AustLit

'Through a contemporary Gothic lens, the book explores theatre theories, processes and practices that explore; the impacts of continuing drought and natural disaster, the conflicts concerning resource extraction and mining and current political debates focussed on climate change denial. While these issues can be argued from various political and economic platforms, theatrical investigations as discussed here suggest that scholars and theatre makers are becoming empowered to dramaturgically explore the ecological challenges we face now and may face in the future. In doing so the book proposes that theatre can engage in not only climate change analysis and discussion but can develop climate literacies in a broader socio-cultural context.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'At this time in history, climate change predicts that we are once again dwarfed by nature. Nature is as Massey (2008) suggests, understood as the classic foundations for our contemplation of place and our fascinations with belonging to place. As creative writers, artists and scholars respond to escalating temperatures, rising sea levels and natural disasters, on a daily basis, the threat of climate change events loom large in the contemporary imagination. Humankind’s pride in domination over all things natural is being put to the test, as we begin to anticipate the terrifying spectacle of our own damnation. From an ecological and eco-critical perspective, climate change may be considered, as the contemporary ‘abomination’ as it poses both a moral and a psychological paradox for us all. It is not an hallucinatory fantasy, nor is it a social pathology. Contemporary Australian Gothic drama explores the paradoxical relationship between perceptions of what is absent and what is present, between past and future, between climate, nature and disappearing landscapes and geographies. It is within this paradox of perception that Australian Gothic drama responds to literary legacies of Romanticism as we ‘lament the loss of spiritual connections’ to nature (Bate 1991: 17). This paper discusses the environmental and eco-critical themes embedded in two of my theatrical works, Dust 2016 and Salvation 2013, in which notions of evil in the Romantic sense are discovered in the ecologies of landscape, place and space from which we as humans are, in turn, becoming alienated.' (Publication abstract)

'Dust was developed as a response to increasing confirmations of global warming.' (Source : Linda Hassall Contemporary Theatrical Landscapes: The Legacy of Romanticism in two examples of contemporary Australian Gothic drama

'Salvation is a realisation of Hassall’s creative research into themes associated with white inheritance of Australian landscape. The work transforms theoretical investigation of landscape from post-colonial and spatial positions into theatrical exploration and questions Euro-centric associations of historical and future place, asking ‘What will we leave behind?’ Salvation voices some uncomfortable national silences to investigate and provoke socio-cultural questions pertaining to identity, nation, race, class and gender. Salvation questions the ideological or mythological perceptions that may promote a sense of the significance of dominant (white) European society in the Australian landscape. Salvation may read as a metaphor that voices Australian racial, environmental and cultural tensions. Salvation claims the value of landscape as central to the themes investigated and to the cultural knowledge statements that are embedded within the fiction. ' (Author's abstract)