Using Theatre to Explore Unlivable Heat
This is a guest post by Molly Anne Sweeney and Sofia Bagge (Wise Ram Theatre) have just started a new collaborative project with researchers at The Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction at UCL called “Using Theatre to Explore Unlivable Heat”. It is funded by UCL Culture through Performing Planet Activism, a project that brings together UCL researchers, artists and activists to create space for dialogue, collaborations and projects that can inspire climate action.
Using Theatre to Explore Unlivable Heat
How can theatre be used to communicate extreme and unlivable heat? Is theatre a useful medium for this?
These were questions that I and scriptwriter Molly Anne Sweeney were asking ourselves at the beginning of this week. Molly and I run Wise Ram Theatre, a company based in Colchester making theatre about the earth crisis. In April 2023 our production Decommissioned premiered in London. Decommissioned is inspired by the events in Fairbourne. Flooding is a big theme in the play and torrential rain often forms the backdrop to the characters’ lives. We are now trying to apply what we have learnt from Decommissioned, to explore another form of extreme weather, namely extreme heat together with researchers at UCL.
Our new project, aptly entitled “Using Theatre to Explore Unlivable Heat”, is a collaboration with researchers at the Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction at UCL including Dr Susannah Fisher. It is funded by UCL Culture through Performing Planet Activism, a project that brings together UCL researchers, artists and activists to create space for dialogue, collaborations and projects that can inspire climate action.
We had our first meeting yesterday. A comment that stuck with me from the meeting was that extreme heat in the UK can often be experienced as quite mundane or even dull. It is often experienced as just a bit hotter for a bit longer. Unless there are fires the extremity of the weather isn’t visually apparent in contrast to, for instance, flooding.
(It is worth briefly noting that this experience might be true for those who are fit, healthy and fairly young, however many people in the UK are incredibly vulnerable to extreme heat and it can be fatal.)
A thought I have carried with me into this project is how difficult it is to fully remember a physical sensation, such as being too warm, when you are not experiencing that sensation. I am writing this on September 20th in North Essex, it is blustery and windy outside, the temperature is pleasant. It is nice to be outside and I find it very difficult to imagine what it would be like to feel too hot. But I shouldn’t struggle to imagine this. I recently experienced it.
Less than 2 weeks ago we had the September heatwave which brought the highest temperature in the UK this year, reaching over 30 degrees, 6 days in a row. The hottest day of the year is less than 14 days ago, and I still find it hard to imagine being so warm that I struggle to think a single coherent thought. Now maybe this inability is highly specific to me, but anecdotally it seems quite common.
Intellectually I also know that this September heatwave followed July, globally the hottest month on record, which followed the hottest June ever recorded in the UK. I also know that impacts of extreme heat are not, and will not be, the worst felt in the UK. Logically I know all this, but most of the time I don’t feel it.
So how can we use theatre to communicate extreme heat in the UK? As a company we will find out through this project. But overall the answer is in a myriad of fantastical, disturbing and moving ways of course. But what I believe theatre, and art more broadly, can do particularly well is to help an audience feel the things they already know.
Sofia Bagge
Co-Artistic Director
Wise Ram Theatre
