Lighting the Way Design Book: CCTA 2019 EcoDesign Charrette

After the 2019 Global Climate Strike Triga Creative was inspired to take on a leadership role in our local sustainability movement through the mentorship of Ian Garrett of the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts. Comprised of Shannon Lea Doyle, Alexandra Lord, and Michelle Tracey, Triga formed in 2018 as a collective of Toronto-based designers who share the goal of developing new working models for theatre design and live performance. In addition, we were already dedicated to providing our creative community of independent designers with resources-a physical studio space, intergenerational mentorship opportunities, and values-based artistic exchange-in order to increase the sustainability of their lives and careers in a precarious and competitive industry. After feeling the enthusiasm of the Global Climate Strike, we wanted to learn more about ecoscenography as a conceptual approach to dramaturgy and as a practical framework to design for theatre and performance. We saw that Triga was well- placed to provide our community with access to the resources and knowledge we, as individual designers, were seeking, and hoped our collective could encourage greater creative ecological thinking amongst our peers. We found just such an opportunity when Ian introduced us to the 50 short plays commissioned by Climate Change Theatre Action in early 2019. Ian suggested CCTA as a platform to reach the international community of playwrights and other theatre artists involved in this project. We leapt at the idea. The CCTA short plays focus on aspects of the climate crisis, providing a unique opportunity to explore ecoscenographic practices and to share this exploration with an established network of artists. We dreamt of bringing designers together to read, discuss, and develop design concepts for all 50 plays. We imagined that through rapid design seeding, we could expand how a community of designers imagines ecoscenography and its power to change the world.