Lara Stevens – författare

Charting a history of theatrical resistance to environmental exploitation, this study places drama and theatrical performance staged in Australia within the context of international scholarship to address changing ecological systems. Exploring the staging of disasters ranging from droughts and floods to forest fires and rising seas, it examines a strikingly diverse body of work that reflects the entanglement of socio-economic and environmental forces leading to ecological damage and climate change. Weather phenomena become protagonists in plays by Jack Davis, Andrea James, Louis Nowra and Hannie Rayson, while mutant creatures manifest climate threats in Jill Orr's work, and performances by the Australian Indigenous Marrugeku and Bangarra Dance Theatre invite grief for immense losses. Featuring First Nations performance and its profound knowledge of biodiverse multispecies habitats, this study challenges the ways in which socio-ecological disaster is called 'natural' and positioned outside human responsibility.

Performing Climates features 13 interconnected essays exploring theatre and performance’s relationship with more-than-human elements at a time of climate emergency. This book argues that Western performance – how we conceive of it, as well as how we train and educate people in and about it – needs to reorient its ways of making and thinking about itself to reconsider patterns of breakdown, decay and renewal happening on and off stage in a literal play of cells and particles. Performing Climates examines live performance as a uniquely compostable artform, formed by sonic vibrations and movements of air and matter, more-than-human elements, composition and decomposition. This book will appeal to undergraduate audiences, postgraduate scholars and performance studies colleagues, offering exciting possibilities for reconsidering theatre and performing in an age of crisis.

Examining the ways in which contemporary Western theatre protests against the ‘War on Terror’, this book analyses six twenty-first century plays that respond to the post-9/11 military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine.

Together with new essays by contemporary ecofeminist scholars, the book uncovers the dialectical relationship between environmental and feminist causes, the relational identities of feminists and ecofeminists, and the concept of ecofeminism as a rallying point for environmental feminism.