The theatre of net zero: Exploring the power of community theatre as a radical engagement tool in place-based approaches to just energy transition

Peer-reviewed paper 1-261-26

Community theatre has a long history as a radical and effective approach to raising awareness and empowering communities to take action on environmental, political and social justice issues. It does this through strengthening social fabric which has the effect of creating pathways to deeper and wider spread of new technologies and practices, creating new knowledge and awareness and through building transferrable skills and confidence which are precursors to collective action and more active participation in political decisions and local governance. But the use of dramatic arts, and arts more generally, have been much underused as agents of change in our communities. This paper explores the theory and practice of community theatre as part of a strategy to engage low income and hard to reach groups with the offer of low carbon technologies and practices in a community in Oxfordshire in the UK. The paper draws on observation of how usual engagement approaches largely failed to connect with low income, ethnically diverse, and vulnerable groups with the offer of a low cost, derisked heat pump installation and describes how a work of community theatre was conceived in response, detailing all the stages from researching local community priorities, scriptwriting, recruiting local people to perform, rehearsals and finally performance. The entire process is evaluated via participant observation, interviews, analysis of materials produced in the process and thematic analysis of responses to the performance captured in 13 recorded interviews with audience members. The paper concludes with discussion of the potential for community theatre to have a role in place-based approaches to just energy transition.