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British director Katie Mitchell’s latest project “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction” will be screened in 10 countries by 2024. Still, neither Mitchell, nor the cast, nor the crew will cross a single border.

The experiment is part of “Sustainable Theatre?”, an initiative of the Vidy-Lausanne Theater in Lausanne, Switzerland, with a network of 10 European producers. Mitchell has created a “tour score,” an online handbook with detailed instructions on every aspect of the production, given to local artists at theaters at each stop. But these artists also have creative control: “A Play for the Living in a Play in a Time of Extinction,” a monologue by American playwright Miranda Rose Hall about a young theater worker’s reckoning with man-made damage to the environment, takes a different place. Will have. director and look everywhere he goes.

The zero travel commitment is part of the theater’s efforts to adapt to climate change. In recent years, a growing number of artists and venues have begun to rethink their reliance on easy, but environmentally costly, international travel.

At Milan’s Piccolo Teatro, where the show opened on Thursday, Mitchell’s vision was reinterpreted by the Rome-based collective lacasadargilla. In Mitchell’s instructions, “while operating within the parameters outlined below, you have the artistic freedom to make your own show.” These include casting, music, and technical requirements, down to a video tutorial explaining how to build a power meter.

Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli, a lacasadargilla member who directed the Milanese version, named Mitchell’s production, which she watched on Zoom when it was presented in Lausanne, “Model Zero”. She said that now she, she and Mitchell felt like they were leading together from afar.

It is an unusual production model in European theatre, where directors tend to have the last word in every iteration of their work. The goal, which Mitchell explained in a video interview, was to find new avenues for theater production in the face of an environmental threat. “You can’t have normal hierarchies, systems, structures or control in light of climate change because the issue is much larger and much more important,” he said. “You have to give up artistic control.”

Mitchell, 57, known throughout Europe as a theater and opera director, said he’s in a position to try what he calls “eco-dramaturgy.” “I’m at the end of my career, not the beginning, so I have nothing to lose if I mess up artistically. I want to keep the younger generation away from it and they just get the result.”

“Sustainable Theatre?” The program started with virtual conversations. Mitchell and another environmentally conscious artist, French director and choreographer Jérôme Bel held online twice-monthly meetings for nearly a year with Vincent Baudriller and Caroline Barneaud, artistic directors of the Vidy-Lausanne Theater, to find a viable production model. , director of international projects.

The team also connected with researchers from the University of Lausanne to assess the theatre’s carbon footprint. Completing a similar self-assessment process is a requirement for Vidy-Lozan’s European partners, which includes theaters in Ghent, Belgium; Maribor, Slovenia; Vilnius, Lithuania; Zagreb, Croatia; Lisbon; and Stockholm. (Taiwan National Theater and Concert Hall has also registered.)

In terms of production, the partners signed on without seeing it: At the time, Mitchell and Bel thought they could create a single production (and screenplay) together. Instead, each theater will receive two: In addition to “A Play for the Living in a Play in a Time of Extinction”, Bel’s “Jérôme Bel” will be re-performed by the participating theaters.

Mitchell’s work has been responding to the climate crisis on and off the stage for a decade. He said he stopped flying altogether in 2012 after meeting with British scientist Stephen Emmott and hearing him talk about the need for radical behavior change. “Sustainable Theatre?” zero travel rule for it was his idea – and he said, “definitely pissed off people in the beginning.” Based in the UK, he directed (almost attended) “A Game Living in a Time of Extinction” entirely on Zoom, prior to its Lausanne premiere last September.

Cameras were installed inside the theater and operated by a special technician to transmit the rehearsals to Mitchell. “It’s not entirely easy to read a room and you can’t understand the small micro-talk that goes on. We needed to have a different communication protocol,” he said. “You can see everything as a problem. Me and my team have chosen not to do that.”

Barneaud from Vidy-Lozan said the experience has been positive for the theatre’s in-house team. “It gave everyone a greater sense of responsibility. For example, the sound engineer had to ‘ear’ for composer Paul Clark because he wasn’t in that room.”

Apart from the instructions in the script that Milan’s Piccolo Teatro and other theaters received after the premiere, only a few have been pinpointed. One is to remove the performances entirely from the electrical grid. Instead, Mitchell placed stationary bikes on the stage, which the performers rode throughout the show, to generate electricity. Mitchell said it’s about “showing the effort of electricity.” (There are also tutorials on how to build bikes in lap points.)

Made for a larger stage than the one in Switzerland and with more elaborate sets, the Milan version uses four bikes instead of two. While climate change has been a recurring theme in lacasadargilla’s work since its inception in 2005, the requirements of the show still force its members to rethink some habits, said Ferlazzo Natoli: “We normally work with video a lot more, but video consumes a lot and requires a constant amount of energy.”

Working with constraints has proven encouraging, he added. “This is very exciting because we discovered that we can work with devices, lights and instruments that we didn’t know about before.”

All of the participating artists and producers stressed that the model they developed was only an option to limit the impact of theater on global warming, rather than a one-time response. “I think we are really at the beginning of this journey,” said Claudio Longhi, director of the Teatro Piccolo. “This project is a method of asking questions, a provocation.”

Mitchell will of course be watching via Zoom when the Italian version of “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction” opens on Thursday. But then there will be no notes from him, he said. “It belongs to local artists in Milan. They are free to do what they want.”