Meanwhile: Becoming Porous

HowlRound Theatre Commons: Held in Mexico City this past June, this session was one of more than twenty working groups offered at the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics’ 2019 encuentro. These efforts reflected a continuation of the nascent Climate Commons, begun in 2018 at the HowlRound “Theatre in the Age of Climate Change” convening in Boston. For our session in Mexico City, twenty-five performance scholars and practitioners gathered each morning to consider the ways that our work is evolving in response to, and within, the unexpected rhythms and dissonant scales of global climate crisis. Responding to the encuentro’s overall focus on humor, we thought together about how to move beyond the fear, shock, and grief that tend to monopolize climate conversations. We asked how to make room in our “serious” art and scholarship for the wild, the winking, and the naughty.