Award-winning performer, director, writer and producer, Adam Paolozza invites audiences into the world of eco-dramaturgy through his latest theatrical work, Last Landscape, premiering January 2025 at the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto.
Presented by Bad New Days production company, this new play evokes a sense of ecological preservation and a call for reflection. Eco-dramaturgy is a term used to describe theatre that centres on ecological issues and our obligation to protect the environment.
Palozza’s play holds a mirror to the environmental troubles we’re likely to face in the upcoming years, especially as political leadership is handed to figures who seemingly lack the care needed to keep the world spinning on its axis.
Drawing inspiration from the beauty of Ontario’s vast landscapes, Paolozza conceived this performance with the desire to bring forth an emotional response from being faced with the natural world and the concept of humankind’s inevitable disappearance.
The play follows an ensemble of workers who assemble and disassemble artificial recreations of natural landscapes in a post-human world. Through low-fi techno and geophony beats spun with live turntablism, the wordless performance probes at our sensitivities through nostalgic imitations with an eerie sense of dystopia looming overhead.
The opening scene of the mimesis commences with a ring light, a bench, and a nameless worker, performed by Nicholas Eddie. A warm hue emits through the dark theatre as Eddie clicks on the ring light, and the hum of sunbeams quietly fills the background as he gradually raises the light’s stand. He then joins his fellow actors downstage, soaking up the artificial rays with reflective foil in hand and sounds of muted satisfaction.
In the show’s program notes, Paolozza writes that Last Landscape aims to produce “larger conversations between art and ethics, and highlights the crucial importance of formal innovation in art that seeks to seriously engage with sustainable thinking and practice.”
What sets this play apart from more conventional takes on dystopia is its willingness to ease and soothe our minds with glimpses of what we naturally take for granted — the fleeting beauty of nature. Many of the scenes throughout the play touch on posthumanism with nostalgic depictions of beach days, night strolls, changing seasons and interspecies care.
Paolozza’s deliberate decision to place the landscape as the protagonist rather than human actors is done so to bring the concept of posthumanism to the centre stage.
By focusing on the greater web of “being,” the play compels the audience to contemplate sustainability. The artificial landscapes urge viewers to consider what exists to covet a sense of preservation rather than enrage them with images of mass destruction to create that same wistful feeling.
The layering of nostalgia and despair within the play’s subtext shifts our attention to the feeble fight we’re putting up against climate change.
To put this further into perspective, the projected leading candidate in the lead-up to a potential Canadian federal election, Pierre Poilievre, consistently avoids declaring his stance on climate change. Yet, his campaign mantra ironically happens to be “Axe the Tax,” referring to the carbon tax instilled to reduce our carbon footprint nationwide.
In a world on the brink of irreversible environmental collapse, we still see our elected officials fall short of their eco-friendly promises and the appointment of figures who find no shame in turning the other cheek to the fires that scorch our earth, the explosives that decimate our ecosystems, nor the nearing-drought of our finite resources. Thus, pieces of art such as Last Landscape are brought into existence to reflect our shortcomings and offer a future worth manifesting.
The show concludes similarly to how it began, with the five actors squished together on a wooden bench, releasing a final exhaustive “ah” after having spent around an hour and 50 minutes manipulating the stage to portray the little beauties of life deeply overshadowed by our imitation at living.
Last Landscape teases the idea that it’s more than a reflection of what was and more so a glimpse of what will be. As the chorus of applause rang through the theatre, the question of what we would do to protect what we love against the imminent threat of environmental collapse hung thickly in the air.