Date of Award
4-22-2015
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Honors Thesis
Department
Theatre
First Advisor
Owen Schaub
Abstract
"You're on Earth. There's no cure for that," says the character Hamm, in Samuel Beckett's Endgame. The stage offers a unique lens through which to explore the reality of human existence on Earth, sharing the behaviors of characters in imagined circumstances with audiences. My honors thesis production, GAIA: an eco-theatre project explores human relationships with the environment and comes out of research conducted during the 2014 Butler Summer Institute. My thesis project began by raising the following questions: How do we impact the environment, and how do we react to changes in our ecosystems? What do our actions in our environments - our relationships to natural resources - say about who we are as a community, and as individuals? Through the creation of a theatrical production, I investigated these questions to involve audiences in new perspectives on what it means to be human, and as a result, came across new open-ended questions about how we interact in an increasingly interconnected global community.
Recommended Citation
Levine, Julia Stephanie, "Existing on Earth and Stage:
Exploring Human Relationships with Ecosystems Through Performance" (2015). Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection. 305.
https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/ugtheses/305