Ecologies of Time and Change

Co-chairs:
Lindsey Mantoan, Linfield University
Matthew Moore, Muhlenberg College
Angela Farr Schiller, Boston Conservatory at Berklee

The US theatre industry is shifting seismically, and the upheavals feel to some like an end–or maybe The End.

May 2023: Nataki Garrett, Artistic Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, announces her final day with OSF will be May 31st, after she was the target of death threats.

June 2023: Oscar Eustis, Artistic Director of the Public Theatre, announces that the Under the Radar Festival has been put on hiatus

July 2023: Book-It Repertory Theater closes its doors for good after serving the Seattle theatergoing community for over 33 years.

Last year, over 300,000 acres of land were destroyed across the Pacific Northwest, signaling that Western firefighting practices repressing time-honored Indigenous cultural burns may have been the biggest culprit.

This present is tense. But tensions and upheavals are always with us, like the shifting of Earth’s tectonic plates, and do not necessarily prescribe ends.

This conference theme reflects on the time of change. Borrowing from ecology and the languages of other time(s), we ask how organic material evolves into something new, and how we might differently imagine or make visible our own processes of change.

In her moving manifesto, theatre artist Annalisa Dias writes of the ways Western dramaturgy programs us to view endings as final, and she encourages us to ask:

What if instead of dramaturgies of collapse,
we looked to the earth and learned from natural processes of decomposition? 
[…] 
A dramaturgy of decomposition 
Is a tender invitation beyond loss.  (“Decomposition Instead of Collapse”)

The shift that Dias posits changes the shape of time’s passing, creating hope. She suggests that even our greatest tragedies might evolve when considered from a different angle or shape of time. Hamlet’s tragedy becomes Denmark’s renewal; Oedipus’ fate absolves the city; our personal losses become growth, in time. And although our own moment is fraught with impending threats to life as we know it, life will go on. The fear of our end, brought on by our own hamartia haunts our relationship to the natural world and our future, but this conference is not about the final outcome of climate change. It is about the shape of change we want to imagine in relation to our cultural practices; it is about the stories we want to tell ourselves about change.

Our work–theatre studies, theatre history, performance studies, live art practice, and so forth–takes place in time, and must engage with the landscape of time and history that we hope to invigorate in this moment of change. A focus on temporality and change opens space for research centering race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, theatre histories, performance studies, global theater, the relationship between the non-human and the human, media and culture, musicals, and the incursion of AI into our theatrical and educational practices. Asking our community to rethink temporality, the practice of history, and dramaturgy in relation to natural systems of change signals the seriousness with which the arts will engage in conversations about complicity in human-authored climate catastrophe. Engaging change beyond current dominant-culture, western methodologies and practices, as Dias’ dramaturgy challenges us to do, may indeed be “a tender invitation beyond loss” for something more.

The 2024 ASTR Conference Committee invites considerations of:

Present Tense
Climate change
Liveness
Rhythm and Tempo
Non-human temporalities
Text and presence
Simultaneity
Perceiving time

Past Continuous
Queer times
Indigenous temporalities
Race and Time
Archives, the material, and the ephemeral
Post/Colonial, post-industrial times
Scars and the stories they tell
Duration
The time of language, the languages of time

Future Imperfect
Recycling
Chronopolitics of Racial Time
AI
The temporary and the permanent
Utopian Performatives
Reincarnations, Revivals, Adaptations
Death, decomposition, regrowth and performance
Change and the Pacific Northwest
Futures of Practice, Futures of the Field