The event NOW – AT ONCE – (AS OF) TODAY will focus on so-called climate change theater — a kind of theater that vies for attention by addressing a pressing crisis — in the contexts of scholarly and public discourse. It is part of the currently occurring worldwide festival Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA) 2025. In response to this year’s theme, The Time Is Now, 50 microdramas are available to anyone who wants to organize an event. Embedded in the atmospheric impact of visual art by Diego Bianchi und Celina Eceiza, i.e., of works that highlight the body as well as spatial experience, students from a drama and theater seminar taught by Nassim W. Balestrini (CIMIG & Department of American Studies) will recite several short plays.
Subsequently, they will invite audience members — among them students of Julia Hoydis (Department of English Studies) and Ulla Kriebernegg (CIRAC) — to reflect on the ways in which activist theater can contribute to raising awareness of the climate crisis. (How) can such theater convey changes of attitude and behavior without being overly didactic? Which aesthetic strategies of drama and theater are crucial in this respect? Which inquiries of Aging and Care Studies can be profitably linked to the meaning-making impact of theater in sociopolitical contexts? How do students who, for instance, want to become educators or who want to work for cultural institutions, perceive their own options? We look forward to a stimulating discussion of how the arts and academic scholarship address ways of responding to the climate crisis and of how we can raise awareness of these issues in Graz.
Cooperation: Center for Intermediality in Graz, Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care, Departments of English and American Studies, HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark
NOW – AT ONCE – (AS OF) TODAY Climate Change Theatre Action 2025 — HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark