The ecosystemic legislative theater

Abstract

Do animals and plants have rights? And rivers and mountains? And if they do, can theater be a means to represent these rights in the design of environmental policies? These questions guided a research-creation process carried out at Fine Arts in the second semester of 2024, with the aim of proposing a method from theater for the design of environmental policies. Our research combines two already existing methodological approaches, one from participatory theater and the other from social sciences. On the theatrical side, the starting point has been Legislative Theater, a social intervention method by the theater pedagogue Augusto Boal in the 1990s, which involves the use of participatory theater scenes to engage citizens in the formulation of laws and policies. On the social sciences side, we chose the 'more-than-human' approach in geography as our starting point.

While human geography has focused on the relationship of the human being as subject, in contrast to the environment as object, in the last two decades there has been a 'more-than-human' turn in this discipline that led to the recognition of non-human actors as subjects with rights and, consequently, to their participation (through human representatives) in the design of policies that affect the environment.