The Universe as Home: Exploring the tension between climate change and the space race through somatic experiences, speculative design, and interactive performance

Abstract

In this presentation, we describe the process and outcomes of a two-week workshop with participants of the 2022 Winter School at the Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema and Sound (RITCS) in Brussels, which explored the tension between the climate crisis and the new space race. As workshop facilitators, we proceeded from the assumption that while it might seem that confronting climate change and investing in space exploration are strategies opposite to each other, they are really both concerned with survival and with the search for humanity’s place in this universe. To this end, we invited workshop participants (students from RITCS’ theatre, music, and radio programmes) to act as radical agents and to develop multisensory expressions and imaginations beyond what we can ordinarily see. The initial prompts for the workshop were a series of provocative questions: Could participants create a multisensory performance in which audiences really, deeply experience the complex and invisible forces that are shaping the planet’s climate? Would it be possible to craft an experience that helps the audience feel in their body the vastness, emptiness and incomprehensible age of the universe? Participants were led through a series of discussions, speculative design sessions, and somatic experience explorations to prime their creative process. The final outcome was a prototype of a multisensory, multimedia, site-specific, interactive performance that showcased the unique blend of skills and disciplines of the workshop participants, and offered a experiential, embodied way to reimagine the universe as home.