Urban ecologies in performance: from colonialism to community in Peter Morin’s cultural graffiti and Fast Familiar’s The Strategy Room

Woynarski, L. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2516-0046 (2025) Urban ecologies in performance: from colonialism to community in Peter Morin’s cultural graffiti and Fast Familiar’s The Strategy Room. In: Climate Theatre: Ecology and Performance in a Climate Emergency. Routledge studies in Theatre, Ecology and Performance. Routledge, Oxford. ISBN 9781032953472

Abstract/Summary

As most of the world’s population now lives in cities, they reflect the inequalities of society at large and embody historic nature/culture divides, histories of displacement and dispossession, anthropocentrism, and material inequalities. Urban ecologies become essential to consider through climate crisis, and we need cultural acts of imagining different ways of living together in more just and equitable ways. Peter Morin’s (Tahltan Nation) Cultural Graffiti in London (2013) embodies Indigenous knowledge and culture by foregrounding how legacies of colonialism are living in the structures of contemporary cities. In this site-based performance work, Morin sang Tahltan songs to different monuments in London (UK), bringing Indigenous awareness, existence and art into the city where Indigenous presences have been wilfully forgotten or erased. The Strategy Room by Fast Familiar (UK 2023) is a participatory work in which audiences are immersed in a not-too-distant future and need to make decisions about their local communities to support carbon reduction policies. I argue that the combination of principles from each work allows us to see the potential of performance in imagining a more climate just future, by taking the colonial marked systems and transforming them into community-driven ones that prioritise equality and environmental justice for the human and more-than-human world.

Item Type	Book or Report Section
URI	https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/131204
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Arts and Communication Design > Film, Theatre & Television
Publisher	Routledge
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