Introducing:
Chris Fittock
Environmental Theatre is a hot topic for our community. Logically, the need is there. But a lot of us are asking ‘can it actually do anything?’. Mrs C’s Collective held a discussion board at the beginning of the year, led by community member Zoe Woodruff. Zoe wanted to explore the potential of this emerging genre - it became clear just how new and complex making work with an environmental mission is.
So, it made complete sense to invite Chris Fittock over for a chat. Chris is a leading maker of environmental theatre, and we are thrilled to have had Chris share with us an honest account of his current journey, confronting the climate crisis as a theatre-maker.
Grab a cup of tea, a biscuit and maybe even a notebook, because you’re in for a good read here!
Q. Theatre in the Rough - we are so excited by your work - can you tell us more?
“Theatre in the Rough originated as something I’d now describe as well-meant but well-worn: namely, a new writing company for young people, producing platform performances of short plays.
Why well-worn? Well, taking young people from page to stage is really fruitful, of course. But the audience is kind of a spurious one. Because it’s mums, dads and aunties. The perceived risk-reward ratio of going to see a play by a 14-year-old is pretty high. I mean, I probably wouldn’t go to one either! So as a producer, there’s something unsatisfying there. Because the value of a work relies on a credible concatenation between maker and audience.
“And if you look at the makers who are already way ahead in this field – well, they’re making just the most thrilling work imaginable.”
So we started embedding work within contexts that reduced barriers to entry for non-self-selecting audiences. We’d ground projects around thematically familiar and community-based subjects. And present them in non-theatre spaces.
We became more expansive in terms of artforms too. That meant trying to look beyond the UK mainstream. A few years ago, we produced an audio project called Coastlands, which took its inspiration from the German and Danish genre of Radiomontage, which is a style of ‘audio play’ you just don’t find very often over here. I’m not hugely excited by just replicating what lots of other people already do perfectly well!
We’ve also collaborated with a lot of non-theatre organisations, from National Museums Liverpool to a National Nature Reserve. I think staying in your own lane’s a bit of a dead-end. And over the past year or so, we’ve consciously started to pivot towards making work with an environmental focus. That’s the next big phase of our journey.”
“But to me, it felt like a product that wasn’t just from a different time, but from a different planet. And I felt totally dissociated – and, actually, very sad – as both a maker and a punter.”
Q. What does environmental theatre mean to you?
“My fundamental conception of ‘environmental theatre’ is bound to a poetics I haven’t fully got to in practice yet. But as an aspiration, I don’t see how it’s avoidable.
Ultimately, I think the only way to usefully confront the devastation of the Anthropocene* is to decentre the human. To a great extent, it’s the psychological, chauvinistic fiction of human exceptionalism that’s killing us. We essentially author the planet, and we’re writing a selfish narrative of colossal failure right now.
So, what does that mean for a theatre aspiring to some kind of environmental grace? Well, there’s clearly a structural correlation between how we position ourselves in the world and how we position ourselves in the arts. As makers, we tend to the authorial and exceptional. And that renders even our best intentions suspect. How so? Well here’s the predicament: Somebody could write the finest play about the Climate Crisis, that runs for a million years, garners twenty million five-star reviews, and wins nine billion Olivier Awards. ‘Hurrah’, we say. ‘A super successful stage play advocating for all the just and true things that demand such advocacy. Go playwrights!’.
Okay, fine. But, as a form, that just seems complicit in the basic problem. Firstly, it’s hierarchical and dualistic, in that it’s almost certainly Anthropocentric writing about, not with. And secondly, it’s probably presented in a theatre building that walls off – in a deliberately illusive, representational space – the very environments it’s talking about. It may seem churlish, but that kind of discontinuity is emblematic of the central problem. And the more you think about it, the more it feels absurd.
So for me, ‘environmental theatre’ is one that’s grounded in what’s called Object-Oriented Ontology. It means thinking and creating reciprocally with the non-human world. It means promoting what Corrine Donley calls ‘cross-species mutualism’. It means vitiating discontinuities in artistic composition and presentation.'
“We had short films, audio plays, guided tours of public parks, paper-making, clothes-mending, and witchcraft.”
Now, this is really fucking difficult. Because, plainly, we are humans! So it’s not so easy to escape our being the centre of our own experience of the world! Perhaps there’s a school of enlightened fish, somewhere, having a debate about the dangers of ichthyocentrism**. Because that’s how they experience the world: as fish. It’s ineluctable, right? But we have the cognitive capacity to think of ourselves as part of an ecologic mesh in which all things are interconnected and of equal value. And that’s a crucial ethical perspective that the making of environmental theatre has the power to get to grips with.
I’m not there yet, probably by a long shot, because it is difficult. And it is more complex than just treating the human species as a monolith, in which each person bears equal culpability for biospheric disaster. And it is a case, as a maker, of unlearning millennia of normative artistic practice. But I remain more and more dogmatic about this. It’s certainly a creative and intellectual challenge that’s there to be risen to. And if you look at the makers who are already way ahead in this field – well, they’re making just the most thrilling work imaginable.”
* meaning this current geologic period. It’s used to describe the most recent period in Earth's history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet's climate and ecosystems
** Ichthyocentrism is the fish equivalent of Anthropocentrism. So a 'fish-centred view of the world' - a fish's belief that fish are the central entity in the world.
Photo from 400 Parts Per Million, Theatre in the Rough
Q. What was your journey like into this area of making work, how did you arrive here?
“There were a few stages on my journey so far.
In 2019, I wrote a Masters dissertation looking at amplifications of the Anthropocene in twentieth-century Frontier Literature. This took me deep into ecocriticism and ecopoetics, and really opened my eyes to the value of not just re-reading texts in the light of the Climate Crisis, but ontologically repositioning them. When you understand that the ecocritical frontier’s an amazing limen between referential and concrete worlds, there’s really no going back.
The second stage was more prosaic. I was on an escalator at Liverpool Central Station, passing advertisements for the latest theatre shows. I’ll be criticised for saying so, but there’s long been a genre of play in Liverpool that thrives on self-reflexive provincialism, to the extent that you can almost play trope bingo with them. And – almost certainly through a very ecocritical prism at the time – I felt an outsized exasperation when passing by a poster for the latest such piece. I was like, ‘Are we still doing this? The sky’s burning, the clock’s ticking, and we’re still doing this?’ It may have been a very fine play, and good luck to everyone entertained by it. But to me, it felt like a product that wasn’t just from a different time, but from a different planet. And I felt totally dissociated – and, actually, very sad – as both a maker and a punter.
The final stage was in 2021, when I was diagnosed with cancer for the second time in five years. A very tough recovery was a reckoning between myself and the non-human world. Recognising my diminished position within an elevated ecologic cosmos was supernormally restorative. And I think what I went through, and what the non-human world gave back to me, has radicalised me to an extent that wouldn’t otherwise have happened.”
“I think it starts with asking the question: ‘What does it mean to be an artist in the Anthropocene?’”
Q. If someone is at the very beginning of their artistic ecological journey - do you have any tips for taking those first steps?
“I think it starts with asking the question: ‘What does it mean to be an artist in the Anthropocene?’
You have to first locate your practice within the whole, and then figure outs its artistic efficacy or suitability. I gently suggest that if your aim is to reduce your carbon footprint, then don’t write a play about it: just turn down your heating or ride a bike. And as counterintuitive as it may sound, don’t just lapse into agitprop: the arts are not a convenient and boundless dumping ground for activism. There are far better environments in which to hector people!
Then, if you still think that the arts are the most appropriate vehicle to realise your intent, then start to ground yourself in theory and practice. See, listen to, and read about other people’s work in this space. Because the best of it is not like the work you’re used to. It’s so cutting edge, it’s untrue.
I also think an academic grounding can’t be underestimated. Scholarly articles aren’t always easy, but you’ll encounter a constellation of theories and ideas that’ll make your own journey that much more expansive. And you definitely shouldn’t fight back against the outdated tyranny of (very often publicly funded) paywalled journal articles by using Sci-Hub to access them for free. Because that would be illegal…”
Q. You refer to your most recent project, 400 Parts Per Million, as an artistic intervention - can you tell us more?
“400 Parts Per Million was our first eco-focused project. It explored young women’s experience of the Climate Crisis and was inspired by two things: firstly, the fact that, globally, women are the group most likely to be affected by the Climate Emergency; and secondly, women are still significantly under-represented in both arts and STEM.
We wanted to ground the participants and ourselves in the science, arts and activism of the subject before making any work. So we were lucky to work with an amazing roster of inspirational women leaders in this space, with weekly workshops delivered over Zoom, emanating from Toronto to Lancashire. We then worked with the participants to develop individual responses, and the breadth was really amazing. We had short films, audio plays, guided tours of public parks, paper-making, clothes-mending, and witchcraft.
We also produced a weekly podcast, in which the participants interviewed women leading hope and change in the Climate Crisis. This included theatre-makers, musicians, TV presenters, non-profit CEOs, and activists of many stripes. Guests came from the UK, Canada, the United States, the Netherlands and the Philippines. A truly global enterprise.
Ultimately, the work reached about 50,000 people online, which speaks to the unbelievable creativity of the makers. Is it important to ‘vent some fucking rage’, as our callout said? Yeah, I think so. But it’s maybe not a strapline I’d foreground now. It feels a bit agitprop-y. I think all the participants ended up asking the question ‘What does it mean to be an artist in the Climate Crisis?’, and, in answering it, came up with work far more potent, complex and useful than just ‘fucking rage’.”
“How can we just pitch up with our work in the way that travelling players might have done in the market square in their pageant wagon? Wouldn’t that be something.”
Q. As an emerging genre in theatre, what are the challenges?
”I honestly think the biggest challenge is negotiating systemic, normative practices on a structural level. If we say it’s more ideal than not to have continuity between the work and its composition and presentation, then questions seem to arise about the capability of the current building-based theatre culture to accommodate that. My background’s playwriting, so let’s look at this from the standpoint of a ‘playwright’. Firstly, the normative dramaturgy is problematic. It’s only really interested in a poetics of speciesism; and to a large extent cleaves to crisis, resolution and catharsis as a narrative framework. Well, I think that speciesism is contrary to good ecopoetics, as I’ve already said. And that dominant Western narrative model seems severely outmoded for a time of Climate Crisis. An illusion of resolution, and the hokey relief of catharsis, are both dangerous tools that diminish what a crisis really is. It’s not a precursor to an ordained ending. It’s a fucking crisis! And the only good way to address it is precisely without knowing the ending!
There is, by the way, a double challenge here. An audio play in the 400 Parts Per Million project attempted to short-circuit the resolution/catharsis model. And it’s really hard to do successfully. Firstly, it seems like a mistake. And secondly, it feels disappointing as a listener. Because that storytelling model’s so deeply and elementally embedded in us. I mean, there’s a reason it’s been working really well for thousands of years! We discovered that there are ways around it, but you have to take really good care of the audience experience to avoid disappointing or confusing people.
Next, look at the presentation model. I think the architecture of a building-based theatre is, in most cases, contrary to a coherent eco-arts experience. To avoid Anthropocentric dualism and hierarchies, you need to breathe the air and slop in the soil, okay? Walls and ceilings are physical and emotional parasites: in ecological terms, they sap connection and meaning – out of both you and the work. LEDs – sap! Speakers – sap! Set – sap! Prosecco in the bar – sap! ‘What about a bit of Verfremdungseffekt?’ somebody asks. Nope! Sorry, Brecht! In many ways, drawing attention to the illusion of the theatrical process makes matters even worse. It’s like doubling down on the very barriers themselves. So where are these new eco-plays supposed to be performed? Where’s the ready-made touring circuit of outdoor spaces equivalent to the existing building-based touring circuit?
We talk a lot about sustainability now. I have this romantic idea of playwrights (and theatre-makers more widely) being able to be self-sustainable. In terms of making, touring, the whole thing. How can we just pitch up with our work in the way that travelling players might have done in the market square in their pageant wagon? Wouldn’t that be something.”
Q. Where can we discover more about environmental theatre, through you or through other resources?
“The first thing everybody should do is check out the work of Gobbledegook Theatre. Lorna Rees is a beneficent genius, and has been my guide star in this space for the past year. Her work Cloudscapes is described as ‘a duologue for performer and clouds’. I mean… YES! That’s the aspiration for my whole practice right there in one sentence!
After that, please do not stick just to theatre! Because, arguably, much of the most radical work in this space is NOT being done by theatre… yet.
Academically, everything will eventually lead you back to Timothy Morton. Their ideas are dizzyingly dense, and their writing style’s, well, idiosyncratic. But for me, they’re at the cutting edge of thinking about our place in the universe.
The academic and poet Stuart Cooke is also pretty thrilling in terms of ecopoetics. He’s an amazing thinker, and, as a poet, really lays out the application of theory to artistic practice. Something fun to listen to is the Everything is Alive podcast, which interviews inanimate objects. I suppose it doesn’t strictly pass some of my more radical tests for an inter-species continuity… but it’s really clever and touching and funny and empathetic. So in terms of speculative realism, yeah, go for it. I really wish I’d written it. And if you want something really far out, check out Tree Talks by Wendy Burk (if you can find it). It’s a stunning documentation of interviews with eight trees in Southern Arizona.”