LAUREN GILGER: “Anthropocene” is a big idea. It’s a contested term in the scientific world, a proposed geological epoch that’s defined by our own human activity on the planet.
And it’s the title of our next guest’s latest project, a decadeslong endeavor that tackles consumption, climate change and human progress.
Rachel Bowditch is the performance’s project director and co-vision keeper alongside Karen Jean Martinson. She calls the show physical theater rather than dance. And it’s headed to Paris this week, where they’ll perform it at UNESCO’s MOST Climate Summit.
I spoke with Bowditch more about the project, and she told me the road to creating this show has been long and winding.
RACHEL BOWDITCH: I was living in New York City, and I went to see an exhibit at the Historic Society. And there was a little installation of a New York coffee cup with a bagel, and next to it was all of the things that it took to make the bagel, to do the coffee, from the fuel, to the water, all the things that everyday New Yorkers took for granted, sort of the DNA of consumption. And I remember thinking, “I want to make a piece about this somehow,” but I didn't know what it was.
And then flash forward, I was doing a workshop with Moisés Kaufman, and we were working with AI and the concept of AI. And I built a scene using our cellphones with people having intimate conversations with Siri. “Siri, tell me you love me. Siri, hold me and tell me everything’s going to be OK.” And I just had a vision of actors in these various boxes, all isolated in their own worlds.
And so I knew I wanted to make a play with people in these boxes, scenically, but I didn’t know what that was. Flash forward to 2018, I was at Harvard as a fellow, and they brought someone in from the United Nations to talk about the climate crisis. And she kept using the word anthropocene, anthropocene. And I remember not knowing that term and looking it up on my phone, saying like, “What is that term?” And it’s the current geological age that we’re in.
It’s a contested term. Scientists are arguing that we’ve entered into the Anthropocene. Prior periods are the Holocene, Pleistocene, these various eras. But we’ve entered into this new era where the geological record is being impacted by humanity.
LAUREN GILGER: More than anything else.
RACHEL BOWDITCH: Yes. And so when I heard that term, I said, “That’s an umbrella term for these complex ideas from sustainability to chains of consumption, descalation of consumption, all of the complexity of our current moment.” And so I said I want to do a performance around this, and I had a class at ASU where we investigated the term anthropocene. What is it? And then I presented it to our main stage season at ASU in the theater department, and Karen Jean Martinson was like, “Do you need a dramaturg?” And so she joined the project, and since then we’ve been really co-vision keepers of the project.
LAUREN GILGER: This has been a real evolution like over your entire career, almost, of creating this thing. So, tell us for this radio audience that is only listening to this, what does this look like? It’s really, it’s striking. You’re talking about movement, some dance, some other types of movement. You’re talking about lots of lighting, sound. What’s it like?
RACHEL BOWDITCH: Yeah, we wanted to make a play that was visually striking, and so we’re not doing psychological realism where characters are talking to each other. We are doing a piece where there’s a lot of visual dramaturgy, so there’s a lot of visual images. So, we have a media designer, sound designer. The whole thing has this beautiful soundscape, and we work together to create a rich visual world with a three-story set. There’s projection surfaces, and the screens open and close, revealing and concealing the actors.
We built a world in which every character — there’s 12 actors — plays five or six roles. So we see a flash of a character throughout history. So, the mother, there’s a character who’s a mother, we might see her and her daughter, and then we see her in the Industrial Revolution, then we see her in the 1950s, then we see her in fast fashion. So, we see sort of these historical continuums that are threads interweaving.
And one of the key points during the development of this is our media designer said, “If you make a play about everything, you make a play about nothing.” Because “Anthropocene” is such a big concept, so we really honed in on that, and were asking ourselves, “What is this play about?” And so we decided that it was about the story of the escalation of consumption through time, looking at historical patterns, starting from the Silk Road, the first East-West trade route, all the way into where we are now, fast fashion, and we’re sort of hurtling ourselves off this edge of consumption where, if we keep going in this direction, it’s not a good scenario.
So we actually perform a collapse scenario where at the end of the play, the stage is full of boxes and plastic and Amazon boxes and plastic is falling from the sky, and then boom, all the actors collapse, and there’s just this moment of rebirth and reemergence. The idea is leaving the audience with this sort of gut punch of, “How am I going to contribute to this?” or, “How am I going to make change?”
LAUREN GILGER: Wow. So, quite a commentary there. And like, you’re talking to the audience in a very specific way, it sounds like. Talk about the costumes here. They’re very striking. You can recognize parts of them as you watch it: Target bags, Starbucks cups in there, right?
RACHEL BOWDITCH: The most elaborate costumes are from the Silk Road, where they’re wearing these very elaborate, beautiful dresses — men in dresses, as people say. And then in the fast fashion section, we took Target bags and created these elaborate costumes, basically hot-gluing Target bags together in a way to sort of illustrate fast fashion, consumerism.
And there’s a whole section with plastic ocean, plastic rain. One of the actors has this big piece of plastic and wraps it around their waist like a dress and is playing with plastic, and it becomes very beautiful, but at the same time, it’s a commentary on all the plastic.
LAUREN GILGER: So, you described it really beautifully, but the impact of this, I wonder about reaction from audiences, right? You’ve been working on this in various iterations for so long. And I think at a time in which people have become much more aware of some of these themes, not just climate change and consumption, but definitely fast fashion, the amount of plastic, the plastic island in the ocean, right, that we hear about these days. What do you hear from folks who watch this?
RACHEL BOWDITCH: I think one of the best reactions we received was we were doing a designer run with our crew who were going to be backstage, but they were watching the show beforehand. And a couple of them afterwards said, “I need to go reconsider my life.”
And that for so many, all the way from the performers, we have them all make a sustainability commitment, and they have a sustainability buddy where they make a commitment: “I’m not going to use plastic bags. I’m going to ride my bicycle instead of drive my car,” making these commitments to each other. So, that started with the cast becoming more conscious, all the way to me and my collaborator, like, we got solar on our house, we drive hybrid cars, I compost, like, we’re trying to do that within our own lives. And then with our audience members, so many of the audience members afterwards were saying how impactful it was and just going back to think about what they could do in their own habits and their own lives.
LAUREN GILGER: So, it’s changed things drastically for you, for the people involved in this, for the people who see it.
RACHEL BOWDITCH: Yeah, and we got a lot of incredible feedback of, you know, “Take this beyond Arizona,” and, “This should tour nationally.” So, we’re getting a lot of that feedback as well, which has been helping us with our fundraising to be able to bring this to Paris. And who knows where that will take us beyond, because we’re performing for 35 different nationalities at the UNESCO climate conference. So, this could be the beginning of something much bigger.
LAUREN GILGER: Is that where you’d like to take it, somewhere much bigger?
RACHEL BOWDITCH: Part of us are, you know, we’ve been working on it for seven years, we’re like, “This is our last hurrah.” And then a friend of ours were like, “No, this is actually maybe the beginning of something.” So, we’ll see. Just going to let it unfold.
LAUREN GILGER: Rachel Bowditch, theater professor at ASU. Rachel, thank you so much for coming in. I really appreciate it.
RACHEL BOWDITCH: Thank you.
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