Sensing a Twenty-First-Century Commons in the Theater: Relationality in a Climate of Distrust and Destruction

Conceptualizations of the Commons

The English term commons, which has gone through multiple meanings related to shared economic, social, and political places as well as concomitant power structures (Rose; Hardin; Ostrom), has occupied a prominent place in activist thinking that emphasizes its revolutionary fuel through focusing on cooperative empowerment rather than individual benefits. As David Bollier and Silke Helfrich argue, nowadays the commons should be understood as “an insurgent world view” that proposes a large-scale blueprint “for reimagining our future together and reinventing social organization, economics, infrastructure, politics, and state power itself” (11). Insurgency against oppressive systems thus translates into a socially constructive surge or wave of activity towards a future society characterized by freedom, fairness, and cooperation. This requires an “identity shift” oriented towards action and transformation, which historian Peter Linebaugh dubs “commoning” (20). Bollier and Helfrich interpret this gerund as expressing “creative experimentation and the courage to initiate new patterns of action. We need to learn how to identify patterns of cultural life that can bring about change, notwithstanding the immense power of capital” (12–13). By not focusing on spaces that seemingly belong to everyone or no one, commoning highlights “relationships and systems” (19) rather than geographical locations. If we follow this trajectory, the “commons [figures] as a life-form, not as a ‘resource’” (38). Rather than being even remotely linked to extractivist ideas or practices, it focuses on living together and on surviving together. Accordingly, practical involvement in acts of commoning becomes an “exploratory [social] process” (56) that is inherently in flux and creative.

In addition to offering a pragmatic guide to commoning, Bollier and Helfrich define terms they consider useful for linking worldview and action. Some of these terms resonate with thinking about a twenty-first-century theater commons and about new aesthetic impulses for playwrights. For instance, the expression “Ubuntu relationality” signifies

a way of thinking that seeks to align individual and collective well-being. [. . .] In Western languages, we have no synonym for Ubuntu, but we do have social practices that reflect its spirit. [. . .] The individual achieves meaning and identity through the social context of communities and society – and society constitutes itself through the flourishing of the individual. (36)

Significantly, they perceive potential similarities between specific ways of life in Africa and in the West. The fact that the lack of a fitting English word inspired them to adopt an African word mirrors a relational and planetary ethos. Rather than seeing this process of changing the discourse as a form of appropriation, Bollier and Helfrich encourage “pattern mining” as a method of exploring how mutually beneficial concepts may work in different cultures (71). This amelioration of what could be read as an extractivist metaphor (“pattern mining”) again feeds into the overall trajectory of not universalizing Western cultural norms by being open to all cultural patterns that foster the commons.

The focus on intra- and transcultural relationalities recurs in their alternative for the word individual: “Nested-I describes the existential interdependency of human beings on other humans and the larger world, which co-creates and supports our personal development” (61). Instead of “self-interests” which undermine “collective interest” (61), a commons rests on the notion “that the relations between entities are more fundamental than the entities themselves” (64). It also envisions “that living systems develop and thrive through their interactions and intra-actions with each other. As a social system based on how people come together to collaborate and sustain themselves, a Commons is based on a relational ontology” (64). Bollier and Helfrich emphasize the anything but negligible impact of words. To them, “language is an indispensable force for imagining the world – and for socially constructing what counts as fact. It is even more: language is a means for co-creating the world” (44). If verbal expression has such practical and constructive consequences, literature in general and spoken theater will necessarily enjoy a high status in such a commons.

At the same time, the creative use of language in theatrical spaces transforms a performance venue into more than a setting in which actors play for passive viewers/listeners. If the theater engages in commoning, then the experience of all present expresses agency and action from a specific worldview, with well-defined goals, and on different scales extending from the personal to the planetary. As Elizabeth Maddock Dillon argues in her monograph New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849, two simultaneous, yet contradictory developments occurred in eighteenth-century Britain. While commonly used lands were increasingly privatized and thus became unavailable to those who needed them to survive, popular sovereignty was on the rise (Dillon 3). The primary understanding of the commons-as-sustenance gave way to a virtualized one focused on shared political values. This shift caused a crisis “at the intersection of the material and the representational, at the crossroads of the ontic and the mimetic” (3). This very crossroads, Dillon argues, manifests in the theater because in this physical and social locale, “the entwined material and figurative nature of the ‘people’ appears forcefully in the space of the theatre” (3). The theater came to be seen as a location of “a shared network of relations” (4). To my mind, Dillon’s conceptualizations of a “performative commons” is not limited to the time period and the locations that she studied (Balestrini, “Intermedial”). Her focus on colonialism and racialism is still relevant, albeit in different ways.

Inquiring into how theater aesthetics, capitalist forces in theater culture, and a political and politicized understanding of spectators as participants in social systems are linked to specific notions of peoplehood and sovereignty is more topical than ever. I thus ask: which “modes of commoning” exist in theater today? Which (re)conceptualizations of audience members and of the functionality and sociality of theater are necessary prerequisites? Eco-drama and climate-change drama demonstrate that rather abstract understandings of the commons (focused on political will and defining community through numerous variants of sovereign or national formations) and the material or economic side of the term are inescapably connected, particularly when we consider theories of decolonial planetarity that regard relationality and interdependence as the necessary basis of achieving a community that is able to handle issues related to land and power (Elias and Moraru).

Relationality in a Climate of Distrust and Destruction

The implied question of this article’s subtitle, reiterated here as a section heading, is whether and how specific understandings of relationality can overcome a political climate of distrust, even though such a climate threatens to compartmentalize and polarize rather than bring people together. A related second quandary is how such understandings of relationality are supposed to function effectively in an era of environmental destruction and social disintegration. In eco-drama and climate-change theater, relationality comes in an extensive array of shapes and forms, all the way from staged depictions of conversing humans to cross-species interaction and to allegorical figures like Mother Earth addressing her offspring. In addition to experimenting with representing specific relations onstage, such works engage audience members in overt, sometimes jolting ways. Dillon’s notion of a performative commons raises the question of what kinds of viewers and relations specific dramatic texts and their performance contexts produce.

One factor that distinguishes a twenty-first-century eco-drama and climate-change performative commons from the pre-1849 Atlantic performative commons is that it tends to incorporate multiple interrelated scales that extend from the tight circle of a single household to the wide perspective of planetary awareness, often in the space of one speech act. Thus, critics have been debating a return to cosmopolitanism as a term that replaces an understanding limited to jet-setting for the few with a more expansive earlier meaning. This earlier meaning links up with theories of planetarity and their concomitant consideration of how an interdependent sense of community could work as an alternative to the trappings of economic globalization (Elias and Moraru xii; see also Spivak; Miyoshi). According to Giovanna Di Chiro,

the ideal concept [is] that we are all members of a human cosmopolitan community, fundamentally united as world citizens through a shared morality based on relationships of mutual respect and assumptions of goodwill despite differences of culture, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or political perspective. (207)

That is, the “old cosmopolitanism” needs to be rethought; the goal is to remodel it into “a fresh version that envisions and connects with a commitment to the sustainability (and survivability) of local hometowns and local environments” (207). Simultaneous perception of large and small scales certainly encourages a double perspective on a commons and commoning that brings a local theater performance into conversation with a planetary outlook.

The term sustainability, which Di Chiro uses, has become increasingly associated with neoliberal notions of preserving the Global North’s status quo (Alaimo 558–561). In order to avoid potentially inadvertent associations with an understanding of sustainability that favors the Western world, I suggest that the new cosmopolitanism that participates in contemporary notions of commoning also needs to be discussed in light of competing conceptualizations of solidarity. I will do so by introducing media studies scholar Lilie Chouliaraki’s nuanced outlook on various phenotypes and underlying ideologies of public engagement for others. In particular, I will discuss how her insights into solidarity as communication provide helpful inroads into thinking about drama and theater in activist contexts. Here, I will rely in particular on political philosopher and aesthetic theorist Jacques Rancière’s notion of the emancipated spectator.

According to Chouliaraki’s research on how solidarity is communicated, elicited, and experienced, we live in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism, as she calls it in the subtitle of her book The Ironic Spectator. She posits that it is

only when we examine solidarity as a problem of communication, that is, as a moral claim seeking to reconcile the competing demands of market, politics and the media, that we can better understand how the spectacle of suffering is subtly but surely turning the West into a specific kind of public actor – the ironic spectator of vulnerable others. (2)

In her study of “appeals, celebrities, concerts and news” (4), she comes to the conclusion that post-humanitarian solidarity is part of a “neoliberal lifestyle of ‘feel good’ altruism” (4). Very briefly put: such post-humanitarianism focuses on pity and irony in ways that bolster Western “ethnocentric cosmopolitanism” (187). In contrast to Di Chiro’s and to planetary theorists’ definitions of a planetary perspective, this oxymoronic concept privileges practices in which empathy highlights the feeling person and not the ones who need help because they are subjected to – for instance – what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence.” This occurs particularly in ostensibly humanitarian pronouncements and acts of public self-expression (as publicized, for example, in memorably brief and juicy statements on social media). Whether one agrees with this analysis or not, within the possibilities and goals of commoning in the theater (which obviously occurs in public spaces and possibly with acclaim in social and other media), it is intriguing that Chouliaraki wants to solve this “problem of communication” of narcissistic virtue signaling by “reclaiming the theatricality of the public realm” (4).

Although she mostly uses theatricality as a metaphor for public communication, her discussion of the latter resonates with the implications of a performative or theatrical commons. A theatricalization of public communication about solidarity can occur, Chouliaraki writes, when realizing “the capacity of this communication to stage human vulnerability as an object of our empathy as well as of critical reflection and deliberation” (22). Harnessing this two-pronged capacity can replace the market-derived “branding” (19) that is typical of feel-good solidarity. What could replace such branding is a “systemic and explicit engagement with the voices of vulnerability and the values that may inform our action upon it” (24). Chouliaraki’s idea of solidarity “relies heavily on the pedagogical process by which the theatre regulates both our affective proximity to and contemplative distance from vulnerable others, constantly seeking to engage us with the two key requirements of solidarity – emotion and argument” (192). Thus, theater audiences are (meant to be) able to think critically, ethically, and with a perspective on taking action in response to theater-based communication. If empathy were to be coupled with knowledge and insights, then the selfishly voyeuristic spectator of somebody else’s suffering could become a thing of the past. Theatrical-humanitarian (rather than post-humanitarian) communication must thus bring to the fore the equally “pedagogical potential of staging the spectator as actor – as someone capable of seeing him/herself thinking with and acting in a collective ‘we’” (197). Such a spectator, I would add, does not only follow up on the incentive to participate in communal action with other spectators but also overcomes the separation between the stage and the auditorium by, in a positive sense, switching roles because s/he understands acting and watching as interdependent.

Similar to Chouliaraki, Rancière unravels the history of anti-theatrical prejudice to prepare the argumentative ground for what he considers viable alternatives. The alternatives are based on conceptualizing theater as “an exemplary community form” (Rancière 5). He regards it as exemplary whenever it brings together “active participants as opposed to passive voyeurs” (4). Rancière perceives a fluid relation between taking in a performance and making sense of it. His “emancipated spectator” is anything but a passive sensory machine. Instead, an audience member consciously processes a performance. Rancière envisions that

The spectator also acts, like the pupil or scholar. She observes, selects, compares, interprets. She links what she sees to a host of other things that she has seen on other stages, in other kinds of place[s]. [. . .] She participates in the performance by refashioning it in her own way – by drawing back, for example, from the vital energy that it is supposed to transmit in order to make it a pure image and associate this image with a story which she has read or dreamt, experienced or invented. (13)

While the subjectivity, experience, and knowledge of the spectator/actor feeds into the re-creation of what she has seen, she simultaneously engages – like a scholar – in the analysis and reassembling of parts. This analytical framework also applies to artists who,

Like researchers, [. . .] construct the stages where the manifestation and effect of their skills are exhibited, rendered uncertain in the terms of the new idiom that conveys a new intellectual adventure. The effect of the idiom cannot be anticipated. It requires spectators who play the role of active interpreters, who develop their own translation in order to appropriate the “story” and make it their own story. An emancipated community is a community of narrators and translators. (22)

As in Chouliaraki’s approach, knowledge, critical thinking, creativity, research, and transformation are at work here. Taking in performances and translating them into new narratives are emancipatory actions and processes that shift from individuals to entire groups. Comparable to Chouliaraki’s “we,” Rancière envisions a “community.” In this sense, both Chouliaraki and Rancière theorize creative forms of Ubuntu relationality (Bollier and Helfrich) avant la lettre.

In her analysis of contemporary theater, Jenny Hughes also perceives the potential for social engagement. She argues (citing Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri) that – even in a neoliberal economic context – “the commons is a source of surplus value that cannot be absolutely enclosed and exploited by the forces of capital, because it comprises modes of social productivity that confound control – codes, effects, symbolization, knowledge, performance and relationships” (78). Hughes identifies three criteria for a theater commons to emerge from community, amateur, and professional theaters. These are “the mobilization of makeshift economies of resource,” “The nurturing of charismatic commons present in performance, creating breaks in the smooth representations of formal politics,” and “the privileging of everyday know-how as well as vernacular expression as powerful filters for formal economic and political discourse” (89). Here, the precarity of theater endeavors in different contexts inspires improvisation when locating potential resources. The charisma of performing a commons on stage serves as an antidote to staid performances of political processes and of concomitant traditions of self-representation. Parallel to that, the everyday figures prominently in analyzing and understanding privileged discourses.

In the next section, I will discuss how specific dramatic works speak to the feasibility and the forms of a twenty-first-century performative commons. To my mind, all of Hughes’s categories can be found in the context of recent climate-change theater. And the same applies to Chouliaraki’s and Rancière’s conceptualizations of theatricalized or dramatic communication and spectatorship.

Commoning in Twenty-First-Century Climate-Change Theater

A well-known forum in the anglophone realm of contemporary theater is the online platform HowlRound which self-defines as “a digital commons.” The digital nature of this commons, of course, points at a virtual location which facilitates communication. At the same time, virtuality contains a kernel of ambivalence and controversy because, on the one hand, digital communication is less expensive and more inclusive than physical traveling in order to converse or to assert the coordinates and functionality of a specific commons. It thus enables a contemporary form of cosmopolitan engagement. On the other hand, access to digital technology remains – despite all myths about the democratizing or equalizing potential of digital participatory cultures – tied to economic conditions that privilege the Global North.^[1] Articles on the commons and on commoning published on HowlRound thus often emphasize the goal of maximum inclusiveness, a planetary perspective, and a decolonial approach. For instance, Jamie Gahlon and Matthew Glassman reference Linebaugh’s claim that “there were connections between the British radical Commons tradition, indigenous land rights, and slave rebellions” (qtd. in Gahlon and Glassman). Welcoming such a transcultural and historically comprehensive outlook, Gahlon and Glassman argue that “regardless of origin, there are many paradigms, practices, and life ways that break the death march of (white) modernity.” A similar ethos characterizes other websites, often in blog format, that foreground playwrights and theater practitioners, such as playwright/translator/climate-change activist Chantal Bilodeau’s artistsandclimatechange. These examples fit into the notion of an insurgent commons (Bollier and Helfrich), especially through low-threshold participation, a focus on cooperation, openness to myriad cultures, and the desire to offer an alternative to heavily funded repertoire theater.

Since 2015, Bilodeau has been editing a forum on climate-change theater on HowlRound. She is also, with Elaine Ávila, Roberta Levitow, and Caridad Svich, a co-founder and the current artistic director of Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA). In an effort to expand participation from theater-makers internationally, CCTA has been broadening its recruiting endeavors and visibility since its founding in 2015. Every other year, the organization commissions fifty playwrights to write very short (ideally, five-minute-long) plays that can be performed without royalty payments during the roughly three-month festival period that envelopes the United Nations Conferences of the Parties (COP) meetings, that is, conferences that are meant to develop binding agreements among participating countries regarding measures to abate climate change (with mixed levels of success). According to the statistics offered on the website, since CCTA 2017, 143 playwrights from more than forty countries have participated. They include artists that state their affiliation with countries in the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia, and Europe, and with ethnic or national origins, including numerous Indigenous nations, especially in the Americas and the Pacific. The number of plays provided both in their original language and in English translation has been growing over the years, as have events held entirely in languages other than English. While more and more playwrights from non-Western countries or of non-Western immigrant backgrounds have joined the contributors, the primarily anglophone corpus still is not as worldembracing as CCTA might wish. A decisive remedy to this is that the instructions for 2023 explicitly permit organizers to translate individual plays for CCTA events.

This approach to inviting and working with playwrights makes each iteration’s corpus a textual commons in the sense that fifty plays are available for everyone under the same rules and stipulations that all event organizers receive when they first register. The use of this corpus is not to create negative consequences for the playwrights or to be misused in other ways detrimental to CCTA’s goals. Furthermore, the basic idea that anyone can organize CCTA events – be they amateur or professional – fosters participation and creativity without gatekeepers or curators located somewhere in the West. CCTA thus fits into Hughes’s category of “the mobilization of makeshift economies of resource” (89): productions may be as low-cost as hosting a reading in a park or inviting your neighbors into your living room. Moreover, the administrative framework of having to register the event, the publicly available online calendar and listings, online reports and streamed Zoom events with organizers and artists exemplify Ubuntu relationality, the nested-I, and the decidedly cosmopolitan and planetary ethos associated with commoning.

The CCTA corpus of, to date, 250 short works, three fifths of which have been published in three anthologies (co-)edited by Bilodeau, includes numerous pieces that foreground concerns discussed by theorists and scholars who call for those kinds of humanitarian activism (and I perceive CCTA as contributing to such activism) which do not dehumanize sufferers by reducing them to existential struggles (Chouliaraki 40–41). Many of the plays address the fact that sufferers’ voices are not heard. I consciously do not refer to voicelessness here, as these people do have voices – the problem is one of providing them with effective channels of communication that preserve their dignity. Not surprisingly, many CCTA plays feature characters that experience the horrifying consequences of extractivism, pollution, food scarcity, environmental catastrophes, and illnesses. These problems are linked to climate change that, in turn, is connected to the long-term drastic impact of settler colonialism, capitalist market forces, and resultant extreme social differences. Plays authored by and/or elucidating pressing concerns of Indigenous peoples across the globe and of populations in and from the so-called Global South illustrate that, more often than not, those affected the most by climate change are not the ones that have been decisively contributing to global warming. Nevertheless, their predicaments are widely ignored by mainstream media and by powerful institutions whose change of course could have a positive impact.^[2] Significant currents within the CCTA corpus resonate with the above-discussed concerns of rethinking possible meanings and functions of the commons in various ways, two of which I will discuss: first, plays that either critique opportunism and rampant selfishness as anti-commoning behaviors or that depict concrete options for commoning; second, pieces in which a commons-oriented relationality displays the potential to fundamentally change social structures.

Rampant Selfishness versus Commoning Options

The lack of a commons or of commoning is frequently evoked through depictions of complete obliviousness regarding the situation and the needs of others, bolstered by an equally powerful sense of entitlement. In such plays, the option of a shared approach to or even an investment in improving the situation of mankind across the planet can only be inferred ex negativo. At the same time, these works pinpoint major climate change-related issues such as water scarcity (among other things, caused by the supposed needs of the wealthy and by imprudent decisions to develop – as the entrepreneurial euphemism goes – arid parts of the world) and excessive heat (caused by global warming) from which people without access to sufficient electricity and water cannot protect themselves.

In Arthur Kopit’s “Where Has All the Water Gone? Long Time Passing . . .” (2015),^[3] the enraged protagonist complains to a telephone hotline employee about the city having cut the water supply to his eleven-bathroom Bel Air mansion. This employee lives in a place whose location the protagonist at first does not recognize (“And where the fuck is that?”); and, when he does understand, he incredulously asks: “You have an actual bathroom out there?” Hearing that his interlocutor’s water supply is working, probably because he does not (and is not in a position to) overuse a precious resource for sprinklers and a swimming pool, he threatens the man with getting him fired and yells: “DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?”^[4] The employee simply hangs up in response to the customer’s inability to perceive the Earth’s resources as goods to be shared.

Singaporean/US-American writer Damon Chua’s two-character piece “Steamy Session in a Singapore Spa” (2019) escalates the mutually reinforcing coexistence of overblown entitlement and obliviousness regarding suffering Others. The double entendre in the title captures a naive Western tourist’s sexualized and voyeuristic expectations. To his utter surprise, he instead experiences a simulation of the anything but sexy experience of climate change: the spa air becomes so hot and humid that even profuse sweating cannot achieve relief. The local “Experiment Guide” who has been cranking up the temperature and puffing bellows of steam into the exitless room closes the play as follows: “Don’t try this at home. Unless home happens to be an equatorial country like Singapore, where it’s super humid. Then you don’t even need to try. You’re there” (92). The visitor’s inability to escape drives home the brutal reality of rising temperatures for millions who cannot leave or turn on the air conditioning. By accelerating the slow violence of climate change in a microdrama, this short play also addresses the consequences of selfishness and lack of commoning.

A second strategy is to juxtapose opportunistic and genuine solidarity based on knowledge, critical thinking, personal transformation, as well as solution-oriented and pragmatic creativity. Various CCTA plays feature campaigning politicians or other state officials that become aware of feel-good humanitarianism and its narcissistic subtext. These usually dialog-focused two-character plays juxtapose a supporter of an oppressive system with someone who has a guilty conscience and resolves to change his/her ways. A prime example is Métis playwright Keith Barker’s “Apology, My” (2021), a play whose title already implies the ambiguity of filing one’s speech acts according to smoke-screen signifiers. In this one-scene dialog, a ruthless fixer attempts to push a remorseful Prime Minister into a rhetorical corner while advising him/her on a speech. Although the fixer glibly dismisses the “personal” (51) and advises against admitting “Mistakes” (52), making “negative” statements about the imminent future (52), telling the “Truth” about climate change (53), and voicing “altruistic feelings” (55), the politician refuses to listen and, finally, fires the advisor. For Barker’s protagonist, a political career is at stake.^[5] In other cases, the necessity of developing a different mindset is linked to the survival of culturally rooted knowledge of entire populations and, ultimately, to continued life on Earth.

Conceptual changes reminiscent of Bollier and Helfrich’s nested-I and of the superior value of relationality without a monetary impetus are central to Katie Pearl’s “The Earth’s Blue Heart” (2019). This piece depicts a shift from fishing rights debates in economic terms like quotas and profits to the impact of attitudes towards human-fish relations. In an allegorically depicted thought and learning process, two characters travel into the titular heart of the planet. They witness something like a town-hall meeting which concludes with a sense of relief that the debate is not about ownership but about “the right [. . .] to pray [. . .] to dance [. . .] to sing [. . .] to catch and eat [. . .] to live with the fish; to have a relationship with the fish” (282). In conclusion, the (as implied: Indigenous) town-hall speakers and the two visitors agree. Similarly, Madeline Sayet’s “What We Give Back” (2021) juxtaposes monetary value with “liv[ing] in relation” (255) as a prerequisite for saving Mother Earth, and Chua’s “Molong” (2021) pits Western interest in the use value of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) against the Malaysian concept of molong, which is a commons based on interdependency and connectedness. Teaching the audience about molong links up with Bollier and Helfrich’s approach to expanding anglophone discourse with non-Western concepts and vocabulary.

While Pearl, Sayet, and Chua envision contrasting value systems through largely lyrical contemplation and via an intertwining of realist and mythical realms, other plays emphasize pragmatic steps taken by characters who decide to engage in climate-change action because they adopt an ethics of shared attainment of a higher good. Their central argument focuses on individual action regarding environmental protection, sustenance, and survival. For instance, characters start a community garden (Jacqueline E. Lawton, “Our Corner of the World,” 2015), contribute to reforestation (E. M. Lewis, “Start Where You Are” and Shahid Nadeem, “The Last Tree,” both 2017), or protect the water supply on Indigenous land (Corey Payette, “Nibi (Water) Protectors,” 2019) – in other words, they envision the nurturing and use of natural resources in a commons-like social setting. Such depictions of commoning can focus on small steps towards a better future or on immediate joint action. In “Barberman” (2023) by s i g l o, characters in a barbershop initiate a hair donation drive to help clean up an oil spill in the Philippines. In this well-devised work, two scenes evolve simultaneously, demanding that audiences process both dialogs. The barbershop becomes a commons in which concerned people practice Ubuntu relationality, which is depicted as being open to low-threshold participation in commoning.

Confidence in small-step approaches also occurs in plays that invite audience members to grasp the arts of storytelling and of listening. For her 2023 play, “A Hummingbird’s Ululation,” which expresses appreciation for the tiniest drops that contribute to fighting fire, Aleya Kassam adapted a story told by Wangari Muta Maathai (1940–2011), the founder of the NGO Green Belt Movement and recipient of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. It is worth noting that Kassam also contributed a storytelling piece to CCTA 2021 and that this is one among a growing number of plays that center on the desired impact of instructive storytelling as practiced in non-Western cultures. Kassam’s “Listen to Vanessa Nakate” (2021) involves the audience by instructing them how they need to ask to be told a story. Thus, those present engage with and listen to a storyteller rather than watching a performed story. On a meta-level, the storyteller’s tale addresses the importance of realizing that some voices are not heard or erased and of grasping the consequences of the (un)willingness to listen. As Africans contribute little to but suffer enormously from climate change, the play encourages a commons that protects the vulnerable in the spirit of Ubuntu relationality. These plays intertwine commoning as social action – as described in the narrated tales and, thus, located outside the performance space – with the experience of forming a commons in the actual theater. They thus resonate with Rancière’s notion of emancipated spectators that engage in acts of narration and translation, while they also expand his concept. In Kassam’s “Listen to Vanessa Nakate,” audience members literally demand to hear a story: when the Teller says “Hadithi Hadithi” (“story story”) they respond with “Hadithi Njoo” (“story come”) (168). In the end, the act of listening becomes a wellspring of agency and activism for all (171).^[6]

Instead of largely realist representations of human interaction, various plotless plays feature orchestrated voices that evoke shared questions, aspirations, feelings, or experiences. As these texts do not assign specific lines to certain characters, they are easily adaptable to the available or desired number of performers and the spatial options in the performance venue. In Wren Brian’s “When” (2021), hearing an unspecified number of voices that ask questions and share reflections can provide a sense of interconnectedness as a source of hope and orientation towards the future, while also acknowledging fear. When my students staged this piece in 2021, they positioned the performers throughout the auditorium and asked audience members to close their eyes. The subsequent discussion revealed that several audience members were astonished and positively affected by focusing on the audible rather than the visual. Brian’s 2023 contribution, “Now,” again features multiple voices, especially those of minorities. It reads like a continuation of “When,” as it promotes having a dream and retaining optimism as incentives to do what we must.^[7] The ensemble of voices in the theater thus encourages a perception- and thought-based commons which boosts concerted action outside the theater.

Numerous CCTA plays extend the imaginary of solidarity and commoning to the more-than-human realm. Like Pearl’s “The Earth’s Blue Heart,” these works highlight that commoning across species requires a heterarchical understanding of relationality. One play in particular conveys this argument through a metatheatrical method that encourages rethinking the role of the observer/audience member. In Philip Braithwaite’s “Ice Flow” (2019), three icebergs address audience members and interact with them. The personified icebergs, which were inspired by Olafur Eliasson’s art installation Ice Watch (2014), are on exhibit. As humans continuously walk around or past them, the lack of a fourth wall appears to be the only option, but this spatial relation also casts an ironic light on the usual distance between works in a gallery space and visitors who come to see them. In their somewhat exaggerated anthropomorphic manner of speaking, the melting icebergs struggle to articulate the most pressing questions of their current identity crisis. As they have been involuntarily carted from their original location to the exhibition space, they do not know who and where they are and why they are falling apart. They also bemoan their disrupted sense of belonging because they were removed from family members, friends, and their ice sheet environment. The dark underside of their imminent demise equips the surface humor of their conversation about existential concerns with rather bitter awareness of the speed with which global warming and species extinction have been progressing towards catastrophe. Silent observers of suffering, by implication, need to change their ways.

Commons-Oriented Relationality as Social Revolution

Several plays acknowledge that experimental forms of commoning may create upheaval, especially by disrupting relationships in a social context characterized by habit or acquiescence to tradition. They insist on the idea that a commons-based relationality cannot but upset entrenched Western systems. These pieces either focus on necessarily conflict-laden phases of change or they envision a backward glance at successful commoning.

The assertion that commoning can assure a viable future is represented in Patti Flaher’s “Helen’s Hangout” (2021). The play depicts the communal space of a housing project in the Yukon Territory in 2031. The inhabitants – who identify as Indigenous, settler, and mixed-ancestry characters – celebrate that their community has been practicing a climate-aware way of life. Similarly, Zoe Svendsen’s “Love out of the Ruins” (2021), which can be performed by one to five persons, imagines one person’s entire life in a community that has overcome various climate change-related problems. The fill-in-the-gap format of the play encourages performers to adapt the text to local contexts and to tailor it to what specific audiences can process easily, thus supporting their path towards becoming emancipated spectators.

The depiction of conflict related to commoning is central to Yvette Nolan’s “Ranger” (2021), which imagines the creation of a closed community on Canadian soil whose one million members decide to live without fossil fuels in order to find out whether this could become a global model. Set in the few minutes during which the experiment participants are saying good-bye to loved ones and friends before entering the enclosed area, the play illustrates how one partner’s desire to serve the common good far into the future clashes with her partner’s focus on his own lifetime and current personal desire. Similarly poised on the tipping point between catastrophe and triumph, Serena Parmar’s “The Rubik’s Cube Solution” (2017) illustrates the revolutionary potential of commoning as a process of dismantling unjust and destructive hierarchies. The characters are repeatedly threatened by a person that keeps invoking his/her power over their (and other people’s) lives, while giving them an impossible task. Suddenly, one of the characters breaks the rules and reinvents the strictly regulated process of solving the posed problem. More and more characters decide to join in and begin to seek new solutions. Thus, the revolutionary act of commoning upsets hierarchies by changing mindsets in a group that learns the power of solidarity for the common good.

Outlook

As I hope to have shown with these examples from a 250-piece corpus, numerous CCTA plays contain elements associated with current discussions of commoning and the commons. They are future-oriented in the sense that they unmistakably depict the necessity of collaboration in order to achieve systemic changes and workable social structures. These massive adjustments require a shared understanding of justice, of dismantling destructive hierarchies, and of the ability to perceive the local and the planetary simultaneously. As artistic works with a decidedly political orientation, these plays appeal to “an aesthetic community” in Rancière’s sense: “An aesthetic community is not a community of aesthetes. It is a community of sense, or a sensus communis” (57). Such a community experiences “a certain combination of sense data” (57), in our case, when exposed to theatrical performances. Simultaneous with this shared set of sensory impressions, other and especially contradictory meanings are evoked, which implies dissensus or “disjunction” (58). This tension within a specific artistic work (in CCTA plays, for instance, the shared experience of witnessing a clash of opinions about climate change and how to deal with it) is to produce “a new sense of community” (58). Citing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Rancière argues: “The paradoxical relationship between the ‘apart’ and the ‘together’ is also a paradoxical relationship between the present and the future” (59). This temporal dimension emphasizes the process-oriented outlook on commoning which numerous CCTA plays stage, particularly when they use multi-species, human-plus-more-than-human casts of characters and when they eliminate the fourth wall.^[8] In the latter case, audience members cannot restrict themselves to simply loving the arts. Instead, they are encouraged to participate in commoning in the performance space in the current moment and beyond that.

Sensing – as in perceiving a performance and making sense of it by ascribing meaning to it – is a combination of individual engagement and community formation which, at least for twenty-first-century activist theater, describes a Dillonian performative commons. Similar to Rancière, Chouliaraki argues that “reflexive performativity entails both the promise of new solidarity and the risks of narcissism, as long as our relation to others is only accomplished through an imagination of ourselves” (77). The impact of selfishness has become amply clear in the discussion of CCTA plays that encourage commoning by depicting the consequences of its opposite. The pieces that focus on thought processes that, for some fictional characters, lead to new mindsets and behavioral change cohere with Rancière’s understanding of “political subjectivation” which realizes the kind of future- and commons-focused relationality that Chouliaraki regards as truly humanitarian. According to Rancière, “a process of political subjectivation consists in [. . .] the action of uncounted capacities that crack open the unity of the given and the obviousness of the visible, in order to sketch a new topography of the possible” (49). The same applies to learning processes both on and off stage.

Just as Chouliaraki’s media studies research and Rancière’s philosophical thoughts on aesthetics and politics can contribute greatly to thinking about how climate-change dramas relate to current conceptualizations of the commons, it is worth contemplating how commons-related concepts might affect the way we conduct research. In this vein, Philip J. Deloria defines a commons as an “intellectual practice” (xiv). Joni Adamson and Kimberly N. Ruffin even envision a “methodological commons” (11), which strikes me as an invitation to contribute to a growing body of interdisciplinary research. As climate-change theater requires approaches that cover an extensive range of components – such as sensitivity to the arts, science, (cultural) history, and politics – increased openness to changing academic fields and practices with planetary and future-oriented perspectives in mind would be more than welcome.