“Writing Plays That Are Climate Change”

Abstract

Montreal-born playwright, translator, and climate change theater activist Chantal Bilodeau is currently based in New York City. As a co-founder of the biennial Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA), which is a growing international initiative to foster climate change awareness through the performance of very short plays commissioned from playwrights in dozens of countries, she has been dividing her time between coordinating theater-based activism, publishing, and curating a blog series on HowlRound.com, and writing short plays as well as an eight-part series of full-length dramas. As she argues in her 2015 article “In Search of a New Aesthetic,” it is necessary “to move beyond writing plays about climate change to writing plays that are climate change – plays that embody, in form, content, and process, the essence of the issues we are facing. Plays where the concept of climate change is so integral to the work that the term doesn’t even need to be uttered. New problems cannot be solved with old solutions. A new consciousness requires new artistic constructs.”

On the eve of the CDE conference, Chantal Bilodeau spoke about her research-based creative process at a public event in downtown Graz. At the conference, she presented a keynote on how her work in climate change theater addresses crisis as an ongoing condition. This interview provides detailed insights into Bilodeau’s artistic concepts, theater practices, and climate change activism.