The “ETC Theatre Green Book” and Theatre-making During Climate Crisis

The European Theatre Convention (ETC) in collaboration with Renew Culture officially launched in July 2024 the ETC Theatre Green Book (ETC TGB). The sixty-nine-page, freely available document brimming with images, graphs, and tables aims to offer a clear, step-by-step, and undaunting roadmap to live arts institutions in their journey towards achieving carbon emission neutrality. For the sixty-three publicly-funded European member theatres of the ETC, this goal is currently set for 2030.

The ETC initiative extends and adapts the ideas and methods contained by the UK-focused 2020 Theatre Green Book to the institutional diversity of theatres across European countries. The ETC TGB offers time- and cost-saving solutions for theatres willing to embark on the journey towards sustainability as it eliminates the need to devise methodologies themselves and/or to hire external experts. For example, the ETC TGB provides ready-made tools such as the Production Calculator that help to quantify a production’s level of sustainability. As opposed to separate theatres coming up with their own plans, the ETC TGB reunites European theatres towards a common goal, building support networks that rev up enthusiasm and significantly increase the participant theatres’ chances to achieve the green goals.

A strength of the ETC TGB is the flexibility it offers theatres in how to achieve common goals and the order in which they may be addressed along the three set dimensions of (1) implementing more sustainable practices of putting on shows (productions), (2) finding more environmentally-mindful ways for the arts organization to conduct its daily activities (operations), and finally (3) updating the venues and the architectural designs to increase energy efficiency (buildings). Along with the previously mentioned Production Calculator, the other two useful spreadsheets provided are the Operations Tracker and the Building Survey Tool. In an accompanying document published alongside the ETC TBG, the “Applied Research Study on Theatre and Sustainability” (ARSTS), co-Directors of Renew Culture and main authors Lisa Burger and Paddy Dillon explain that the ETC TGB’s flexibility is designed to render the path towards sustainable theatre-making approachable to all kinds of theatres, irrespective of the previous steps (not) taken, the staff’s level of expertise and comfort, or the larger national, municipal, and legal frameworks in which they operate and which might curtail their actions. For example, some theatres are housed in historical buildings whose status as heritage sites render their renovation difficult. The ETC TGB ensures that all willing theatres can begin by doing something right now, and not get bogged down by aspects outside of their control.

At the same time, the ETC TGB’s holistic approach makes sure that theatres take steps in all three identified dimensions of change needed to achieve zero net emissions, and not get fixated on making huge progress only in one area while other crucial aspects get ignored. The ETC TGB proposes four different tiers that classify theatres according to the progress in sustainability they make by hitting pre-defined targets across all three areas of production, buildings, and operations. The different levels, setting increasingly tight requirements on aspects such as energy use or reusing materials, are: Preliminary (where theatres merely need to pledge their intention to follow ETC TGB guidelines and create a task force with an action plan), Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced. For example, according to the ETC TGB, a theatre that reached a Basic level of sustainable practices means that it simultaneously:

• Meets the Basic standard in production practices. Among others, this standard asks that half of everything on stage is reused or recycled (such as costumes drawn from the costume shop), and that 65% of materials used in the show will subsequently be stored to be repurposed in the future.
• Runs the majority of operations to Basic standard across four out of six operational categories. This may include practices like introducing a progressive reduction of waste, encouraging through positive reinforcement audience travel via public transit, and controlling heating and cooling by timers to avoid energy wastage.
• Develops a sustainability plan for its building and carries out initial easy fixes to reduce energy use. The latter might include draught-proofing windows and doors and installing hot water flow restrictors on taps and showers.

A stand-out approach featured in the ETC TGB is related to the self-certification process in which theatres may award themselves any of the four levels. Theatres can earn badges that self-accredit them to levels of Basic, or Intermediate, or Advanced, and they can post these badges on websites and promotional materials. In the absence of any external evaluative commission, the process functions according to an honor system that may reduce anxiety and boost collegiality while also risking the temptation to cut corners, especially so in the context of growing financial pressures and the inequality of theatre budgets across the European continent. The ARSTS document mentions as a challenge the high costs of upgrading theatre buildings, but does not sufficiently factor in how said costs may be prohibitive for some and not others. The ETC TGB tactic of bolstering theatres’ engagement with sustainable practices through a gamified four-tier process that puts participant theatres together in a low-pressure competitive quest has its significant benefits. But it can also add to the brutal competition for slices of the public budget and private funding that arts institutions are forced to participate in. The impact of the ETC TGB project will depend on whether ETC will be able to help theatres foster a belief in and dedication to the intrinsic, non-monetary value of sustainability, instead of looking over how theatres join other types of businesses in greenwashing practices where superficial changes are designed merely to court customers and funding bodies.

An interesting part of the ARSTS report includes short case studies where representatives from the nine theatres that participated last year in a test-run of trying to achieve ETC TGB Basic level in sustainability recount their experiences. Highlights from the case studies include Artistic Director Calixto Bieito from the Teatro Arriaga in Spain stressing how following the ETC TGB guidelines did not limit her creativity in any significant way. The point is important to emphasize when some directors and designers may view imposing limits on how much and what kind of materials employed in a production as restrictions upon their artistic vision. Yet imagination and invention paradoxically flourish most within imposed limits. Not relying on the dazzle and literalness of lavish realistic décor will nurture theatricality.

Multiple voices in the case studies point out that the success of transitioning to sustainable theatre practices rests on capacities to work together. Martin Kukučka, co-Artistic Director of the National Theatre in Prague, talks about how participant institutions need to begin by inspiring every worker in the theatre starting from the bottom up, instead of operating through top-down impositions. Craig Tye, Technical Director, and Lucy Davies, Executive Director at the Young Vic, discuss the vital need for storage spaces when theatres are supposed to reuse materials. Finding such spaces is a challenge, however, particularly in big cities like London burdened by pricy real estate and a housing crisis. A possible solution is for theatres in a city to collaborate and share storage and resources. Finally, the most impactful changes, such as switching energy sources from fossil fuel to renewables, depend on close collaborations with crucial actors such as the municipality and are reliant on city, national, and ultimately global shifts in how we live, how we function, and what we value. Many sustainable changes that should be pursued in theatres, like better waste management or environmentally friendly transportation of audiences and touring artists, depend on the larger infrastructure.

Dillon and Burger are well aware that “changing processes requires not only personal commitment but a deeper examination of systems” (ARSTS 9) and that “perfect sustainability cannot be achieved overnight in a world which is not engineered for sustainable working” (ARSTS 10). They argue convincingly and astutely that first steps need to be taken regardless. The most laudable aspect of the ETC TGB is the big effort it puts in making change actionable, manageable, and measurable, shaking theatres out of the paralyzing passivity that sets in when faced with a daunting task. At the same time, close attention will always have to be paid to these larger systems. A main challenge identified during the trial run, a “macro-blocker” as referred to in the ARSTS report, is the issue of time. More precisely, the current pressures on theatres and artists to produce large outputs and move quickly from project to project leaves no time for a managerial and artistic team to discuss, develop sustainable ideas, and innovate procedures. The gig economy itself—prone to over-production, waste, and burnout—is inimical to the sustainability of materials, workers’ health, and artistic creativity. Dillon and Burger make the obvious observation that “reducing the amount of work theatres produce would make sustainability easier” (ARSTS 65). All of this discussion about systems amounts to the conclusion that any real interest in sustainable theatre-making goes hand in hand with larger interests in promoting labor rights, in resisting the fossil fuel industry, and in criticizing the current economic models.

Whatever reservations the ETC TGB may elicit, they would be similar to those debated at length in relation to proposals such as the circular-economy model or notions like “sustainability” itself. The latter term implies that the fight is to sustain and maintain what we already have, not to try to fundamentally change the crisis-generating system in the first place. With the motto “against renovation, for innovation,” Bertolt Brecht similarly argued against efforts to prolong the life of a moribund theatre industry instead of fashioning an altogether different theatrical apparatus. If promoting recycling and reusing while functioning otherwise still driven by its engines of growth and profit, the circular economy model is a puny, ineffective measure against the extent of the climate crisis.

Yet focusing on pointing out the limitations of existing measures in the absence of any other initiative is an even more ineffective and defeatist gesture. The ambitious ETC TGB plan is for the initial nine theatres in the focus group to mentor more ETC member theatres over the span of a year. Then, the following year the plan is to expand again the mentoring to other theatres, so that by the end of 2026 all ETC member theatres will have reached the Basic level in the joint quest towards zero net emissions by 2030. The ETC TGB is a more than welcome initiative in a theatre sector that is already late to efforts to improve their practice with an empathy for living others and a concern for our common future.