About

This practice-based research challenges the inability of environmental protestors to sustain public support. I propose an interdisciplinary dramaturgical framework (IDF) for developing verbatim theatre (VT), that uses psychogeography to analyse the undergirding ethnography. This approach foregrounds the spatial politics influencing protestors and public alike that are beyond the ambit of testimonial-dependent VT, which thereby limits sympathy. I demonstrate this methodology through developing VT pieces about Extinction Rebellion (XR).

Criticism of XR has, paradoxically, been correlated with increasing climate anxiety (Conner and Mann, 2021). Psychologists identify this 'interpretive denial', as symptomatic of trauma (Stanley, 2021). Movement theorists argue this denial is furthered at protests, in which public spaces are constructed by neoliberal ideologies to occlude private interests, thereby safeguarding economic activity from subversion (Ruiz, 2017). This theorisation can be extended to theatre, widely considered as 'public space' (Trueman, 2018).

VT has therapeutic potential to create sympathy between audiences and performed subjects (Madsen, 2018). However VT practitioner Stuart Fisher (2011) cites mimetic conceptions of trauma as incommunicable in language, to suggest VT's limitation in using decontextualized testimonies. Combined with the repressive nature of neoliberal public space, this results in sympathy being further obstructed.

Guy Debord's (1967) psychogeographic technique of détournément challenges neoliberal repression by exposing the hidden configuration of public spaces (Smith and Katz, 1993). By using détournément heuristically, an ethnography of protest can develop VT that is both contextualised and challenging; thereby engendering sympathy and shifting opinion.

By undertaking ethnographic research at XR protests, and using an IDF to analyse this data, I will be able to develop VT performances. These will then be staged for groups with heterodox opinions on the climate crisis, whose responses can then be analysed. This research advances awareness of the climate crisis and furthers thinking in the fields of theatre and social movement study.