Month: December 2025

CCTA and the Theatre of Necessity: Visceral Responses to Climate Crisis

For actor and director Giovanni Enrico Morassutti, the recent Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA) Turin residency demonstrates theatre’s role as an artistic laboratory where we practise the emotional bravery required to face the climate and nature crisis together.

1,400 words: estimated reading time = 5.5 minutes

I have just returned from Turin, where I had the honour of leading an artistic residency for the tenth anniversary of the Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA). Despite my long-standing commitment to these themes, I constantly find myself measuring the vastness and urgency of the climate crisis — a topic so immense that it makes me feel almost overwhelmed by its complexity. Yet, it is precisely in this difficulty that the strength and necessity of theatre reside.

CCTA & Art Aia: Climate Change Theatre Action in Italy

The philosophical basis for this work lies in Art Aia – Creatives In Residence, the international residency I founded, which integrates environmental sustainability into its core mission. As a central hub for the Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA) in Italy, Art Aia actively hosts, coordinates, and promotes ecodramaturgy, using the performing arts to translate the climate crisis from abstract data into emotional, visceral experiences. This commitment is materialised through highly conscious production methods — such as powering performances with solar energy on the Tagliamento River, aligning the artistic output with the environmental message — and by upholding its founding principle of operating in total respect for the environment. Indeed, the CCTA movement is an interventionist action born from the recognition that scientific discourse often fails to prompt the necessary emotional or behavioral change. The movement strives to translate the abstract scale of climate data into the personal realm, aiming to foster collective agency. This mandate has historically driven my efforts, from directing ‘When’ by Wren Brian in 2021 on the Tagliamento, integrating science with local authorities like Legambiente and ARPA, to the 2023 performance of ‘Mirror Mirror’ at the WWF Oasis Dune degli Alberoni in Venice, where theatre powerfully merged with the activism of Extinction Rebellion and WWF volunteers.

CCTA: Showing Climate Change Theare Action 2023. Partners include WWF and Extinction Rebellion. Photograph: Jacopo Capuzzo © 2023
CCTA 2023. Partners include WWF and Extinction Rebellion. Photograph: Jacopo Capuzzo © 2023

Artistic visions & techniques converging on global crisis

This crucial mission was recently amplified in Turin through an unexpected but powerful collaboration with Serena Bavo, founder of the Earthink Festival, a pioneering project dedicated to sustainability in the performing arts. Working with Serena to co-direct three pièces commissioned by CCTA was a discovery of synergy, showing how different artistic visions converge toward a common goal. Our creative process was nourished by two distinct but complementary souls: I brought the depth of over twenty years in Method Acting, exploring tools like Sense Memory, Animal Work, and the Private Moment, essential for transforming the ecological crisis into a visceral, felt reality. This research leverages the actor’s deep emotional experience to embody the consequences of the disaster — be it the struggle of an endangered species or the fragility of the isolated individual — and thereby builds an empathetic bridge with the audience. Serena, for her part, enriched the directing with innovative ideas, such as the use of audio in headphones and the performative walk (passeggiata), taking the theatre outside conventions and into direct contact with the lived space, thereby aligning our work with the movement’s tendency toward site-specific performance. 

This fusion of techniques — emotional introspection and environmental immersion — is fundamental, for it is not just about telling a story, but about creating a visceral experience that pushes for action. To achieve this, Serena and I carefully selected three pieces for Turin, our analysis focusing heavily on ecodramaturgy and the drama of animal survival. ‘Brackendale’ by Elaine Avila, for instance, is a profoundly sad yet crucial text about bald eagles reduced to feeding on landfill garbage and nesting with plastic — an image of profound ecological decline. Similarly, ‘The Polar Bears’ by Nicolas Billon is direct and uncompromising, showing the accelerated melting of the ice making survival impossible. Counterbalancing these, ‘Homo Sapiens’ by Chantal Bilodeau projects us into the sixth mass extinction with an inquiry into our future identity; I define this work as ‘compassionate’ because it seeks hope or at least a reflection on our identity currently hanging in the balance.

CCTA: Showing Serena Bavo in 'The Polar Bears', written by Nic Billon, presented in Turin during CCTA 2025. Photograph: Paola Odone © 2025
Serena Bavo in ‘The Polar Bears’, written by Nic Billon, presented in Turin during CCTA 2025. Photograph: Paola Odone © 2025

“The Time is Now”

To fulfil the action mandate and ground the artistic work in scientific reality, we collaborated with Valerio Neri, the regional manager for the WWF, whose accurate and informative talks clarified the condition of these animals and the risks of a mass extinction. His intervention made the problem and the necessity to act now even clearer, powerfully underscoring this year’s CCTA theme: “The Time is Now.”

Showig: Solar panel station. In line with the principles of the ecological transition, the lights and sounds of the show and the concert of CCTA sul Tagliamento were powered by clean energy thanks to a photovoltaic panel generator realised by La Casa del Sole. Photograph by Edoardo Marcon
Solar panel station: In line with the principles of the ecological transition, the lights and sounds of the show and the concert of CCTA sul Tagliamento were powered by clean energy thanks to a photovoltaic panel generator realised by La Casa del Sole. Photograph: Edoardo Marcon

We must also incorporate forms of ritual to process the heavy emotional weight of the crisis. To this end, many CCTA events, including those I have organised, actively employ the Climate Ribbon initiative. This participatory art project invites audiences to write down their grief, fears, commitments, or hopes for the climate on a coloured ribbon before tying it to a collective structure — a tree, a fence, or an artistic installation. This simple, yet profound, act externalises the intense, often internalised, emotions associated with eco-anxiety, transforming private fear into a visible, communal commitment. The resulting tapestry of ribbons serves as a powerful symbol of shared vulnerability and mutual solidarity, grounding the abstract threat of climate change in a tactile, communal experience.

The pervasive feeling of eco-anxiety, which currently limits our audience reach, is precisely where the role of the artist becomes most critical. We must acknowledge that the fear generated by the sheer vastness of the crisis is profoundly paralyzing, yet the theatre, especially when utilizing the profound intimacy of Method Acting, offers a crucial, specialized space for processing that collective trauma. By guiding actors to embody the visceral truth of ecological collapse — not just conceptually, but through deeply felt experience — we provide the audience with a necessary emotional container. The performance acts as a cathartic shared space where collective grief and fear can be recognised, validated, and subsequently transformed into productive energy and sustained purpose. This necessary shift from paralysis to commitment is my primary concern as we look ahead to the final iteration of this specific format, which is intended to spur urgent climate action before a likely transition to a different model. It is no longer sufficient to simply raise awareness or shock audiences; we must equip them with the emotional and psychological resilience needed to sustain long-term engagement with the crisis. This demands that we, the organizers and artists, become relentless in diversifying our outreach, moving beyond traditional theatre circles to actively collaborate with civic leaders, technologists, educators, and local community groups, effectively turning the CCTA framework into a true multidisciplinary engine for regional and global change.

The artistic challenge now is to find and articulate a sustainable hope within the darkness, using our unique emotional language to reinforce the message that though the problem is immense, collective action is not only feasible, but absolutely unavoidable. Theatre remains the essential laboratory where we practice the emotional bravery required to face the future together.

Find more

Art Aia – Creatives In Residence is an international art residency based in the north-eastern Italian region Friuli-Venezia Giulia, for artistic production and research that combines art, environmental sustainability and ecotherapy practices.

Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA), launched in 2015, is a worldwide festival of short plays about the climate crisis presented biennially to coincide with the United Nations COP meetings.

The Climate Ribbon is an arts ritual to grieve what each of us stands to lose to Climate Chaos, and affirm our solidarity as we unite to fight against it.

Complementing this final post for ClimateCultures during 2025, you can read playwright Chantal Bilodeau’s post at the start of this year, All Good Things Must Begin. Chantal shares CCTA’s latest anthology of short plays on the climate crisis, whose theme takes an imaginative leap through challenging times towards a just and regenerative world.

And in Giovanni’s previous post for us, Create the Future – Creatives in Residence for Climate Change, he shares further case studies of climate theatre and community engagement at an international conference, exploring strategies for encouraging cross-disciplinary projects to address the biodiversity and climate crisis.

Giovanni Enrico Morassutti

Giovanni Enrico Morassutti

An actor, director, cultural entrepreneur, founder of Art Aia - Creatives In Residence, promoting environmental and biodiversity protection, inviting communities to take action on the climate emergency.
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A Strange Country

Psychotherapist Susan Holliday discovers an intricate world of imaginal possibility (a strange country) in an overlooked detail of a familiar landscape. Turning away from global events for a moment reminds us that change often starts with something small.

2,060 words: estimated reading time = 8 minutes

It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time, or the traveller who enters a strange country.1

– Bill Brandt, photographer (Camera in London)

I wake before dawn to the sound of a robin’s song piercing the morning chill. It takes me less than an hour to dress and make my way to the wrought iron gates which mark the entrance to Richmond Park. A heavy dew rests on the still shadowed grass, seeming almost to hover above it like an overnight spell. All around, the bracken is rusting into its autumn glory. I make my way up a gentle slope through a stand of birch, beech and oak trees to reach the crest of the park. Here the sun has just tipped over the horizon and cast every leaf, blade and branch into fine gold. A huddle of deer nuzzle the grass, making the most of the quiet before the weekend cyclists arrive. I must have walked in this park a thousand times and still it takes my breath away.

The park is always a ‘strange country’ to me, a correlation of ever-changing elements, light, season and subjectivity. At first I just see what I have seen before, but with every step my preconceptions fall to the floor. Unclad, my eyes begin to see beyond recognition. What I’ve come to realise, over many encounters with the park, is that as my perception deepens, it moves from the general and the big, to the particular and the small. On this occasion it shifts from the broadbrush palette of grass, tree and sky, to the particular curve of a branch; the tritone beech leaves rustling their blessings over the waking park; and the oceanic wave structure of ageing bark.

Walking for days at a time, nature writer Nan Shepherd notices how her perception deepens gradually, so:

The eye sees what it didn’t see before, or sees in a new way what it has already seen.
So the ear, the other senses.2

This strikes me as a beautiful description of how we come to see more keenly. The word ‘gradual’ refers to something coming into fullness over time (from Latin gradus, meaning ‘step’). Gradually, we see what we ‘didn’t see before’. We begin to see ‘in a new way’.

So it is only on my way back down the slope, as I re-enter the shadows, that I notice the dazzling spiders’ webs which jewel the bracken. They were there all along. I passed them on my way up. I just didn’t have eyes keen enough to see them. Crouching down now, to take a closer look, I see a lattice of tiny pearls, strung together with impossible intricacy. To me, their beauty stems in part from their near perfection (the essential word here being ‘near’). Each little rectangle of negative space is uneven, each one an incomparable structure, building through repetition into something greater than the sum of its parts. These lines have not been measured or calculated. They have been drawn through countless micro movements of the spider’s body.

A strange country. Showing: Jewelled spider's web. Photograph by Susan Holliday 2025
Jewelled spider’s web. Photograph: Susan Holliday © 2025

A strange country: the  gift of intricate hinterlands

Each web is a ‘strange country’ all by itself. The longer I look, the more I feel drawn into this other world. I imagine any one of these webs would be fine enough to grace a noblewoman’s robes in a Tudor court. I find myself wondering what it might be like to shrink down in size, to place my feet on its little ladders, or to hold one of the pearls in my hand. Children quite naturally see this way. The most unremarkable detail becomes an opening onto an intricate hinterland. Through their imagination and the suspension of preconception, these details become enormous. We have only to think of the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, or the wardrobe in C.S Lewis’ Narnia adventures to remember the power of this portal vision.

And this brings me to the heart of the matter. For as adults we tend to regard the ‘small’ as lesser, as marginal and of little consequence. This has never been more so than at a time when everything is valued according to quantity and scale. The small can so easily be dismissed as a mere trifle, rather than valued as a coherent whole with its own integrity and particularity.

Indigenous peoples, artists, philosophers and mystics have long held a different view, in which every speck of the whole reveals universal patterns and principles. Fourteenth-century mystic, Julian of Norwich, encapsulated the essential paradox of the ‘great little thing’ in one of her revelations:

He showed me a little thing the size of a hazelnut, in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with my mind’s eye and I thought, ‘What can this be?’

 And the answer came, ‘It is all that is made’.3

Four hundred years later, William Blake encouraged us to “see a world in a grain of sand”.4 Romantic fancy, some might say. In defence of the small, I could stray into the ways in which quantum mechanics and fractal geometry are opening up our contemporary understanding of the complexity and correspondence of micro and macro dimensions of our world; the profound influence of the minute. But I want to stay with my own experience, to say something about why I believe we need to turn our attention away from the titanic battles, the larger-than-life characters, the numbers, trends and averages, and lean towards the small, the slight and the fleeting.

They say ‘the devil is in the detail’, but maybe the sacred is there too. I don’t mean this in any religious sense, but in the context of everyday experience. We live in an age of distraction and consumption fuelled by fear of boredom and emptiness. As a psychotherapist, this word ‘boredom’ has intrigued me for years. It comes up a lot, either in the sense that life has become ‘boring’, or that a person fears they will be perceived as ‘boring’. It seems to me that ‘boring’ is the state we arrive at when we believe there is ‘nothing much to see here’, or perhaps ‘nothing new’. Boring is the ‘same-old-same-old’. It feasts on abstractions and averages, on preconceptions and generalisations.

‘Boring’ signals I have lost faith that within me, or in front of me, there could be more than meets the eye. More to be discovered. More strangeness. Perhaps I believe that I’ve seen all there is to be seen, or I’ve seen it all before. So I stop looking, or I start looking elsewhere. This is a bit like looking down from an airplane window on an outstretched continent, and believing it to be boring, simply because at this height (and at this speed) I can’t see the incomparable particularity, the infinitely varied and ever-changing detail of its topography. At close quarters, what I thought was entirely self-evident reveals itself to be a ‘strange country’, full of surprises and unplumbed depths. 

Showing: Bark detail. Photograph by Susan Holliday, 2025
Bark detail. Photograph: Susan Holliday © 2025

Each of us contains an inner landscape. A place, like the park, we may have visited many times. Perhaps we think we have seen it all. Until one day, if we are really paying attention, we notice a slight shift, a little anomaly, an overlooked detail ‘for the first time’. Virginia Woolf suggests these glimpses are “little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark”.5 How often we overlook or dismiss these curious intimations. Un-midwifed by our beholding, the inkling moment is stillborn. Yet the moment we start to notice the details of our experience, life no longer seems so boring, so barren.

Just imagine how this simple practice of attending to little daily miracles could change our relationship to each other and to the whole. When every detail (like the jewelled spider’s web) opens a door onto a world of imagination and possibility, life feels rich and vital. Perhaps then we would no longer need to consume our way out of emptiness.

Finding my niche

We differentiate ourselves through our particularity. It is through paying attention to the subtle qualities and slight nuances of character that we start to appreciate we are not just a number, a statistic or a type. Each of us is one of a kind. There is only one of us in all time.

In his 2021 book, The Journey of Soul Initiation, Bill Plotkin articulates the principle that each of us occupies a distinct ‘ecological niche’:

Soul, for me, is an ecological concept, not a psychological one nor a spiritual or religious one. Specifically, by Soul I mean a person or thing’s unique ecological niche in the Earth community.6

Hauled into the trawler nets of socio-economic grouping, diagnostic typologies, or target markets, it can feel increasingly challenging to distinguish our authentic singularity, the significance of our particular ecological niche.

Could it be that the current polarisation of society into crude groupings of ideology and identity originates in a deep wound, which is the experience of not mattering in our smallness. If everything around me reinforces the narrative that what I imagine, feel, think and long for is of little importance ‘in the grand scheme of things’; if what I choose to do with my life doesn’t really matter ‘in the end’, then I will find my sense of mattering through identifying with something larger. Through this amalgamation, I lose sight of the details which define my singular significance.

The tragedy is that this obscuring of the little things which make me uniquely ‘me’ robs the wider whole of my particular contribution. Collectively, this self-effacement quickens the degeneration of the planet.

If I am to find my unique ecological niche in the Earth community, I will need to give some time to wandering about the inner ‘park’ of my life, until my eye sees what it didn’t see before, or sees in a new way what it has already seen. Sensing my responsibility to my own particularity, I no longer look to ‘kill time’ (with distraction and consumption), but to realise my life ‘through time’ in all its richness and distinction.

Perhaps the Earth can teach us

Absorbed in the intricacy of the little spider’s web, my eye flickers between the lines and the spaces between them, the negative shapes. I start thinking how the whole structure of the web depends on these little spaces. I begin to breathe more deeply, as though taking in this airy structure as a blueprint for my own existence. Like most of us, my life is pretty crammed, packed with activity, crowded with ideas, obligations and intentions. Loaded with stuff. Drawn into the ‘strange country’ of the little web, I begin to sense what it might be like to live a more spacious life.   

It occurs to me then, perhaps the Earth can teach us. Perhaps the small, the slight and the fleeting, in all their intimate beauty and particular significance, can show us other ways of living. To heed this minute and infinite intelligence, we may need to create little gaps in our lives, tiny spaces. Change starts with something very small. A deep breath, perhaps.

Walking on down the slope, I feel a little lighter.

Susan’s references

  1. Bill Brandt, Camera in London (Focal, 1948)
  2. Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain (Canongate Books, 2011)
  3. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (Penguin Classics, 1998)
  4. William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, A Choice of Blake’s Verse (Faber and Faber, 1970)
  5. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (The Hogarth Press, 1927)
  6. Bill Plotkin, The Journey of Soul Initiation (New World Library, 2021)

Find more

Susan Holliday is a psychotherapist and photographer and you can find more of her writing at her website.  

Susan’s book Hidden Wonders of the Human Heart was published by Matador in 2021. You can read James Murray-White‘s review for ClimateCultures, Seeing Nature’s Wonders in the Human Heart.

Susan Holliday

Susan Holliday

A psychotherapist and writer committed to the rewilding of human nature, exploring the correlation between despoiling our natural world and the desolation of the human spirit ...
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