Dead or Alive

While ecological questions haunt our thoughts and guide our behavior, both individual and collective, Julie Sermon analyzes in this essay the resonances of these issues in the field of the performing arts. How do they affect the ways of writing, producing and performing works, as well as receiving and talking about them? What can the performing arts, according to their specific modalities, give us to think about and in this juncture? Through several concrete examples, the author tells us what the taking into account of ecology makes happen on contemporary stages, by focusing on the thematic and aesthetic aspects of the shows as well as on their creative process. This work imports the tools and reflections of ecocriticism into the context of French-speaking performing arts, a transdisciplinary theoretical approach that emerged in the Anglo-Saxon academic sphere in the 1980s which aims in particular to renew the framework of analysis of the works produced by problematizing their links with ecology. Dead or alive is presented as an anchor point allowing debate to be generated, and renews our ways of seeing and thinking about the works produced over the past ten years.