STAGES – Sustainable Theatre Alliance for a Green Environmental Shift

STAGES – Sustainable Theatre Alliance for a Green Environmental Shift

STAGES – Sustainable Theatre Alliance for a Green Environmental Shift is a never-before-seen theatre experiment to revolutionize how the cultural sector interacts with the concept of sustainability.

Between 2022 and 2025, 14 influential theatre organizations tour urgent new performances on the climate crisis around Europe and even as far as Taiwan. What makes STAGES unique is that no people or items move as part of the tour.

Each partner also uses lessons from Doughnut Economics to undergo a new auto-analysis process to identify necessary changes in areas such as building design, audience travel and work-life balance; and test a series of participatory events and workshops, bringing scientists and local audiences into the creative process.

The STAGES partners commit to re-thinking touring processes by re-staging the two performances created by Katie Mitchell and Jérôme Bel for Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne, using local casts, local sets, and even electricity generated on-stage. They are:

A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction, a purposeful eco-feminist monologue by Miranda Rose Hall which reflects on our responsibilities and means of action in the face of ecological disaster, directed by Katie Mitchell
Jérôme Bel, an auto-bio-choreo-graphy that could have been subtitled: “dancing, from AIDS to the climate crisis”, by Jérôme Bel.

STAGES partners have also been able to use their influence and Cross-European connections to express solidarity with Trafó, the project’s Hungarian theatre partner, through a period of immense financial difficulty. This solidarity allows the theatre to produce the adaptation of the play Jérôme Bel, also co-produce an additional show in the second half of the project.

An annual series of participatory Forum events and workshops brings together artists, scientists, and audiences to dream of “desirable futures”. The first Forum focused on the topic of Space and Territories and was hosted by Théâtre de Liège and NTGent in November 2022. The second Forum took place at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb, in Croatia, on 20 and 21 November 2023.

In Milan, the multidisciplinary workshop Terra: con i piedi (e le mani) per terra [Soil: with feet (and hands) on the ground], coordinated by Davide Carnevali in collaboration with Politecnico di Milano, is going on: thanks to the dialogue between art and science, its objective is to work, over a period of three years, on raising citizens’ awareness of the concept of soil as a common good, in order to create artistic and concrete interventions to preserve and enhance it.

In September 2022, our theatre started a participatory process of self-analysis focused on the issues of sustainability in its broadest sense, following the principles of Doughnut Economics. Eight months of work, four groups, more than eighty participants – including theatre staff, artists and spectators –, more than one hundred and ten recommendations and suggestions, more than one hundred possible interventions from which five priority actions were identified to implement thanks to dedicated Creative Europe funding.

During our 2024/25 season we are not only continuing the project’s research activities with the multidisciplinary Terra workshops: on the basis of the reflections arising from the self-analysis process for each partner, we are staging two different productions promoting the culture of sustainability: Benvenuti al Piccolo! Green tour of the island of trees by Michele Dell’Utri and Semidei by Pier Lorenzo Pisano.

The full list of partners: Théâtre de Liège (Belgium) | MC93 — Maison de la Culture de Seine-Saint-Denis (France) | Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb (Croatia) | The Royal Dramatic Theatre, Dramaten, Stockholm (Sweden) | Lithuanian National Drama Theatre (Lithuania) | Piccolo Teatro di Milano – Teatro d’Europa (Italy) | Trafó House of Contemporary Arts (Hungary) | Teatro Nacional D. Maria II (Portugal) | NTGent (Belgium) | Maribor Slovene National Theatre- Slovensko narodno gledališče Maribor (Slovenia) | Riga Technical University – University of Latvia (Latvia) | European Theatre Convention (Germany) | Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne (Switzerland) | National Theater & Concert Hall – 國家兩廳院 (Taiwan)