Founded in 2015, the Climate Change Theatre Action uses theater to bring communities together and provides tools free of charge, guidance on how to produce events, marketing support, and a model that encourages leadership and self-determination.
Who We Are
CCTA was founded by Elaine Ãvila, Chantal Bilodeau, Roberta Levitow, and Caridad Svich following a model pioneered by NoPassport Theatre Alliance. It has since evolved into a collaboration between The Arctic Cycle, the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, and Theatre Without Borders.
A global participatory project, CCTA uses theatre to bring communities together and encourage them to take local and global action on climate. By providing tools (a series of plays) free of charge, some guidance on how to produce events, marketing support, and a model that encourages leadership and self-determination, we make it easy for everyone to engage with an art form they may not be familiar with, and we empower them to harness their creative potential and put it in service of the greater good.
How We Do It
Every other year, fifty professional playwrights, representing all inhabited continents as well as several cultures and Indigenous nations, are commissioned to write five-minute plays about an aspect of climate change based on a prompt.
This collection of plays is then available to producing collaborators interested in presenting an event during the project’s time window, typically in the fall. Events can be in-house readings, public performances, radio shows, podcasts, film adaptations, the possibilities are endless! Collaborators can design their event to reflect their own aesthetic and community, and include additional material by local artists.
To emphasize the “Action” part of Climate Change Theatre Action, collaborators are also urged to think about an action, educational, social, or political/civic, that can be incorporated into their event. It may involve the scientific community, other departments within a university, local environmental organizations, etc. Examples of actions from previous years include: presentations by scientists; donations to hurricane relief efforts and food banks; conversations with social justice and environmental organizations; writing letters to legislators, and; sharing tools for sustainability at the local level.
Want to Join Us?
We are thrilled to share our theme for Climate Change Theatre Action 2023, “All Good Things Must Begin,” inspired by the journal entry of American science fiction writer Octavia Butler. Butler was incredibly prescient, writing about extremism, racial justice, and climate change some 30 years ago. By setting intentions and visualizing a positive outcome, she defied the odds and became the author of many celebrated novels, winning each of science fiction’s highest honors. CCTA 2023 runs from September 17 to December 23, 2023.
While the worlds of her novels depict the violent challenges of today’s interlocking crises, her protagonists remain devoted to thriving, to achieving survival beyond the destructive and oppressive societies they come from. The climate crisis demands the same kind of imaginative leap: we will create a just and regenerative world only if we dare to imagine it first, and use that vision to guide us through the difficulties.
We hope you will get involved by organizing an event in your community using one or several plays from our collection of 50 plays.
For more information, visit our CCTA website.
To request access to the plays, email us at ccta@artsandclimate.org.