Staging the Geological Archive: Ontroerend Goed’s World Without Us and Anthropocene Theater

Abstract

With regard to art and the Anthropocene, literary critics have extensively discussed fiction, but theater, in its evanescence, offers a unique opportunity to think through the pressures and challenges of the Anthropocene as well. Very little attention has been paid to the strategies used within contemporary theater to tackle the challenges the Anthropocene poses to the human imagination, even though, or perhaps exactly because, theater seems to face an even bigger challenge than fiction. Unlike printed forms, performance is not only dependent on human language, but also on human bodies that act out, or at least convey, the story, and these performances are themselves fleeting and difficult – indeed, impossible – to preserve for posterity. The few articles that have been published on theater and the Anthropocene focus on climate change plays that have been staged (Johns-Putra), or they overlook the formal challenges inherent in depicting the Anthropocene on stage. In this essay, I use the term “Anthropocene” in the formal geological sense of the word as defined by the Working Group on the Anthropocene (n.p.). Their definition is based on the stratigraphic signals which indicate that the Anthropocene is, will be, and will have been a distinct stratigraphic unit whose distinctiveness derives precisely from its being anthropogenic in nature. The concept of the Anthropocene, literary scholar Jeremy Davies argues, “requires a certain indirectness [because] one must imaginatively transfer oneself to the far future” to see “how readily discernible [environmental change] will be millions of years from now” (66–67). World Without Us (2016), a Flemish theater play by Ontroerend Goed, tries to do just that: it imagines the long-lasting impact of the human presence on the planet. The play World Without Us is loosely based on Alan Weisman‘s speculative nonfiction work TheWorldWithout Us (2007), in which he describes what would happen to the natural and built environment if human life were to be wiped out. The play toured from 2016 to 2018 in Belgium, the Netherlands, Australia, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. World Without Us explicitly takes the present, the here and now of the theater space where the actor and audience are gathered together, as a starting point for a proleptic remembering of the geological archive. It is a monologue for one actor, who functions as narrator, describing in a factual