Mind Matters Talk with Frédérique Aït-Touati

“Gaia on Stage”

Gaia Series

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In our contemporary Theatrum Mundi, as the Renaissance called the theatre of the world, Earth is not simply a shared stage, but a major performer – acting and interacting, striving and suffering in an increasingly dramatic planetary plot. What are the implications of reimagining Earth more as protagonist than platform? What are Earth’s agencies, means of resistance and reverie? Many crises of our era – including related climate, social and political catastrophes – have pushed Earth’s suffering to center stage, spotlighting global tragedies of environmental and geopolitical injustice. What is the role of art – and more specifically of theatre – in revealing and representing this eco-ethical drama?

It is in this context that we have been developing some stage experiments with Bruno Latour for 15 years until his death in October 2022. With a series of stage experiments, we tried to understand the cosmological turmoil we are going through: the irruption of a new character (the Earth) on the world stage. We had the conviction of a necessary alliance between science and the arts, between knowledge and forms of expression (and, more specifically, between the terrestrial and the theatrical). That’s why we have developed with my theatre company, called Critical Zone, various performances and theatre productions. They have taken several forms, from the performance with several hundred participants to the lecture-performance with one performer on stage. Beyond this diversity of formats, these experiments have one thing in common: they make the stage a kind of laboratory, where a specific kind of knowledge is produced. 

The various theatrical projects that we created together have helped us to think about the link between Earth and theatre, between science, philosophy and art. These experiments are also a testimony of our successive shocks of our understanding of the new climatic regime, as Bruno called it. By sharing with you those projects, I hope mostly to recall some episodes or our collective history during the last 15 years, and to help us think of the kind of story we want to write now.