From weather to climate: a note

This article explores a dimension of ecological experience that tends to be either forgotten or misrepresented in both theatrical practice and scholarly commentary – namely, our relationship with climate. Against scenographic and/or site-based experiments in representing weather, both of which are rooted in decidedly naturalist modes of mimesis, I argue for a more abstract dimension of depicting climate that is inherent in the affective and temporal registers of the theatrical medium itself. In this way, and drawing on David Williams’ entry for ‘Weather’ in the ‘A Lexicon’ issue of Performance Research (2006), the aim is to sketch out the possibility for a new way of thinking about theatre and climate that avoids the narrative and tropic contradictions inherent in the ‘climate change play’, its unresolved humanism. What I am arguing for ostensibly is a counter-intuitive practice of ecological theatre that does not oppose the medium to ‘nature’, but, on the contrary, thinks through the ramifications of posing theatre as part of nature, an isomorph, in other words. I refer to this alternative model of theatre as articulating a dramaturgy of the clinamen, giving rise to a temporal becoming that equates theatrical experience with climatological experience