The play is a work of documentary theatre, meaning it uses interviews, media snippets and other documents to bring the story to life.Neworld Theatre/Supplied
In 2021, British Columbia was smothered by the highest temperatures ever recorded in the province – and the deadliest weather event in Canadian history. More than 600 people died as a direct result of the heat dome, a weather phenomenon that sees hot hair trapped over a concentrated region.
According to climate researchers, this was no ordinary heat wave. The 2021 western heat dome was a direct result of climate change – and a snapshot of how Canada might continue to be affected as temperatures rise across the globe.
Eyes of the Beast is an award-winning documentary theatre production that uses hundreds of survivors’ testimonies to recall the 2021 heat dome and to examine how climate change affects individuals in tangible, intimate ways.
Documentary theatre, sometimes called verbatim theatre, isn’t all that far off from documentary film: The form uses “found footage” by way of text fragments including interview transcripts, media snippets, government reports and letters to create a theatrical experience. The genre is often, but not always, political – famous examples include My Name Is Rachel Corrie, about an American activist crushed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in 2003, and The Laramie Project, about the murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998.
From June 18 – 22, Vancouver’s Neworld Theatre and the University of Victoria’s Climate Disaster Project will present Eyes of the Beast in collaboration with students from Simon Fraser University. At every performance, an elected official will participate in a post-show conversation about what they’ve observed – and how communities can come together to fight climate change.
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“This kind of collaboration between journalism, theatre and oral history is quite unusual,” said Sean Holman, director of the Climate Disaster Project. “It’s simultaneously pulling from the fields of theatre and journalism – this work is based on frontline climate change reporting. And it also draws from secondary sources, as well as these testimonies. It’s an amalgam of these different types of storytelling.”
Both Holman and Chelsea Haberlin, artistic director of Neworld Theatre, underscored the project’s emphasis on trauma-informed practices. All involved parties – the survivors whose testimonies appear in the play, the artists creating the piece and the students performing in the show – had the choice to withdraw their consent to participate in the project as needed. Extra time was also allocated within the rehearsal period to give the artists space to process their responses to the play and its contents.
But as dire as the climate crisis may be, Haberlin insists the play has levity – and is even quite funny in places.
“There’s a point in the show where there’s a guy on his fishing boat during a massive flood, trying to rescue an alligator. That’s an unreal image,” said Haberlin. “There was also a man named Carter who was a historical re-enactor during the heat dome, and he’s a really funny storyteller – he historically re-enacts this very serious medical condition. It’s a horrible thing that happened to him, but the way he tells it is very funny. We needed to find moments where the audience could laugh.”
The upcoming run at the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts will mark only the second time Eyes of the Beast has been produced at scale (the first, which featured professional actors rather than students, played at the University of Victoria last fall).
But Haberlin hopes the piece can tour – and says it’s been constructed in a way that’s adaptable for future audiences.
“The script is fairly modular,” she said. “Our hope is that we could go into a community, interview people in that community who’ve lived through the specific disasters that have happened in that community, and then work them into our script.
“It wouldn’t be 100 per cent of the piece,” she added. “But we could add in two or three stories in each place we go, and over time, we could actually have this piece that tells the story of climate disaster across the country, and in a way that is local and meaningful to all the places we’ve been.”