Weathering Together:
A Site-Responsive Ecodramaturgy
This year's PSL will culminate in a public ecodramaturgical experiment titled “Weathering Together”, a collaborative, site-responsive theatrical performance developed in partnership with residents of Neochori, Mount Pelion, and led by theater director and actor Dina Stamatopoulou. This experiment will engage activists, scholars, artists, and local community members as theater practitioners in a co-learning and co-creation process that challenges dominant forms of knowledge production and environmental storytelling.
Ecodramaturgy invites us to reframe our relational understanding of the climate by turning ecological disaster into an opportunity for co-presence, dialogue, and improvised embodied response. It offers a theater of weathering—a shared space where different lifeforms (human and nonhuman), forces, and social actors can encounter each other, rehearse alternatives, and imagine otherwise. We draw inspiration from speculative fiction—Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Afrofuturism’s luminous traditions – performance and media studies, and decolonial practices, narratives, and visions founded on social and ecological justice to imagine and enact alternative modes of planetary habitation that defy technocratic solutionism, accelerationism, and ecofascism and offer, instead, revolutionary acts of place-making attuned to an ethics of mutualism, care, and ecojustice.
By centering embodied, performative, and relational storytelling, the experiment will also challenge conventional knowledge hierarchies, breaking the divide between experts and the public, as well as between technical fields and the ‘soft’ humanities and social sciences, while exploring theater as an ecological and epistemic intervention. In staging scenes of ecological rupture, resistance, and speculative futures, we will ask: How do we embody climate change beyond spectacular media events, statistics, policy debates, and technical solutionism? How does performance unsettle the politics of expertise in environmental discourse? What forms of collaborative survival and resistance emerge when communities stage their own ecological histories and futures? Can theater materialize more livable, inhabitable futures by shifting affective, relational, and epistemic conditions?
“Weathering Together” is thus not merely an artistic intervention but an act of engaged ecological pedagogy. It seeks to re-politicize environmental discourse by: 1) Foregrounding local knowledge over abstract policy solutions; 2) Resisting crisis narratives that foreclose community-led responses; and 3) Creating a laboratory for alternative imaginaries, where art and activism merge in the face of ecological collapse.
As we explore new genres of climate storytelling throughout this year’s lab, we will grapple with the slow violence of environmental collapse—not as an isolated catastrophe but as an ongoing condition that is deeply entangled with race, nation, and histories of colonial extraction. By disrupting anthropocentric modes of knowledge, the culminating public experiment will expand the stage beyond human actors to include the more-than-human, allowing landscape, weather, and nonhuman life to become co-performers. Accordingly, by staging climate realities as lived, contested, and co-produced, this performance experiments with ways of living otherwise, unsettling dominant environmental scripts and opening space for ecojustice-centered futures. At its core, “Weathering Together” aspires to be an ecodramaturgical experiment in reimagining repair—not as a technical issue, but as a relational one.
Ecodramaturgy invites us to reframe our relational understanding of the climate by turning ecological disaster into an opportunity for co-presence, dialogue, and improvised embodied response. It offers a theater of weathering—a shared space where different lifeforms (human and nonhuman), forces, and social actors can encounter each other, rehearse alternatives, and imagine otherwise. We draw inspiration from speculative fiction—Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Afrofuturism’s luminous traditions – performance and media studies, and decolonial practices, narratives, and visions founded on social and ecological justice to imagine and enact alternative modes of planetary habitation that defy technocratic solutionism, accelerationism, and ecofascism and offer, instead, revolutionary acts of place-making attuned to an ethics of mutualism, care, and ecojustice.
By centering embodied, performative, and relational storytelling, the experiment will also challenge conventional knowledge hierarchies, breaking the divide between experts and the public, as well as between technical fields and the ‘soft’ humanities and social sciences, while exploring theater as an ecological and epistemic intervention. In staging scenes of ecological rupture, resistance, and speculative futures, we will ask: How do we embody climate change beyond spectacular media events, statistics, policy debates, and technical solutionism? How does performance unsettle the politics of expertise in environmental discourse? What forms of collaborative survival and resistance emerge when communities stage their own ecological histories and futures? Can theater materialize more livable, inhabitable futures by shifting affective, relational, and epistemic conditions?
“Weathering Together” is thus not merely an artistic intervention but an act of engaged ecological pedagogy. It seeks to re-politicize environmental discourse by: 1) Foregrounding local knowledge over abstract policy solutions; 2) Resisting crisis narratives that foreclose community-led responses; and 3) Creating a laboratory for alternative imaginaries, where art and activism merge in the face of ecological collapse.
As we explore new genres of climate storytelling throughout this year’s lab, we will grapple with the slow violence of environmental collapse—not as an isolated catastrophe but as an ongoing condition that is deeply entangled with race, nation, and histories of colonial extraction. By disrupting anthropocentric modes of knowledge, the culminating public experiment will expand the stage beyond human actors to include the more-than-human, allowing landscape, weather, and nonhuman life to become co-performers. Accordingly, by staging climate realities as lived, contested, and co-produced, this performance experiments with ways of living otherwise, unsettling dominant environmental scripts and opening space for ecojustice-centered futures. At its core, “Weathering Together” aspires to be an ecodramaturgical experiment in reimagining repair—not as a technical issue, but as a relational one.
Provisional Structure of the Experiment
Phase 1: Collective Research and Storytelling Workshops
- Facilitated by a community-based theater expert in collaboration with PSL organizers, faculty, and artists.
- Engages local residents, including farmers, craftspeople, educators, and students, in oral history and storytelling exercises that surface memories, experiences, and perspectives on ecological change.
- Uses participatory methods such as “memory walks” (tracing places of ecological transformation) and “object stories” (bringing significant objects related to local environmental history).
- Develops a collaborative dramaturgy using embodied techniques from Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, Black performance studies, and decolonial theater.
- Enacts scenes of past, present, and speculative futures of the region, focusing on moments of ecological rupture, resistance, and renewal.
- Incorporates local materials (wood, stone, textiles) and nonhuman actors (wind, rain, soil, trees) to challenge anthropocentric narratives.
- Investigates how political climates—from state abandonment to corporate-driven extraction—shape environmental destruction and local responses.
- Culminates in a site-specific performance in an open-air space(s) in Neochori.
- The audience is not merely spectators but participants - spect-actors (Boal), invited to engage in interactive storytelling, movement, and ritual practices of shared survival.
- Explores “commoning techniques”—ways of restoring communal responsibility and kinship beyond state-centered solutions.
