To write about Theater in 2024 requires a clear understanding of my place in the world. The fact that I have the time to write about art making without feeling unsafe is a huge privilege that comes from living in the Global North in a city that is not currently being ravaged by war or climate disasters.

Everyday we watch and listen to the news about “unprecedented” events happening everywhere. Homes, livelihoods and lives being lost to flooding, hurricanes, fires, and heat waves. With so much suffering around us, how do we strengthen the ways in which the Arts matter to people in the era of climate disaster? Can we even do that without becoming social workers or community engagement organizations? How can we do this without being performative? 

It's an unanswerable question but it’s this question that we’re embracing at Neworld Theatre. We’re living in and creating for the question. 

As a small creation-based theatre company, we’re constantly shifting our attention to what feels relevant to audiences and what strikes us as the important current issues in the cultural zeitgeist. And over the last few years, we've focused greatly on the climate crisis, greatly influenced by being based in British Columbia, which saw a devastating heat wave and a crushing atmospheric river in 2021.

Collectively and individually, we've attended conferences, workshops, talks led by experts, and strategic planning sessions in an effort to find where we belong in this conversation. But after a lot of soul searching, we’ve come back to basics and embraced who we are at our core: storytellers.

So our role, and how we believe we can have the most impact, is to involve ourselves in the crisis as Storytellers. Not only on the stories we tell but also how we tell the stories and who tells the stories and when we tell these stories. We are choosing to use theatre to make the crisis visible and tangible so that people attending these shows can have an encounter with art that will spark their own involvement in the climate arena. 

We design these theatrical experiences to lead our audiences to a place of transformative change. Renowned author and environmental activist George Monbois said that “despair is the state we fall into when our imagination fails”. So Neworld is creating stories that, hopefully, lead to a kinder, better world. This is the crucial role of Arts and Culture in building a post-fossil world. We’re showing the world the promise of a better future is available to us if we get to work.

And ‘getting to work’ also involves taking care of our own carbon emissions and adapting to more sustainable practices. Neworld is in the initial stage of developing a climate policy which will be limited and small at the beginning. We're going through the exercise and the documentation because we believe it's the right thing to do and because we want our funders and audiences to know that we're engaging in this conversation onstage and offstage.

So are we doing enough? Depends on how one measures it. But I’m certain we’re doing as much as we can with limited resources in an area that has not been a priority for governments and for which public funding is not currently available. Onwards.