A Personal Exploration of Ecoscenography and a Sustainable Future for Theatre Design
Sustain, frontal version (by Bodil Rørtveit, Jørn Lavoll, Vibeke Havre, Silje Kise.)
by Erika Guay
Erika Guay is an Associate Professor of Theatre at SUNY Plattsburgh and designs scenery, costumes, lighting, puppetry, and directs TYA productions.
Previously on this blog, I wrote about using plastic and other unconventional materials onstage for a production of Into the Woods with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and book by James Lapine.
As I previously mentioned in that article, our production was not geared towards any goals of sustainability or environmental messaging. We used both new and old plastic items, lots of spray foam, and a dry rotting scrim for one last use. And when the production was over, all the plastic was thrown out. Frankly, as many of us know, throwing out your work after a production is a common occurrence.
In our circumstance, all the plastic was treated with flame retardant (see my previous article about this) and made it impossible to store. You might think that watching all this plastic go into the dumpster would have been a wake-up call, but it was actually a few months later as I was writing and processing our work. It started to hit. The guilt of all the waste from just one set. I started looking at old photos of other large sets, props, and costumes I designed that also did not get reused or recycled. It gnawed and gnawed at me seeing the waste of my work piling up. Theatre designers are rarely hired or trained to consider the impact of their designs after opening night. I thought, “there has to be a better way” than to continually create things and often have to throw out many creations that can't survive under long-term storage or won't fit into our storage areas. Or might not have a stylistic use in other shows.
To be clear, this post is not about defending our past behavior but to look to our future to do better. What occurred for Into the Woods is an example of what my “typical” design process looks like and it illuminates a production where we could have exalted the “green” elements of the set – the reused plastic, scrim, and stock items – without looking at the full cycle of the items nor understanding the true carbon footprint or ecological impact of what we created.
However, I believe it is time for theatre artists to step forward and play a role in changing our design and production process; to put sustainability in the front of every production, at the beginning of every design process. To that end, myself, and my department, are going to step up and see how we can be part of this change. I know we will not be perfect and I will make many mistakes. I also understand that if we don’t try we will never make change happen. The idea of “sustainability” for theatres is not necessarily new, but the awareness and visibility of the concept have accelerated in recent years. More theaters in 2021/22 are putting sustainability statements in place aiming for new measures and goals to help combat climate change.
So where does one start? How did my journey begin? Possibly similar to other designers, the covid pandemic provided an unprecedented time for pause, reflection, research, and planning. I started with simply discussing the idea of sustainability with my theatre colleagues and found many defensive. They felt that their environmental footprint is already low because they reuse the same pieces of scenery and costumes over and over, often due to a lack of funding. Others find the concept of “environment first” as a limiter to their production quality and unfair if they are aiming for specific styles. I myself love upcycling, recycling, and using stock in my work, yet, my design aesthetic has been considered “cheap” since I often use less money on supplies. I tried to take these comments and thoughts as starting points. Is our footprint smaller because we reuse items? Is placing the environment first in design a limiter? Can we view productions with small or no materials budget as a good thing?
The first resource I accessed as I searched was the Ecoscenography Facebook page. These 1,700+ people immediately provided a network of information, opportunities, and have become a vital part of my theatre community. So what is “ecoscenography”?
According to the founder of the organization, Tanja Beer, ecoscenography is a practice defined as, “the integration of ecological thinking into all stages of scenographic production and aesthetics.” A main part of this practice is to no longer view the end-point of our theatre work as waste. Rather, to view the opportunity to both use the readily available resources (such as stock items, found objects, and otherwise discarded materials) and extend that use beyond performance. While Into the Woods did some of this work on the front end by happenstance, it did not complete the life cycle needed. There was never a consideration of the end-use of the materials.
At this point you might be wondering about the breakdown of the term “ecoscenography” – it is in fact the two words “ecology” and “scenography” mushed together– both of these terms employ a holistic approach to their field. Ecology looks to the interactivity and relationships between ecosystems, and scenography to the whole experience of performance that intersects between design, direction, and audience interaction. According to Beer, ecoscenography considers how production affects and relates to the broader ecosystem beyond the theatre. It entails incorporating principles of ecology to create recyclable, biodegradable, restorative, and/or regenerative performance spaces.
So for the department, this is part of the excitement of this journey. There are huge challenges but any of the changes we enact as part of ecoscenography is not bound to any particular methodology. We will have to see what works for us as collaborators and embrace this in our creative process. Even with knowing myself, by working through this process of reflection and research, I would not label myself as a “ecoscenographer,” YET.
From the Ecoscenography group, I was linked to another major resource for our department: The Theatre Green Book by sustainability engineer Buro Happold, with the help of 200 theatre-makers who are listed in the acknowledgements. The series of three books, available online in beta version, each tackle a different side of theatre: Book 1 is on sustainable productions, Book 2 on sustainable buildings, and Book 3 on sustainable operations. In short, these three books cover all the elements of theatre: the plays and shows a company produces, the buildings or area they put them in, and then all the other offices, marketing, catering, travel, etc. that can be involved.
The Theatre Green Book argues that “It isn’t a matter of deciding which is the worst offender and forgetting about the rest. If theatre is to become sustainable, and be seen by the public as sustainable, then it has to review every aspect of what theatre-making means, and rethink every way in which it currently harms the planet.” Taking on three books at once is a daunting task. For myself, as a designer, the book that I directly relate to is Book 1: Sustainable Productions.
The text itself is straightforward in how it presents the creative challenge of placing sustainability from day one through strike, even weighing different paths and abilities of various sized theatres along with specifics for scenery, props, costumes, hair and makeup, lighting, sound, and AV.
While there are many details to consider, the basics laid out by the text are simple:
Do more with less.
Use more reused components and recycled materials.
If it has to be new, think where it comes from.
Reduce harmful chemicals.
Reduce travel. Reduce deliveries.
Make sure everything gets used again.
I am expecting many of our conversations in the department to revolve around the “Who does what?” chart, as the breakdown in our department, and I am sure other places as well, is not as clear cut. The text presents four clear groups of people: producers, directors and designers, production managers, and production staff, makers, and suppliers. For example, in Spring 2022 for our production of The Cake, by Bekah Brunstetter, I am a faculty design mentor to student designers, one part of the “producer” team, and the costume shop manager. Those titles place me in three of the four categories. Meanwhile when I directed A Peter Rabbit Tale, I had the role of director, designer, was part of the production management and producer team, and I also mentored students making props and costumes, thus placing myself in all four categories.
Being someone who bridges all the areas of a production could help with steering sustainability to the forefront, but it also adds time, research, and makes it hard to be accountable to myself. Who would know but me if I was running out of time and went and bought that last minute plasticy thing that would only survive for one production before it breaks? The Theatre Green Book acknowledges that perfection is unlikely early in a company’s process, but emphasizes collaboration, planning, and providing time for experimenting.
This text also provides clear layouts of how to plan: rethinking our budgets, working with new collaborators, and excellent charts such as the one of The Materials Hierarchy. The top of the chart starts with designing materials away from the production and the bottom is high carbon footprint materials such as plastic, toxins, etc. Looking at my example from Into the Woods, while the reused materials hit in the middle of this chart, the 2000 brand new ball-pit-balls would go to the bottom of this chart – both for origin and afterlife. Clearly there is room for us to grow.
As I move forward from today and continue my journey, I would like to share a more recent project that reflects some (but not all) of the key takeaways of Ecoscenography and the Theatre Green Book. As part of the production of The Cake, students in my stagecraft class made fake cakes. These cakes used bead foam sourced from packaging materials from the Campus General Store (which would have been thrown out) – we have stored many large boxes of this foam. We also used non-toxic theatrical “glue” that is ending its shelf life so it avoids the trash, fabrics which we already own, and trays and decorations from stock that we already own. The wonderful element is that all the cakes were built in a manner to withstand storage and should find life in other future productions.. Since the cakes have common geometric shapes, the foam could be reused in the future or the cakes rebuilt in new ways. These are items that should avoid the trash for the foreseeable future. While this is a small step, it is one of the first where I fully know the items we will make will embrace a different path – I’m not 100% happy with this small project alone – I could still see some of these cakes getting destroyed, never fully used but instead gather dust, or see the trash –but it is still a step with mindfulness.
There is a long way ahead – the way many theatre designers are trained will have to change. Currently, our industry trains creativity, collaboration, and focuses on getting to opening night through a process. Traditionally, designers do not have to make choices about what to keep and what goes in the trash after a production closes. That task is often left on the shoulders of technical directors, costume shop managers, and other technical production members. Yet, the crafters behind the designer have little to no agency on what designers design. So other people are the ones to feel the burden of what can be saved, what materials are purchased, what materials are used, what can be stored, and what has no other spot than the trash or donation pile.
The hope is that our department can use these resources and many more out there to foster change in how we work. Rather than just being lucky that we reused something one more time, have storage for the items, or know another home for something by chance, we need to think through a larger process of how the items we design will see another day on a stage.
To access the Ecosenography group go here: https://ecoscenography.com/
To access the Theatre Green Book go here: https://theatregreenbook.com/