How do you cope when your survival depends on ecological loss? How do changes in our environment affect our human relationships? How do we avoid the realities of climate change? How do we address them? Two plays being performed in partnership with the Curb Center this weekend explore these questions and more. Commissioned by the Eco-Grief Performance Project, a collaborative effort of the Science and Media Grand Challenge, the Theatre Department and the Curb Center, these works are expressions of complex emotions brought on by living in a changing climate.
Join a horseshoe crab named Eloise and her maybe-rescuer, maybe-kidnapper Violet in Kristin Idaszak’s Blue Blood Red Knot, a surreal conversation about chronic illness in an unfair system. Idaszak is a two-time Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellow and the former Shank Fellow at the Goodman Theatre, and her play Second Skin received the Kennedy Center’s Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and the Jean Kennedy Smith Playwrighting Award. Her recent work, including Blue Blood Red Knot, explores the intersections of climate change, gender and chronic illness.
In Gina Femia’s Daphne & Florence, two 18-year-old girls find themselves somewhere between reality and myth, childhood and adulthood, and tree and person as they face parting from each other and from their childhood forest. Femia has received recognition from The Kilroys List, the Leah Ryan Prize, the Doric Wilson Award, the Otis Guernsey New Voices Award and others.
During development, Femia and Idaszak worked closely with the Vanderbilt community. Both writers hosted conversations with Vanderbilt students in environmental studies and theatre, creating a space for dialog between the arts and sciences and gaining insight into how students think about climate change. The performances will star Vanderbilt student actors and have been produced with sustainable methods and . “Working on these productions, both in the scene shop and in the rehearsal hall, has illuminated for all of us the ways in which climate change affects us,” said Leah Lowe, director of the Curb Center, professor of theatre and “Everything from the materials we use to the foods we eat and the ways in which we conceive of the future.”
Femia and Idaszak will be on campus to attend the opening night performances, visit theatre, communication of science and technology and art classes, and offer a pre-show Q&A on Thursday, Sept. 26, at 6 p.m. in the Author’s Room of Central Library. The playwrights will be joined by David Wright, CSET program director, who collaborated with Lowe to develop the Eco-Grief Initiative, in a conversation moderated by Clara Wilch, environmental humanities fellow in the Robert Penn Warren Center’s Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Program.
Showtimes:
- Thursday, Sept. 26 at 7:30 p.m.
- Saturday, Sept. 28 at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
- Sunday, Sept. 29 at 2 p.m.
Ticket sales information is available on the VU Theatre website.
This is only the first set of performances of the Eco-Grief Performance Project. The second will be Oct. 17–20 and feature the work of playwrights Reynaldo Piniella and Jaymes Sanchez. These playwrights have also developed their plays, Let Us Sit Upon the Ground and Waiting for Environman, in direct collaboration with the Vanderbilt community.
These performances make up one part of the Vanderbilt Eco-Grief Initiative, a project built to use art as a tool to process the complex emotions brought on by climate change. From now until Dec. 5, Extraction/Interaction, a visual art exhibition featuring artists Eliza Evans, Will Wilson and John Sabraw, will be displayed at the Curb Center as part of this initiative.
