Co-Mutability, Nodes, and the Mesh: Critical Theatre Ecologies – An Introduction

Critical theatre ecologies are a field within the environmental humanities. Ecology is usually understood as “ the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment ” ( “ What Is Ecology? ” ; see also Alaimo 100). It is therefore little wonder that notions of interconnected-ness and interrelationality are at the centre of an endeavour that seeks to trace the theatre ’ s ecologies. We use the term critical theatre ecologies , rather than theatre ecology , to try to do justice to the multitude of approaches, methodologies, and text- and performance-related phenomena the ecological engagements of the theatre entail. When we speak of critical theatre ecologies, we imply that each of these approaches, each methodology, and each reflection on these aforemen-tioned phenomena must always and necessarily entail a self-reflexive perspective that interrogates the avenues and the limitations of their theoretical horizons. make an appropriately complex diagnosis of the present. diagnosis, as we shall see in the articles collected in and The results of critical theatre ecologies are decisive answers and fresh perspectives to the central challenges of what the German sociol-ogist Ulrich Beck has influentially called “ world risk society. ” This special issue corroborates that what is needed are inter- and transdisciplinary approaches and thus the explicit participation and profiling of the arts, of the theatre in particular, and of the humanities in general. Texts are environmental, not simply because they are made of paper and ink that comes from trees and plants (or other terrestrial sources), or because they are sometimes about ecological matters. Reading is formally ecological, since in order to read we must take ac-count of the dark sides of things, as intimately connected to the “ lighter ” sides as the recto and verso of a piece of writing paper. Reading discovers a constantly flowing, shifting play of temporality, and a constant process of differentiation – like evolution. All texts are environmental: they organise the space around and within them into plays of meaning and non-meaning. ( “ Deconstruction and/as Ecology ” 292)