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.
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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.
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.
“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.”
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.
