A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction [2024]

Homo Sapiens invented the steam engine two hundred years ago. He probably had no idea that he was triggering a mass extinction. The sixth one since the appearance of life on Earth. We are right in the middle of it. Will we survive?

Three years ago, the director Katie Mitchell commissioned a text from the American author Miranda Rose Hall on the ongoing ecological disaster. How can we talk about the collapse of life? What exactly are we talking about when we speak of the sixth mass extinction? Miranda Rose Hall’s text offers an evening of sharing, focusing on us, the living. It discusses our history and our urgent desire to have a future.

But if it’s possible to create a performance to joyfully address the catastrophe, how can it be done without contributing to it?

In 2020, while creating the text at the Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne, Katie Mitchell set specific guidelines. This performance will not travel, but it can be performed anywhere in the world. This performance must be carried out without being connected to the electrical grid, yet it must be visible. This performance must be performed by a woman, but a woman who does not come from the visible majority of her country. This performance must emit the least carbon possible. It must be modest. It must not contribute to the sixth mass extinction. It can be created by other artists besides Katie Mitchell. It is part of a larger experiment.

An experiment that has been ongoing for three years, through a European project: Sustainable Theatre Alliance for a Green Environmental Shift (S.T.A.G.E.S), in which MC93 is now participating.

S.T.A.G.E.S offers several European theaters, connected by the same desires and questions, the opportunity to undertake a transformation program to address their common concerns: How can live theater be sustainable? Is creativity necessarily destructive? Should we promote the circulation of works and reduce that of goods? Who is theater made for? Should we stop serving meat in the cafeteria? Do LED bulbs pollute? Is going back to oil lamps really a return to the time of the Amish?

In this context, MC93 invites the Compagnie Lieux-Dits to create its own version of Katie Mitchell’s performance and to conduct the experiment in turn. Will gathering in a theater to talk about the living be enough to dream of a desirable future?

David Geselson

Produced by MC93 – Maison de la Culture de Seine-Saint-Denis, Compagnie Lieux-Dits

Coproduced by Creative Europe as part of the STAGES project – Sustainable Theatre Alliance for a Green Environmental Shift.

The writing of the text for this performance is part of the creation process of Sustainable Theatre, by Katie Mitchell and Jérôme Bel, conceived at Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne.

Compagnie Lieux-dits is accredited by the ministère de la Culture – DRAC île-de-France