7. Moving Beyond Recovery and Reconstruction: Imagining Extreme Event Preparedness Through Performing Arts

The UN Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, 2022) noted that the global climate emergency is growing. Catastrophic weather events in the last four years provide confirmation. Australia’s Black Summer (December 2019 to February 2020) saw devastating impacts, including loss of human life. On the eastern seaboard, settlements, native and commercial forest and farming lands were annihilated, and millions of animals and plants were destroyed (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2020). While Australia has a long history of extreme weather events, film footage of wildfires and severe flooding in Northern Europe in 2022 was shocking. Ten wildfires occurred near London, and some 800 individual wildfire episodes left unprecedented scars on England’s landscape (Horton, 2022). In 2023, Canada experienced 6551 wildfires, burning nearly 50 million acres between March and October, with 346 fires deemed out of control (Cecco, 2023). These and other extreme weather events, all directly associated with climate change (Igini, 2023), represent the escalating worldwide crisis.

Emergency services globally acknowledge not only that extreme weather events will increase in frequency and severity but that associated disasters will become more commonplace and more dangerous (Kemp et al., 2022). As societies become increasingly culturally complex in terms of their interface with the natural world, the “command and control” practices that have dominated disaster management will become ineffective (Mullins, 2021). In the face of unpredictable extremes in weather, it is imperative to build preparedness, coping and recovery solutions that engender foresight, resilience, resource replacement and post-traumatic growth. Considering this, it is crucial that toolkits for imagining and coping with unpredictable future weather events be prioritised. In this chapter, we explore ways in which performing arts have been used to represent disaster and manage its aftermath, and we explore the embodied thinking and action these artistic forms can provide in developing future preparedness for an escalating climate emergency.

In disaster and emergency scenarios, resilience as a capacity to withstand or to recover quickly has tended to refer to the post-disaster period, processes of successful behavioural flexibility and the ability to adjust to both internal and external demands of extremely challenging experiences (López-Marrero & Tschakert, 2011). Kenneth Ginsburg has identified seven components or behaviours (the “7 Cs”) that together promote personal psychological resilience: “competence, confidence, connection, character, contribution, coping and control” (American Psychological Association, 2023). Natural disasters typically present unexpected, unimaginable and devastatingly traumatic events that easily undermine or even obliterate the ability to display these behaviours and prevent individual recovery and healing. Performing arts have had a powerful role to play in promoting Ginsburg’s 7 Cs and in the development of personal resilience.

At a systemic level, socio-ecological systems theory (SES; see Holling, 1973) usefully articulates the “intertwined systems of people and nature embedded in the biosphere” that are affected in natural disaster scenarios. At a meta level, the shock a natural disaster delivers is followed by possible outcomes: systems stasis, systems development or systems failure. Recovery and resilience in this context support continuation and development to avoid systems failure. Given the interrelated social, economic and ecological impacts, it seems that understanding how resilience can be strengthened at the systems’ level is required in preparation for and not just after natural disasters.

Folke has been a key researcher in the SES field, applying “resilience thinking” to “deal with complex adaptive system dynamics and true uncertainty and how to learn to live with change and make use of it” (2016). Indeed, Folke et al. (2002) describe “resilience building” as flexible, diverse, responsive and evolving mechanisms. “Adaptation and transformation” become the outputs of resilience, allowing for response to the sudden shocks that produce dynamic change. Adaptation is contextualised as the ability of a system to sustain development along current pathways following disruption. Transformation describes the shift to alternative pathways or the creation of entirely new ones. Resilience provides SES with the capacity to transmute crisis into opportunity and depends on finding moments of opportunity to navigate crisis conditions (Folke, 2016). Kendra and Wachtendorf (2003) have referred to resilience building as “not merely as the application of scientific knowledge and techniques, but also as an art” (ibid.). For them, resilience is “the product of a kind of craft skill, or an artistic interpretation and response to singular, unexpected, anomalous events as opposed to a rationalised predetermined response to what is regular or expected” (ibid.). Therefore, building or exhibiting resilience requires “organisational craftsmanship…[and]…artistry” (ibid.). So, even at the systemic level, artistic thinking and practices have strong potential in generating both adaptive and transformative solutions to the crisis conditions of disaster.

Across human history, embedded in different cultural contexts, performing arts have been used to express, regulate, control and transform self, community and society through diverse practices (Davidson & Garrido, 2014). Interactions between co-performers and audiences take place to produce highly significant events delivering profound consequences. In some contexts, crucial cultural knowledge can be transmitted or discovered only in the time and space dedicated to performance (Davidson, 2011). In more recent times, performing arts have been used to address climate issues, often serving to support coping, adaptation and even transformation, thus providing evidence of their potential in developing resilience (Demos, 2016). Interventions using music, theatre, dance and integrated forms have been used in fire, flood and tornado recovery settings (Egan & Quigley, 2015; Peek et al., 2016). Music therapy’s focus on moving an individual or group through a psychological process that has explicit thinking, behavioural and/or physical benefits has been successfully employed with a range of different people in disaster scenarios. In one example, “children who had survived a tornado in the Southeastern United States” used music making to describe and express emotions associated with lived experiences of this event. The musical work also enabled them to imagine and then realise a safe transition back to school after the event, building both personal and community resilience (Davis, 2010).

In another music therapy project with teenagers “after the Black Saturday fires in Victoria, Australia in 2009”, therapist researchers reported that the musical tasks of improvisation, song writing and discussions surrounding the production of musical works enabled young survivors to “hear one another”, bond, share experiences of loss and subsequently regain confidence (McFerran & Teggelove, 2011). Indeed, during and after the Black Saturday fires more generally, community members used arts practice skills to work in local crisis centres with disaster-affected families, facilitating processes in which they were able to listen, process feelings, express fear and hope, collaborate in artistic acts to mourn and recover and find respite and relaxation in a safe space. Rita Seethaler was one music leader whose incredible efforts in singing and band work, in particular the creation of a steel band, were recognised in Arts Victoria’s 2011 Recovery Program report (Fisher & Talvé, 2011; see also Garrido et al., 2015). Activities have continued and been adapted for 15 years since that particular disaster, some moving into everyday social groups and others deliberately focused on the journey from disaster to transformative resilience in memorial rituals where community survivors come together to share their thoughts and feelings at fire sites, singing, dancing, speaking and sharing visual artworks to honour and remember those people, animals and places that were destroyed.

Practices such as these can be seen with each new emergency. Extensive floods in Lismore, New South Wales, in 2022 destroyed over 400 houses, displaced more than 31,000 people and disrupted 3000 businesses, with water, sewage and power utilities extensively damaged (Gilmore, 2022). Arts practices provided extensive community recovery intervention. Artist Claudie Frock endured great trauma after she, her partner and her dog were rescued by the State Emergency Service in a boat, having been in water up to their chests. Frock, as a long-established artist, performer and arts worker in Lismore, responded by using aesthetic opportunities, working to connect people. She and others engaged in creative recovery sessions for people to come together, make collages and have space to write, recite poems and listen to and make music. She noted: “Programs like this are so important at the moment when people have become displaced and isolated from each other as a result of this disaster” (qtd. in Stephens, 2022) (Fig. 7.1).

A photograph of people who sit at 3 tables out of 4 arranged in a row with stationary and other items in a lawn area. All are engaged in creative sessions. 2 people stand near the last table, with parked cars and trees at a distance in the background. A long banner is on the left, behind the people.

Applied theatre, theatre in education and drama therapy have also addressed a range of issues after disaster, exploring community vulnerability and working to find routes to recovery and resilience through imaginative exploration, questioning and solution-finding (Heras & Tàbara, 2014; O’Connor, 2013). Typically devised in close collaboration with the disaster-affected communities, this work draws on a range of theatre-based methods to contribute realistic problem solving through the prism of a fictional story.

A pilot study of youth theatre in Australia found that “child and youth [performance] addresses the climate crisis across four intersecting domains: from disaster preparedness, through first response, to disaster recovery, and climate activism […]. Across these domains, [performance[ traverses artistic [practices] and everyday actions that contribute to children and young people’s [ability to process trauma and eco-anxiety]” (Woodland et al., 2023) and cultivate a sense of critical hope, agency and community (ibid.). This accords with findings from other studies in child and youth drama and performance in response to the climate crisis (Egan & Quigley, 2015; Freebody & Finneran, 2021; Gallagher et al., 2022).

The projects mentioned above have all offered positive gains to those attempting to manage personal and community impacts of disaster scenarios. Harms et al. (2023) aggregated and analysed individual and community data from the Beyond Bushfires and more recent 10-year Beyond Bushfires studies (3–4 years and 10 years after the Black Saturday fires of 2009). This resulted in tracing 391 individuals affected in 2009 and exploring the relationships between their individual demographics, bushfire exposure and community-level variables within the framework of post-traumatic growth (PTG). This theory argues “that people who endure psychological struggle following adversity can often see positive personal growth afterwards” (Tedeschi & Moore, 2021). In PTG, “people develop new understandings of themselves, the world they live in, how to relate to other people, the kind of future they might have and a better understanding of how to live life” (Collier, 2016). The study revealed that PTG was more pronounced for women and was more likely for those who had been in medium- to high-affected fire areas, rather than low-affected areas. These results might reflect gendered expectations around emotional expression and self-regulation (Davidson & Garrido, 2014), though positive PTG effects were found to occur at individual levels for all affected.

In the same podcast, Aunty Gertie (Gertrude) Deeral, a First Nations artist of international acclaim from Hopevale Arts and Cultural Centre near Cairns in Northern Queensland, spoke of the processes of performance in cloth-making to bring community together physically and emotionally to “yarn”, dye fabric, make clothes and be in the same emotional zone together. For Aunty Gertie, the performativity of this experience offers more than creative expression and social opportunity, and it is about finding memories, stories of the creation and relationship between people, place and nature, so important to generating and disseminating knowledge to make meaning and bring common purpose. While the conversation is about the protection of the reef, it could be applied to wildfires and flooding and their associations and deep histories in the Australian landscape that First Nations’ cultural practices and beliefs support. Indeed, the concept of being “on Country” signifies much more than a simple physical presence, rather it offers a deep connection to the experience of land as a source of knowledge, culture and meaning and demonstrates a need to support and respect cultural practices, which promote an ongoing relationship with the land and its climate in ways most Australians have failed to recognise (Cameron, 2020).

In addition to performing arts interventions used specifically for recovery, work in professional theatre has taken a more politically focused awareness-raising approach. On 30 June 2010, the Independent newspaper in England reported on the increase in theatre works taking the “devastating power of nature as their theme”. One such work was “Katrina, by Jonathan Holmes, which was staged over several floors in the Bargehouse in Oxo Tower Wharf”, in London in 2009. The work focused on the impact of the 2005 floods in New Orleans, when Hurricane Katrina left 80% of the city submerged in water, resulting in 1836 human fatalities. The performance involved the audience moving from “a pre-hurricane tourist office into a bar that had been wrecked by flood water” (Billington, 2009).

The immersive performance incorporated “sounds of the hurricane and of the city of New Orleans falling apart”, with director Holmes saying, “Sound is a great carrier of information…it can give a sense of what it might have been like to be there” (ibid.). Audience members were kept in a state of discomfort and – hearing verbatim testimony – were obliged to perch on stage “debris”. Billington argued the work straddled political agitational and visceral experiential theatre, offering audiences the plight of survivors, examples of heroism and building a “staggering picture of official lies and ineptitude”. This performance engaged empathy, raised awareness and perhaps even incited some affirmative action for the case of the survivors and the climate debate more generally.

Similar examples from professional theatre include Life Streaming commissioned by the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) and National Theatre London that enabled audience members to communicate via computers with the survivors of “the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history [with over a] quarter of a million [fatalities]” (Williams, 2010). Mark Ball, who commissioned the play, reported to Williams that this capacity to merge aesthetic engagement with factual information became very powerful “over the course of an hour you start to feel you can get to know the people behind those one-dimensional images of the disaster. You get a much more nuanced understanding of the impact that the tsunami had on a person’s life.” (ibid.)

As these examples show, there are many ways to interrogate our views of and responses to natural disasters that can help both survivors and spectators, challenge the agencies that in some cases have mishandled such events and potentially encourage climate action and activism.

As illustrated above, climate-focused performing arts have focused on response, recovery and resilience. Surprisingly little has been done in preparing for these disasters, despite the ever-increasing emergency and the trend of growing eco-anxiety around extreme weather and its consequences (Kurth & Pinkala, 2022). Preparedness embraces the actions, measures and capacities built in advance to enhance the ability of individuals, communities and organisations to respond effectively to potential risks or challenges (Hémond & Robert, 2012). In the field of disaster management, it involves proactive planning, scenario modelling, resource allocation and disaster training to ensure readiness for emergencies (Madrigano et al., 2017). Given the power of the performative, it is surprising that preparedness is an under-explored area. Performing arts certainly offer symbolic forms of expression where people can begin to think about how we may face a much more extreme future regarding weather events (Thurow et al., 2023). They can experiment in imaginative and emotional ways to envision scenarios that may have been unimagined previously. This is critical, as preparedness is a function of the prior experience of a perceived threat (Lazo et al., 2015). The two professional theatre performances described above act in this way, highlighting the advantage of performing arts that individuals and communities can explore and process real possibilities to imagine and prepare for the future in a safe non-threatening situation (Thurow et al., 2023).

Of the existing body of research, rare examples stand out for different reasons. The first offers stark visions of the future. Linda Hassall’s play Dust (2015) rearticulates the relationship between people and place by investigating the disappearance of the recognisable Australian landscape and raises themes of escalating temperatures, rising sea levels, disasters and a normalisation of these phenomena. Drawing on the Australian Gothic tradition, the play prophesises that humans will become dwarfed by non-human nature (Hassall, 2021). For her audiences, it is a wake-up call in the form of a contemporary performance investigation, as she introduces several hypothetical futures that provoke dialogue about what could happen if nothing is done about the climate emergency. Hassall attempts to force us to act and prepare for a different outcome.

Extraordinary work has also been done by Kris Verdonck’s A Two Dogs Company, which presents large-scale scenarios rendering possible futures through a pared-back and poignant aesthetic (Thurow et al., 2023). One example is PREY, a music theatre piece initially inspired by the work of Australian ecofeminist Val Plumwood. Comprising “three solos by different generations of women, each has its own focus: text/language, song/music and dance/performance. With every solo, the tension between the human and landscape and/or performer and scenography, becomes more intense” (A Two Dogs Company, n.d.). After PREY’s frightening revelation that we are food and are belonging to a constitutive ecological cycle of life and death, it highlights how we nevertheless continue to destroy and undermine the foundations of life without displaying urgency towards the climate emergency. PREY makes us consider alienation from the environment and, in parallel, our alienation from our own bodies. Characteristic of Verdonck’s oeuvre, the work becomes a nonlinear generation of dream-like fragments, each becoming more intimate and intense and giving us access to other perceptions and challenging our ideas on preparedness as it reflects “a world where humans are disappearing into the background” (A Two Dogs Company, n.d.) (Fig. 7.2).

A photograph captures a person who suspends in mid-air with colorful hair strings while performing on a stage. The musicians play instruments in the background.

Another important example is the series of experimental works by the Performing the Future team in the UK (2017–2018). With a focus on envisioning “positive futures in response to the anthropogenic climate and environmental change happening now” (Performing the Future, 2023), the group devised a series of workshops and digital performances to engage the public, combining scientific data, digital technology and audience participation. Of note are the paired works The Prediction Machine and The Promises Machine (2015), which were installed in locations across England during the project. The Prediction Machine tracked the weather at each specific location and predicted future climate change based on this and projected temperature increases between 2040 and 2050. It was an interactive digital work that combined weather data and video messages about climate change. Participants were asked to estimate weather variables by “embodied sensing” and to project changes into the future (Jacobs et al., 2019). The results were printed out as predictions via “fortune telling machines”. Participants were then invited to engage with The Promises Machine where they could “write their own promise for the future in response to the [prediction] they received” (ibid.). Participants filled in an online text box on an iPad. As project lead Rachel Jacobs points out: “The promises focus on opportunities for individuals to keep a commitment to something manageable within their own lives.…They also explored opportunities to celebrate abundance and consider reassurance by reflecting on wishes for themselves and the world” (ibid.)

The most recognised artistic performance project embracing disaster preparedness in Australia has been Refuge (Arts House, 2016–2021), a world-first six-year programme based at the City of Melbourne’s Arts House. Its goal was to address how art-based creativity might intervene directly and proactively in the climate crisis. In it, performance and creative artists were partnered “with experts from Australian Red Cross, State Emergency Services (SES), Emergency Management Victoria (EMV), University of Melbourne and local community organisations” (Wyatt et al., 2022). Together, they experimented with ideas around preparedness in the face of the growing climate crisis. In 2016, a local flood was imagined, and the North Melbourne Town Hall was turned into a relief centre for 24 hours, with actors and representatives of emergency and relief services collaborating to find solutions to problems. In 2017, five consecutive days over 40 °C were explored. In 2018, the theme was a pandemic event where the risk of contagion meant people might not be able to come together. Ironically, less than two years later, these imaginings were manifested in the COVID-19 setting. In 2019, displacement prompted by climate crisis was the focus, and in 2021, Refuge asked what would happen when these crises meet.

These performance-focused explorations considered practical ideas for implementation, striking a unique position, and the results outlined in the project’s 2016 report highlight distinctive aspects of performance arts practices to support preparedness by creating spaces for enhanced and meaningful connection. They also generate aesthetic evocations of relevant emotions in safe ways. Additionally, the arts afford engagement of imagination and cultural practices, as exemplified in Indigenous practices, and we can explore how to combine with non-Indigenous approaches to create new kinds of resources and approaches. Arts organisations themselves also offer templates for relief and other kinds of centres, which bring community together (e.g. Yue et al., 2017).

Refuge has roots in “socially engaged art (Bourriaud, 2002), activist art (Sholette, 2017) and environmental art (Demos, 2016)” (Wyatt et al., 2022), but its performativity hovering between the representational and the real gives it a unique place. “The creative methods became the ‘glue’…between diverse communities and practitioners to work together as a community” (ibid.). The approaches used strikingly contrasted to the “models and methods of conventional disaster management practice, offering an alternative to the ‘template’ approach” that was heavily critiqued by Steve Cameron from Emergency Management Victoria (ibid.).

In the realm of digital audio recording and sound art, Leah Barclay (2022) describes three case studies that draw on acoustic ecology and “eco-acoustics” to invite deep listening to changing ecosystems. Collaborating with local communities and traditional owners, the work centres Indigenous and place-based knowledges in exploring the impacts of climate change. One example, River Listening, engages audiences in soundwalks through digital app technology, virtual sound maps and geolocation, inviting them to listen deeply to compositions that have been created with local communities. Barclay describes how such approaches can provide “effective ways to engage communities in conservation and climate action” (2022).

Finally, in an exciting recent development, Jen Rae, an artist-researcher of Canadian Métis descent, and Claire Coleman, a Wirlomin-Noongar-Australian writer, have collaborated to create the Centre for Reworlding (C∞R; see Rae & Coleman, 2023): “A collective formed around our collaborative work intersecting arts, disaster risk reduction and resilience within the climate emergency context” (ibid.). This interdisciplinary art collective centres global Indigenous epistemologies to engage in experimental art practices of “reworlding”. The project asks:

What are the conversations that we aren’t having now that might aid us, our loved ones, and our future ancestors?

What are the skills and knowledges at the thresholds of being forever lost, overlooked, or undervalued that our future generations may need for survival?

And what are we willing to give up and/or fight for in the greatest challenge facing humanity? Where do we begin? How will we reorganize?

We begin by reworlding. (Rae & Coleman, 2023)

Such work represents an innovative speculative approach led by Indigenous artists and scholars in socially engaged performance arts. As the authors suggest, “Now more than ever, there is a role for arts and culture to lean into the tensions, to tell the unpalpable stories along with the rousing, and to ensure we have skin in the long game” (ibid.).

This chapter has demonstrated how performing arts projects have been used to deal with the aftermath of extreme weather events and highlighted their potential in developing preparedness for future ones. The examples, from a range of artistic and cultural traditions, show how different performing arts, for example, applied, experimental and digital, can reach diverse communities in presenting opportunities that not only help to re-enact crisis but also make sense of it in embodied and communal ways that build resilience and generate growth, supporting positive mental health and wellbeing benefits for those who have encountered climate disasters. The small body of existing work on disaster preparedness reveals how performance and allied embodied artistic practices can develop agency, empowerment, understanding and strategy for dynamic readiness in the face of disaster emergencies. Examples of performing arts works reveal the range of approaches including applied community-engaged work and large-scale imaginative pieces in which participants can become either immersed, alienated, connected/disconnected or provoked in ways that enable them to see future disaster scenarios in new ways.

Understanding the distinctiveness of the processes developed in Refuge in particular lays foundations for a new form of emergency preparedness that can enable relationships, ideas and practices to develop. Indeed, Refuge offers an excellent model, one that offers a series of bold steps in this increasingly important terrain, operating at the nexus of experimental art and disaster management to produce nuanced understandings and information and to foster preparedness. It was devised “as a knowledge broker to expand how [preparedness] might be understood and implemented” (Wyatt et al., 2022) and, implicitly, how resilience might be built. It has been recognised as having offered safe and open approaches, contained enough to guide, but never being didactic or formulaic, and embracing a range of people and scenarios. Rather than focusing on the outcomes such as the performance, it drew attention to “the dynamics of conversations, how ideas were transmitted and repeated, the circulation of stories and images, and the feelings that arose between and within people” (ibid.).

As we move forward, more work in the preparedness space is required to further understanding, knowledge and guiding practices. And now, in the 2020s, as technologies develop, the opportunities afforded by digital media through different forms of visualisation and sonic representation enable a greater range of performer and audience possibilities than ever previously experienced, as the former boundaries of geographical location or time zones disappear and more imaginative and expansive opportunities emerge.