Readings in Performance and Ecology

This ground-breaking collection of essays focuses on how theatre, dance, and other forms of performance are helping to transform our ecological values. Leading scholars and practitioners explore the ways that familiar and new works of theatre and dance can help us recognize our reciprocal relationship with the natural world and how performance helps us understand the way our bodies are integrally connected to the land. They also explore how environmentalists use performance as a form of protest; how performance illuminates our relationships with animals as autonomous creatures and artistic symbols; and how performance can help humans re-define our place in the larger ecological community.

Wendy Arons is an associate professor of Dramatic Literature and Dramaturgy at Carnegie Mellon University. She is author of Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Women's Writing, editor of a special issue of Theatre Topics on Performance and Ecology, director of the Performance and Ecology Project at CMU, and artistic director and organizer of the 2012 Earth Matters on Stage ecodrama festival and symposium. She contributed to Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions (2010).

Theresa J. May is an assistant professor of Theatre Arts and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. She has published widely on performance and ecology, including essays in Performing Nature and a special issue of Theatre Topics on Performance and Ecology. Her book, Salmon Is Everything: Community-based Theatre in the Klamath Watershed, is forthcoming. She is co-author of Greening Up Our Houses and co-founder/artistic director of the Earth Matters on Stage ecodrama festival and symposium.