Climate Crisis & Contemporary Culture: Anthropocene Theatre
Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021, 11 am - 12:30 pm, Debate, Discussion and Round Table with Duncan Evennou, Frédérique Aït Touati, Clemence Hallé, Auditorium 152 Kendeda Building.
The event will be held both in person in the Kendeda Building Auditorium 152 and virtually on BlueJeans. The conversation will be moderated by Dr. Andrea Jonsson, Assistant Professor of French at the School of Modern Languages at the Georgia Institute of Technology. It is free for all to attend.
Working with the French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour, the theater companies Zone critique (Frédérique Aït-Touati) and Lighthouse Compagny (Duncan Evennou) explore in a unique way the most urgent ecological and climatic issues.
Between philosophy and theatre, stage and science, Zone critique and Lighthouse company productions claim the mix of genres: “we think it is well suited to the current period, in which changes in ideas about the world are accompanied by a change in representations of this world. It is this aesthetics of science on the stage that we have been pursuing together for more than ten years” (Frédéric Aït-Touati & Bruno Latour).
Thursday, Dec. 2, 7:00 pm "Matters" Performance, DramaTech Theatre (Duncan Evennou and Clémence Hallé)
Tickets: https://artsgatech.universitytickets.com/w/event.aspx?id=2052
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/274043345
Matters is a solo that, in a polyphonic assemblage, gives shape and body to the archives of the Anthropocene Working Group's inaugural meeting, scheduled Friday, October 17, 2014 at 9:00 am on the stage of the House of World Cultures, a contemporary performance institution located in Berlin. The geological hypothesis, increasingly noisy in the art world, inscribes the consequences of human impacts on their environments into the depths of earth time. Click here to view the trailer.
With Matters, actor Duncan Evennou situates and then transforms the historical, scientific and political voices of the members of the group, playing with their words in all their sensitivity, and moving from their narratives to their hesitations, their silences or their derision, plays with the frictions of thought when the sciences climb on the theater stage. Between the interstices of an increasingly disturbed performance appear the cracks of a dominant political discourse on the end of the world, powerless in the face of the representations of long and inhuman time that the geologists invite to imagine. Yet it is only the end of a world. Can we hear others emerging from the hubbub of knowledge blurred by the urgency to act?
Friday, Dec. 3, 7:00 pm "Moving Earths" Performance, DramaTech Theatre (Duncan Evennou)
Tickets: https://artsgatech.universitytickets.com/w/event.aspx?id=2053
Where to land?
Whereas in 1610 we had to absorb the shock that "the earth moves", following Galileo’s discovery, in 2021 we have to accept the much more surprising shock that the earth trembles and reacts to human actions to the point of disrupting all our development projects.
We invite the audience to test the hypothesis of a parallel between the era of the astronomical revolution and ours. Are we experiencing a world transformation as profound and radical as that of Galileo's time? One thing is certain: we no longer know exactly what planet we live on, nor how to describe it. It is not a single, fixed and stable Earth, but a multitude of planets that lie before us, and which we must explore to find out which one to land on.
Between philosophy and theatre, this production is a mix of genres: we think it is well suited to the current period, in which changes in ideas about the world are accompanied by changes in representations of that world. It is this aesthetics of science on the stage that we have been pursuing together for more than ten years.
Click here for more information on the events and speakers.
This event is part of the Franco-German series "Climate Crisis & Contemporary Culture" which seeks to explore the diverse means by which we communicate on our current climate crisis while exchanging experiences and art. It is designed by the Alliance Francaise d'Atlanta, the Goethe-Zentrum Atlanta, the Villa Albertine in Atlanta, and the School of Modern Languages of Georgia Tech, with the support of the Cultural Services of the Embassy of France in the US, the Consulate of the Federal Republic of Germany in Atlanta, the Franco-German Cultural Fund, and DramaTech
Contact For More Information
Andrea Jonsson, PhD
Assistant Professor, French
Program Director, French
ajonsson7@gatech.edu