AustLit

'Contemporary performance can expose and dismantle the ideologies that have supported the enduring cultural and mythic dialogues associated with the Australian landscape. As threats of catastrophic climate change accelerate, theatre-making research can play a significant role in making sense of the ecological transformations that we experience. As a practice-led playwright researcher, I investigate how Australian landscapes are re-imagined in contemporary performance contexts that investigate the accelerating climate crisis. Further, I am mindful of how enviro-cultural expression can effectively emerge through a playtext or production and contribute to eco-critical discourse. Eco-critical analysis is becoming popular in both theatre studies and theatre production as the definition of 'text' extends into both written and performative methods. In offering a valuable contribution to eco-critical discourse, the performance text establishes a unique relationship between the theatrical encounter, the audience and the place and time in which the encounter occurs. This research discusses how the enduring Australian cultural legacies, which have defined our mythic relationship to the beloved Bush or Outback, are being superseded by investigations concerning disappearing Nature and the part we have played in our present ecological situatedness. From a historical perspective, Australian theatre has always provoked discussion about our conflicting relationship to the land, the culture, the environment and its human inhabitants. However, contemporary playwrights are choosing to investigate these questions through politicised ecological lenses. Specifically framed through one such theatrical lens - that of Dust (Hassall 2015) - this discussion explores the landscape as both a geographic place and a psychological space. In positioning landscape in this way, the text is associated with contemporary Australian Gothic drama. It suggests that the Australian cultural identity is embedded in brutal psychological, cultural and physical landscapes, which are acknowledged as normative. The play deconstructs familiar ideologies through climate change experiences by investigating themes of environmental human legacy. Throughout this discussion, excerpts from Dust are utilised to support an eco-critical analysis of the performance text. Overall, this discussion explores the intersection between playwriting practice-research, environmental themes and eco-critical concerns. It exemplifies how theatrical text can become a point of eco-critical examination and therefore has the power to question and in some ways expose the repercussions of colonisation and the master narratives that support greenhouse gas emission, unsustainable resource extraction, advanced industrialisation and unsustainable practices.' (Author's abstract)