Reflections on a Green Turn in Modern Greek Studies:
The case for an Eco-conscious Theatre
22 March 2021
Marissia Fragkou Canterbury Christ Church University
Recent eco-criticism in theatre and performance studies in the Anglophone world concern questions regarding the material conditions in which theatre is made and performed and the representational practices that seek to bring the public closer to issues that would mobilize an ‘ecological turn’. What does this turn might look like in the Greek context? How can the arts and theatre in Greece contribute to a creative imagining of an ethics of care about the human and the non-human? Theatre’s potential to animate such imaginings through the affective impressions of its storytelling and the formation of temporary communities evidences its significant role in the promotion of an eco-sensibility. Following examples from global performance practices, a more dedicated eco-critical approach needs to be developed which will complement and extend the dialogue between theory and theatre practice. This eco-critical approach should consist in recognizing the interdependency of the human and the non-human and exploring vulnerability and interdependency as politics on a local and global scale.
In the midst of a global pandemic, our experience and perception of the world has greatly sharpened. The experience of slowing down and the emphasis on caring that has dominated our minutiae in the past few months seem to be gesturing towards the need to decelerate and reconfigure our relationship with temporality, our place in the world and our interdependency with other material and immaterial bodies: we might finally listen to the sound of slow violence and respond to it.
NOTES
[1] R. Nixon (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p.8.
[2] B. Kershaw (2015) ‘Performed by ecologies: How Homo sapiens could subvert present-day futures’, Performing Ethos, 4.2: 113-134.
[3] J. Bennett (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham and London: Duke University Press, p.6
[4] See, for example, Anna Tzakou’s geopoetics a practice focusing on an embodied experience of place and the interdependency of the human and its environment and choreographer Apostolia Papadamaki who created the first underwater performance involving able-bodied and disabled dancers.

Dr Marissia Fragkou is senior lecturer in Performing Arts at Canterbury Christ Church University. She has published widely on theatre and social engagement in contemporary theatre in the UK and Greece. She is the author of Ecologies of Precarity in Twenty-First Century Theatre: Affect, Politics, Responsibility (Bloomsbury, 2019) and has co-edited two special journal issues on Greek theatre for The Journal of Greek Media and Culture (2017) and on contemporary methods in theatre and performance studies for Σκηνή (2021).