What is Ecotheater?
Ecotheater, a project of The Upper New, is ecologically themed readers’ theater to encourage incidental learning, with a twist: multiple iterations of production with various art forms, leading to multimodal accretion from simple dialogue to performance arts and short films.
If you’re not familiar with the concept of readers’ theater, essentially it is a form of dramatic play where the actors read scripts live on stage, using inflection and tone to convey character to the audience. No costumes, no sets. This type of performance lends itself to recording for podcasts.
We hope for creative people around the world to draft scripts and submit them to us for consideration. We’d produce the readers’ theater and release the performances as podcast episodes (or standalone productions).
Upon release, these “dialogue and narration” podcast episodes could be remixed, in a sense, by our global audience of creators. These iterations would include the addition of sound effects (SFX), music, visuals (motion stills), animation, performance art, and short films. We would host a submission process for each iteration cycle, curating these auditory and audiovisual productions for publication through the Ecotheater website as podcasts or streaming videos.
Examples of potential topics for Ecotheater scripts would be dramatic (ethical and moral) interpretation of issues inherent in principles of systems wisdom (expanding our time horizons), the deep shifts of the fourth industrial revolution (smart cities or driverless cars), ecological justice as intuitive justice (a combination of distributive justice and procedural justice), or how to think like a commoner (understanding The Commons as “a social system for long-term stewardship of resources that preserves shared values and community identity”).
As a specific example, consider the following: in Encounters with the Archdruid, John McPhee chronicles debate dialogues between former director of the Sierra Club David Brower and three different men: Charles Park, Charles Fraser, and Floyd Dominy. Many of these debates could easily be translated from the book into script format and performed as readers’ theater.
In the long term, we would consider packaging any number of these topical podcast episodes as thematic audiobook collections, and similarly packaging any number of topical videos as episodes in topical video series, all available as open educational resources (OER) via the Ecotheater website.
Project Goals
The primary goals for the Ecotheater initiative are focused on creative innovation, collaboration, and learning. We believe the foundation of iterative collaboration and interpretation through multimodal accretion of each theater piece over time is the most unique and innovative technical and procedural element of the Ecotheater initiative. As a learning focused organization, The Upper New is launching the Ecotheater project as an extensible multimodal learning experience associated with ecologically themed narratives presented as theater. We hope the examples we create and the calls for submissions we provide will elucidate ecologically critical creative expression that helps us foster systems thinking, systems wisdom, and ecological literacy within our audience communities. Similarly, we wish for the artifacts and processes of the Ecotheater initiative to serve as a model of the iterative production process (and progression of complex creative/critical interpretation through accretion of modalities) for other individuals and groups to emulate across various topic areas. In short, we believe we are launching a new format of longitudinal creative expressive interpretive learning experiences.
Please stay tuned as we build the Ecotheater website.