Lecture
The environmental emergency has raised several pressing questions for playwrights and artists. Why is this? Because we are struggling to picture where we are, who we are, who the conflicting protagonists are and, – perhaps most importantly – which role we should be playing in an adventure for which we were not prepared. As ever in times of profound crisis, theatre is particularly well-suited to capture the climatic upheaval that is underway. Whatever we cannot think about as a group, we must stage before an audience.
Over the last twelve years, French philosopher and science sociologist Bruno Latour and academic and stage director Frédérique Aït-Touati have been exploring the anthropological, aesthetic, and political consequences of moving into a new climate regime. In this lecture, Frédérique Aït-Touati will introduce these stage experiments (particularly the Terrestrial trilogy, performed as part of the Crossing the Lines festival on 27 and 28 October), which draw on theatre, the history of science, politics and anthropology to test, in each instance, the way in which these disciplines have the ability to absorb the shock of new earth sciences.
Somewhere between philosophy and art, this conference will examine the hypothesis whereby the great cosmological upheaval we are currently experiencing cannot escape the arrival of a new figure on the world stage, the Earth, or Gaia.
Frédérique Aït-Touati is a stage director and science historian. Exploring the links between science, literature and politics, she and her company Zone Critique develop a theatre of experimentation. Her work has been performed at the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, the Théâtre de l’Odéon, the Théâtre de la Criée in Marseille, New York (The Kitchen, The Signature Theatre, Crossing the Lines festival), Berlin (HAU, Berliner Festspiele), Lisbon, and Barcelona. A CNRS researcher, she also teaches at EHESS and runs SPEAP, the political science experimental arts programme at Sciences Po. She has published Contes de la Lune, essai sur la fiction et la science modernes (Gallimard, 2011), Terra Forma, manuel de cartographies potentielles (B42, 2019) Le Cri de Gaïa (with Emanuele Coccia, 2021) and Trilogie Terrestre (with Bruno Latour, 2022). Between 2014 and 2021, she was in residence at the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, where she and Bruno Latour and his company Zone Critique created Le Théâtre des négociations, and subsequently the Trilogie Terrestre. Today she is in residence at the Théâtre National de Chaillot with SPEAP and her company.