activate the audience members’ willingness to create complex and caring responses to this cultural and environmental crisis. We posit that theatre of climate crisis must by necessity be dialogic, experiential and playful in order to mobilise affective responses to this most complicated and disempowering crisis of our time. To combat the default settings that our audiences live with—‘eco-paralysis’, ‘arrested mourning’ and ‘climate grief’—art must cultivate affirmative ethics and create hopeful relationships with this terrifying content. Whale takes its audience on a journey from disempowered pawns living inside the work of a patriarchal, omnipresent playwright, to active and powerful beings, who know how to save the world. In this chapter, we will discuss the tactics of this work and the affective responses it sought to provoke from its audiences.
