Una Chaudhuri

Eco-theatre · Animal Studies · Environmental Humanities

Una Chaudhuri brings theatre, ecological thought and the lives of other species into the same conversation. A Collegiate Professor and Professor of English, Drama, and Environmental Studies at New York University, she works across scholarship, teaching and collaborative art.

Her research explores what she calls ecospheric consciousness: ways of thinking, feeling and creating that attend to the many species and physical forces with which humans share the world. Her work asks how performance can help us notice those relationships and imagine living within them differently.

Theatre, animals and a changing planet.
Art as a way of paying attention to the world we share.

Una Becoming Penguin

A portrait in three movements, crossing the boundary between human and animal.

Una Becoming PenguinImage credit: Marina Zurkow · unasite.net

Eco-theatre

Theatre in an ecological world

Chaudhuri is a pioneer of eco-theatre: plays and performances that engage with ecology and the environment. Her work also contributes to ecocriticism, which approaches art and literature through their relationships with the natural world.

In 1994 she guest-edited a special issue of Yale’s Theater journal on “Theatre and Ecology”. Her introduction, “There Must Be a Lot of Fish in That Lake” Theorizing a Theatre Ecology, helped establish a vocabulary for thinking about theatre and environmental questions together.

Her concept of AnthropoScenes explores dramaturgies beyond the human. Alongside her writing, she participates in collaborative research and artistic practice, including Climate Lens and Dear Climate.

Selected writing

Animal Acts: Performing Species Today

Co-edited with Holly Hughes · 2014

Performance and the representation of species.

Research Theatre, Climate Change, and the Ecocide Project

Co-authored with Shonni Enelow · 2014

Research, theatrical practice and climate change.

The Stage Lives of Animals: Zooësis and Performance

Una Chaudhuri · 2017

Animal studies in conversation with theatre and performance.

Animals & zooësis

Animals and zooësis

How do animals enter our stories, stages and ways of thinking? Chaudhuri uses the term zooësis for the wide field of cultural animal discourse and representation. The passage below is her own account of the idea, preserved from the supplied SWS interview materials.

I have long argued that the figure of the animal requires a more capacious concept and have proposed the term "zooësis" to refer to the vast field of cultural animal discourse and representation. The neologism is inspired partly by Platonic "poïesis" and Aristotelian "mimesis," but it also owes a debt to early feminist theorist Alice Jardine's concept of "gynesis," which she defined as "the putting into discourse of 'woman' as [. . .] intrinsic to the condition of modernity; indeed, the valorization of the feminine, woman, and her obligatory, that is, historical connotations, as somehow intrinsic to new and necessary modes of thinking, writing, speaking." Obviously, I want this term, zooësis, to mark the ways the animal is put into discourse, but I also share Jardine's progressive hope that it will contribute to the valorization of animals and teach us that they are "intrinsic to new and necessary modes of thinking, writing, speaking."

Una Chaudhuri · on zooësis

Dear Climate

Dear Climate is a collaborative art and research project founded in 2012 by Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl, Oliver Kellhammer and Marina Zurkow. It takes shape through posters, guided meditations, installations and workshops.

The project invites people to reconsider their relationships with other species, landscapes and the physical forces around them. Its imaginative exercises connect everyday attention with the larger realities of a changing climate.

Chaudhuri’s supplied biography records presentations of Dear Climate in Dublin, New York, the Netherlands and Houston, including Storm King Art Center, the New York Public Library and Rice University.