Heinemeyer, Catherine ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6300-5544 (2025) Why are climate stories hard to tell? Performance extract and commentary. In: Storytelling Collection Storytelling as, and for, Sustainability. Mistra Environmental Communication, pp. 6-9

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Abstract

Climate stories are vital, but difficult, to tell - whether on stage, on screen, or in community storytelling settings. They also remain comparatively rarely told, outside dystopian science fiction; whereas, as Sarena Ulibarri (2019) points out, it is in not engaging with climate change that many storytellers are presenting a fantasy world.
In the online seminar BBC Climate Creatives 2022, writer Russell T Davies discussed the need for stories, not ‘about’ climate change, but of ordinary lives played out in the current moment of climate crisis. Such stories are, he pointed out, hard to sell to production companies. Live storytelling may bypass some of these challenges, as ‘the cheapest of all narrative media, therefore the most independent of corporate gatekeepers and shareholders and so potentially the most subversive’ (Nanson 2021: 17). Nanson urges storytellers to help people find connections to ecology; to move from engaging intellectually with it, to gaining an emotional literacy in it.
As a storyteller and theatremaker, this is a call I have sought for many years to answer. I come up against imposing narrative challenges: the lack of clear heroes and finished stories, the apparent disjuncture between individual human lives and the complex global scientific, economic and political picture. It is perhaps unsurprising that many theatremakers seeking to ‘tackle climate’ include data and mini-lectures in their performances – but audiences may feel distanced by such devices.
I will share an extract from CHANGELINGS, my recent collaborative storytelling performance with Gemma McDermott, to illustrate my attempt to articulate through story where the climate crisis is written on my own body, family and culture. In this journey I identify closely with the current generation of cross-genre women storytellers documented in Stephe Harrop’s recent Contemporary Storytelling Performance (2023), whose shared political reference points include climate emergency, feminism and decolonisation.

Item Type:	Book Section
Status:	Published
Subjects:	N Fine Arts > NX Arts in general > NX456.5.P38 Performance Art
School/Department:	School of the Arts
Institutes:	Institute for Social Justice
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/13750

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