Rehearsing the Anthropocene: Devised Theatre Praxis for Collective Embodied Sensemaking

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Towards A Politics of Multiplicity: Reimagining the Future of “Ensemble” in Art and Education

Abstract

When considered at the scale of the individual, a global phenomenon like climate change can be difficult to grasp. Given the ecological violence at stake if we continue to misunderstand the repercussions of our individual and collective actions in the Anthropocene, questions of scale, agency, and responsibility are more pedagogically urgent than ever.

This study examines how undergraduate actors in a devised theatre rehearsal process used embodied improvisation and themes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to rehearse individual agency in systems that exceed individual control– namely, climate catastrophe. Specifically, I analyze a moment in which ten actors collectively embodied a “depression” as both an affective and meteorological phenomenon. By attending to how participants negotiated their bodies in time and space (Jordan & Henderson, 1995), I highlight the potential of devised ensemble work for making sense of global climate phenomenon at the scale of individual bodies.

Devised theatre is a collaborative method of performance-making in which an embodied script emerges from iterative ensemble improvisations. Learning in these exercises is participatory and distributed, negotiated across the ensemble and their shared compositions (Hutchins, 1995; Ma & Hall, 2018). Moreover, they require participants to attune to one another without a designated leader and make collective decisions shaped by subtle cues and rhythms in the group (Anonymized, 2024). Rehearsing these exercises together cultivates an awareness of individual agency as both constrained and enabled by one’s relational position within a collective.

In the exercise below, ten actors were told to walk onstage and spatially improvise themes from Hamlet with each other. They began by pacing (Fig. A) and tracking each other’s movements (Fig. B). Over time, they spiraled inward, eventually rotating around a collectively chosen center (Fig. C)– later referred to as a “depression”. At one point, an actor hesitated. Others mirrored the pause, interrupting the cyclone. A third actor moved inward, and the collective reformed the spiral.

Analysis demonstrates the group’s spiral is not initiated by a single actor but emerges from their ensemble attunement. The actors’ awareness of when to hold back or follow reveals how agency functions in this coordinated task: the completed cyclone arises from a distributed momentum. The decentralized agency they engage in raises important questions about how we conceptualize collective responsibility. Here, the ensemble serves as a potential microcosm for understanding entangled systems– such as the Anthropocene– where no single actor is “in control,” yet all are implicated in the unfolding.

Misunderstanding individual responsibility in climate crises can obscure systemic causes and collective possibilities. While educators have seen the power of localizing ecosystem-scale phenomena to personal experience (Bang et al., 2014), devised ensemble work offers an embodied, relational pedagogy for cultivating sensibilities towards distributed ecological agency. At the intimate scale of the ensemble– where global issues surface through bodily action– participants can rehearse the forms of collective care and responsiveness necessary for imagining and enacting more just and livable futures (de La Bellacasa, 2017).

Author

• Lana Cosic, Vanderbilt University