14. Creatively Reimagining Place and Community in a World of Extreme Weather

This chapter argues for the importance of a deep understanding of place and community for thinking anew about engagement with extreme weather events. It benefits from the authors’ location in three distinct disciplines: theatre studies, screen studies and architecture. We place these in dialogue to explore ideas of place and community as they are imagined creatively through these combined disciplinary approaches. The Australian television drama series Fires (Ayres et al., 2021) was produced in the wake of the 2019–2020 Black Summer fire season, which led to the loss of 34 lives, destroyed over 3000 buildings and burnt more than “12 million hectares of forests and agricultural areas across southeastern Australia” (Lindenmayer & Taylor, 2020). A fictionalised account of this fire season, Fires offers an anchor to this analysis, allowing us to deploy the different disciplinary approaches in concert to offer a multilayered understanding of what place and community might mean in the context of extreme events. In turn, we are interested in how this multidisciplinary investigation might highlight new pathways for understanding creative practice as an instrument for disaster preparedness. The capacity of advanced technology—virtual reality (VR), digital interactive narrative and artificial intelligence (AI)—to support the creation of immersive even visceral experiences is central to several of these pathways.

Our discussion of “place” and “community” references different scholarly trajectories but finds a conceptual anchor in the work of Edward S. Casey, who argues that “to be at all—to exist in any way—is to be somewhere, and to be somewhere is to be in some kind of place. Place is as requisite as the air we breathe, the ground on which we stand, the bodies we have. We are surrounded by places” (1998). While place is everywhere, it is not so ubiquitous as to be meaningless. The places we inhabit are meaningful because they are inscribed within our lives, experiences and connections. Self and place are inseparable. We also acknowledge that places are redolent with the mutual reliance on all forms of life and their habitat. In this respect, we can consider Casey’s point that “we are not masters of place, but prey to it” (2001) and redeploy it to highlight human vulnerability to and reliance upon the nonhuman environment and its dangers.

For places to retain meaning, we must consider how it is that we inhabit them. It is here that the notion of community comes in. We form communities in place. In co-location, we take on shared responsibilities for our places, whether they are local communities, interest groups, shared work environments, sporting groups, schools or any other place where bodies and subjectivities come together. As Casey points out, “the very word ‘society’ stems from socius, signifying ‘sharing’—and sharing is [done] in a common place” (1998). He goes on to explain that “as Victor Turner has emphasized, a communitas is not just a matter of banding together but of [bonding] together through rituals that actively communalize people—and that require [particular] places in which to be enacted” (ibid.). We are interested in how these communities and subjects are connected by the storytelling potential of architecture, performance and nonfiction screen culture.

Both a sense of place and a sense of community are often described in terms of their contexts or settings, which commonly encapsulate landscapes or buildings. Indeed, the close connection between a landscape (its climate, topography and flora) and the architecture that arises organically within it (and responds to its opportunities or threats) is a central concept in the theory of genius loci. This theory links the phenomenology of a place with the community that lives and interacts in it and the architecture that shelters or sustains this community (Norberg-Schulz, 1980). This aligns with Casey’s notion of habitus, a concept that ties self and place together. Subjects actively relate to places by way of “habitation” as social relations inform and shape our relation to places including the built environment. He argues that “in any journey through the place-world, we live out our bodily habitudes in [relation] to the changing spatiality of the scenes we [successively] encounter” (2001). Viewed through this lens, architecture and landscape are integral to both a sense of place and the characterisation of a community. Furthermore, places are not static; they can be created. This idea, known as “place-making”, was first developed in the 1960s, coming to prominence in the work of Jane Jacobs (1961) and William H. Whyte (1980). Place-making connects space, architecture and public arts by way of the formation of social and cultural groups or support for active storytelling.

Audiovisual forms, such as film and television, reconceptualise a sense of place for the viewer. They can enable an experience of place as being distant, removed from the location and experience of the viewer with landscapes and human activities, to be consumed from afar without significant engagement (Cowie, 2011). Filmmakers and producers, however, often seek a meaningful engagement with place. This is particularly the case with documentary filmmakers, who frequently grapple with the possibilities for expressing place in ways that enhance its meaning in purposeful ways. If Casey tells us that “to be somewhere is to be in some kind of place”, and this place is crucially tied to selfhood, the place in which viewers are asked to encounter individuals on screen conveys explicit or implicit information about the lives, experience and, indeed, habitus of the subject at the centre of the storytelling. This rests on the way editing, framing, sound design and camerawork combine to create strategies of realism and organise perception. These strategies both produce audiovisual evidence and direct our attention, whether affective or cognitive. A sense of place can combine with a sense of community to, for example, enhance a feeling of belonging and home (e.g. filmmaking in occupied territories (Cowie, 2011)); aid in working through collective and individual experiences of trauma by examining the detail of places and what occurred there (e.g. wartime atrocities or family violence (Walker, 2005)); make sense of possible future scenarios of environmental change (Salazar, 2015); or represent the complexity of places as landscapes, ecologies and social relations in ways that would not be perceptible without mediation (Smaill, 2016). Finally, the production of the documentary itself can be a collaborative practice that filmmakers can use to create communities by facilitating participation in the creative process of film production (Miller et al., 2017).

Theatre and performance studies take myriad approaches to considering, rendering and negotiating a sense of place and community, both within the performance space and out into the lived reality of spectators and participants. From realist depictions of actual places and communities in mainstream practice to the avant-garde imaginings of experimental theatre and performance, these concepts are continually being negotiated and remain in flux. What is significant, in this context, for a consideration of both place and community is the fact that these concepts are engendered or imagined in an environment that is both ephemeral and proximate. Indeed, the intimacy of the performance space allows places and communities to feel inhabited, lived in and close. Even in the most abstract of work, the conditions of the theatrical encounter in a live (or primarily live) space with actors, sets, soundscapes and scripts create a sense of intimacy that means the representation of place and community becomes heightened or vivid. This is the case across all forms of theatre and performance, and it is something that occurs even when the work itself is attempting to unsettle, disrupt or antagonise its audience—or, indeed, these notions. Casey’s idea of “implacement” is helpful in this context. As outlined in the introduction to this chapter, he urges a consideration of place in the here and now. He explains that “place itself is concrete and at one with action and thought” (2009). This idea of considering place and, as he further explains, “your immediate placement or ‘implacement’…counts for much more than is usually imagined” (ibid.). Drawing on this, we argue that within the live, embodied locale of the performance or theatrical space, this idea of implacement can become heightened, and, as a result, it can generate a sense or experience in which spectators think deeply about their sense of place. With that then naturally come considerations of community and belonging.

Another type is associated with architecture’s role in depictions of place or community. For example, the tall, narrow canal houses of Amsterdam provide the real-life setting for The Diary of Anne Frank and the fictional counterpart for Albert Camus’s novel The Fall. These canal houses are also a critical place-making device in the virtual reconstruction of Amsterdam depicted in the computer game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. New York’s Dakota building, on the Upper West Side, is a place of isolation and otherness, separate from the world that surrounds it, in the film Rosemary’s Baby and in Jack Finney’s novel Time and Again. A New York apartment is also the setting for Façade (2005), by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern. This AI-powered interactive digital narrative is set in a bleak modern apartment, with the only outlook an ominous city skyline. The sense of isolation created in Façade complements the narrative, which has the reader/player observing the relationship breakdown of two friends. The domestic dispute is not scripted; it evolves in dynamic and unpredictable ways, depending on the reader’s/player’s interactions and responses.

As interactive digital narratives, coupled with AI-supported virtual models of the world, become more common, the use of architecture to evoke a sense of place has become even more important. For example, the computer game Tom Clancy’s The Division (Ubisoft, 2016) features a post-apocalyptic vision of the neighbourhood around the Dakota building, as well as parts of Greenwich Village, a location made famous by Jane Jacobs’ (1961) social critique, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. While, for Jacobs, the federal-style hipped roofs and brownstone-clad buildings of Greenwich Village provided a positive sense of place and community, in The Division, their ruined state is a symbol of the breakdown of a liberal, democratic society. In these examples from film, gaming, media, fiction and nonfiction, architecture is a core element of a larger narrative, enclosing, protecting and framing society.

From its birth in Athens, theatre has always been interested in and concerned with tragedy, as a key storytelling mode. Tragedy provides narrative and dramatic energy for much contemporary theatre and performance practice. There is often a tension at play between the desire to tell big, dramatic and difficult stories and the desire not to reduce or simplify these. Not to make things easy or didactic, and as such to close over the possible meanings an audience might glean from the experience. Unlike other modes of representation, there is no formula that assists with the framing of a narrative, especially in contemporary performance works. Instead, there is a negotiation that takes place between this desire to tell or show and at the same time to hide or obfuscate. Much of the best work dwells in the murky in-between. In abstract imagery and text, in partial stories and fragments, in intertextual allusion. In the capacity to reveal glimpses of an idea and at the same time to eschew saying or telling in any didactic or literal way. Making sense of the work is left to the audience, to their interest in and capacity for imagination and meaning making. Some works that reflect this play between telling and hiding include Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone (2016), in which four women in their 70s discuss life, death, murder and the banal. As Susannah Clapp notes, “Caryl Churchill’s [magnificent] new play unleashes an intricate, elliptical, acutely female view of the [apocalypse]” (2016). The short play set in a suburban garden sees the women talking about ordinary life events, which are interspersed with phobias, murder and abstract scenes—set beyond the garden—that depict, through monologues by Mrs J, pestilence, cannibalism, famine, death, despair, flood and the loss of culture and ideas, indeed perhaps even the capacity to think, through submission to constant social media products. For example, towards the end of the play, she describes the impact of fire on an unnamed society and ends with: “Finally the wind drove the fire to the ocean, where [saltwater] made survivors faint. The blackened area was declared a separate country with zero population, zero growth and zero politics. Charred stumps were salvaged for art and biscuits” (Churchill, 2016).

In other works, the focus is on imagery, the slow loss of connection and of meaning, and the ultimate destruction of the biosphere through humanity’s craving for material resources. In Kris Verdonck’s Something (out of nothing), the work begins in darkness with a voiceover by Tawny Andersen, who states:

It is impossible for me to move, awaken the dead, and make howl what has been broken. I can only see how the mountains of debris are piling up beneath me.

Stuck. Stuck between past and future.

Damage done.

I, I am afraid of the rain, I am afraid of the air, I am afraid of the soil.

The land.

Look with me to the land, everything looks so familiar: the rocks, the trees, the animals, the air and the water. The beauty of it all only makes it worse. (Eckersall & van Baarle, 2020)

This voiceover is described by Something (out of nothing)’s dramaturge, Kristof van Baarle, as starting out in the work as “a more distanced narration of a human-made post-apocalyptic condition in the first part, moving to a witness-like perspective recounting the destructions that the voice saw in the second part, to end in a subjective more poetic speech position [in] the third part, highlighting the voice’s lived experience of watching the catastrophes unfold” (Eckersall & van Baarle, 2020). This voiceover frames the work and is accompanied by scenes with fully masked actors in morph suits and business attire moving in fragmented and singular—or even atomised—ways, while several giant inflatable flower-like structures emerge and inflate from the ceiling. As van Baarle continues, “The difficulty was finding the right tone and perspective for what we wanted: as little human presence as possible, a focus on post-catastrophic moments, as straightforward and concrete as possible, the sincerity of the perspective of the witness and the objectivity of the journalist” (ibid.). They were influenced by myriad texts—literary, journalistic and philosophical—and, as is always the case with the work of Verdonck’s A Two Dogs Company, Samuel Beckett. These different examples demonstrate, to some extent at least, the desire to deal with apocalyptic or tragic themes, but to render them in a way that eschews spectacle in favour of complex narrative and scenography that seeks to both obfuscate and uncover often painful, difficult and crucial ideas (Fig. 14.1).

A photo of a person who sits on the stage floor while wearing a mask with feathers. He rests their hands on their legs. An inflatable flower-like structure with a hook is suspended above.

As a storytelling mode, film has the capacity to re-present extreme events that have already occurred and to imagine, in sound and image, future catastrophic scenarios. This capacity extends across fiction and nonfiction modes. Science fiction has been the primary fictional mode for rendering potent narratives about future dystopias. In the realm of nonfiction, landmark examples exist that offer a potent synthesis of the real and the speculative. Films such as Peter Watkins’ The War Game (1965), Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity (2010) and Juan Salazar’s Nightfall on Gaia (2015) utilise documentary’s address to bring extreme scenarios into the world of the viewer. The most notorious of these is the 1965 Oscar-winning feature documentary The War Game. Part of this infamy is due to the decision not to release the film as scheduled. Funded and produced by the BBC, it was deemed too horrifying for television broadcast. The film offers a representation of a nuclear attack occurring in British cities and employs the conventions of a television documentary to convey a sense of the attack occurring in real time. The film counts forward from the present, constructing a timeline into a fictional near future to reveal an unfolding narrative, including the physical effects on civilians. The dramatisation (or docudrama) in The War Game offers an example of the way narrative conventions can be deployed in ways that potently locate the viewer in the world of the events taking place on screen. It is an instructive example and, albeit utilising analogue technology, one that anticipates the development of AI-supported images in contemporary filmmaking. As we have already noted, this move in film, gaming and other media allows for the visualisation of imagined scenarios in existing present-day contexts while also bringing the added potential of interactivity and multiple pathways or storylines, depending on the user.

Orthodox definitions understand film narrative as “a type of filmic organisation in which the parts relate to each other through a series of causally related events taking place in time [and space]” (Bordwell & Thompson, 2004). While historically film theory has positioned spectacle and narrative in contrasting ways, as storytelling platforms, the impact of a film is tied to the possibility for sensory engagement with the spectacle on screen (and its audio accompaniment). Adrian Ivakhiv summarises this relation by referring to spectacle as “cinema’s firstness, […] the immediate felt quality of the film image, the objectness, presentness, and thingness of what we see, hear and feel as we watch a film” (2013). Narrative, film’s secondness, tends towards linearity and “provides us with the possibility of piecing together storylines as we make interpretive connections between the things we see and hear” (Ivakhiv, 2013). This orientation to narrative, if deployed skilfully, evokes a desire to experience what comes next. Together, spectacle and narrative offer a sensory experience, anchored in time and place, that structures worlds that we, as viewers, are invited to step into, and the promise of resolution, in part, maintains our connection to this world. In the case of dramatic re-construction or “pre-construction” (for an anticipated future scenario) of extreme events, film has the potential to prepare the viewer for what is to come by conveying the complexity, phenomenology and multiplicity of this experience.

Fires (Ayres et al., 2021) is a six-part television series produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and co-created by Tony Ayres and Belinda Chayko. The series was made in the wake of the 2019–2020 Black Summer fire season in eastern Australia. Each episode is loosely linked by the repeat appearances of two young volunteer firefighters, Mott (Hunter Page-Lochard) and Tash (Eliza Scanlen). While the characters are fictional and the places depicted largely unnamed, the intensity and characteristics of the firestorms and the landscapes in which they occurred accurately reflect the conditions and impacts of this fire season. For this reason, we position the series as a creative practice case study that might provide further knowledge about aesthetic and narrative strategies for preparing for extreme events. We explore these strategies from our different disciplinary perspectives, weighing up their function in terms of the series’ illustrative and pedagogical power. Rather than following the original sequence of episodes, in this section, we start with the place of architecture in the landscape before focusing first on the experience of individuals during the events and finally on the traumatic interior landscape of emotions.

Bungan Hall is a weatherboard building made up of small, connected structures around a covered veranda. These are recognisable elements of Australian vernacular design, and, while faded and worn, the hall has clarity about it. In contrast, the landscape is typically indistinct and out-of-focus, a greenish-brown background to the hall. On the hall’s rooftop, a man is shown staring into the distance, looking at the smoke from the closing fire front. It is obvious that he is clearing leaves from the gutters, to prevent embers from catching on the roof, allowing any firestorm to pass over. Volunteer firefighters also douse the exterior of the hall, in another well-understood attempt to stop the approaching fire from taking hold. Inside the hall, wet towels are placed at the base of doors to stop smoke from entering.

Overnight the fire passes by, and the episode concludes with a view of the community hall from directly above. The people who sheltered safely within are leaving to see if their homes are still standing. But as the view from above widens, the hall is revealed to be surrounded by a burnt landscape. This hall, with its distinct sense of place and Christmas trimmings, occupies a normative role in the narrative. It is a refuge of last resort, with a well-understood capacity to be defended from bushfires. There is, however, a clear counterpoint in the series, when architecture’s failure to fulfil the traditional role of shelter is central to the narrative.

It is seven days later, New Year’s Eve at Cooyang Point, a waterfront community in Victoria. This holiday town has been completely isolated by wildfires, and there are no avenues for escape. The local radio station advises people to evacuate their homes and make their way to the water. The town itself is rarely seen. There is a sense, amid the chaos, of a picturesque village with a main street lined with restaurants and shops. But the town and its architecture provide no refuge, and as the sun sets, the yellow-brown smoke-filled sky turns red and the surroundings burn. In this narrative, architecture is largely absent, unable to provide shelter or define a sense of place or community. A brief vignette dramatises this as a man tries to defend his home from the fire, but it is too late. The narrative then shifts to several months later, and people are shown living in cars or tents, and, tragically, to the north, towns are now being destroyed by floods.

These scenes resonate with an Australian audience, not only because Black Summer looms large in the public imagination but also because it came on the heels of an increasing number of megafires over the last two decades (Lindenmayer & Taylor, 2020, 12481). Through sound, image and narrative, Fires organises a range of human responses under various conditions that allow viewers to place themselves in the situations depicted with all the affective and experiential ramifications they entail. The combination of the actual historical setting and the realism of the genre of television drama makes Fires available for a screen studies analysis that draws on understandings of fiction and nonfiction forms.

Episode three is set in a coastal New South Wales town and follows two plotlines that show how individuals respond, and are situated or equipped, as fire advances and residents are advised to evacuate. Lally (Anna Torv) stays to continue preparations to defend the house as her partner Adrian travels to Canberra to drop his daughter off, planning to return before the fire hits. In another thread, recovering drug addict and campground employee Joel (Mark Leonard Winter) is left with no access to transport and without the methadone he relies on when the call to evacuate comes. He eventually persuades a family of campers to drive him out of the fire zone.

Lally’s story attends to the subjective experience of being isolated and underprepared with a fire approaching. With Adrian gone, we follow her anxious movements in and around the house as signs of fire, such as burnt leaves blowing in on the wind, increase and day turns to night. Her initial confidence in defending the house (with a list of actions to tick off which the couple repeatedly refer to) soon wanes as the house becomes a place of uncertainty. The smoke haze increases and flying foxes, disoriented by smoke, are in a state of high activity, with one crashing into a windowpane. The only resident in the close vicinity who chose to stay, Lally is isolated. We are asked to identify with her heightened state of anxious waiting. There are indications that she is questioning their plan. She glances at her packed suitcases and makes intermittent calls to Adrian, imploring him to return soon. He becomes delayed at a roadblock and Lally seals one room off from the smoke with towels after breaking into a neighbour’s house to retrieve batteries. Adrian returns in the light of day, driving up to a house that has, so far, survived the fire. In a tense conversation, Lally asserts that she will leave while she can, no longer willing to risk the uncertainty of the situation.

This plotline is affective rather than simply instructional. It does not explicitly illustrate best practice for fire preparedness, but it does present a subjective and sensory scenario that highlights the complexity and nuances of fire preparedness for communities and individuals. The focus on characters distinguished by gender and/or social status draws attention to the diverse conditions for decision making during an evacuation. These distinct social subjectivities also serve to highlight the importance of relations between individuals. Lally and Adrian are separated and their plans become derailed. The final shot of Adrian as Lally drives away shows him standing on the roof of the house, hosing it down, determined to stay. This contrasts starkly with Lally’s vulnerability the previous night. Working at the campground, Jeff, alone and underresourced, had no plan and was left to rely on the generosity of others. Both groups of characters are diverted from their plans, with road closures and their locations in areas relative to the fire important factors in the creation of a causal, temporal and spatial coherence across the world of the episode.

Episode two begins with the Simpsons, Kath (Miranda Otto) and Duncan (Richard Roxburgh), returning from evacuation after the fire destroyed their homestead, to have dinner and the opportunity to rest with their neighbours. Kath and Duncan are accompanied by their missing son’s partner Brooke (Taylor Ferguson)—who remained at the house she shares with her partner Lochie, their eldest son, on the family farm. The tone is sombre and the sense of stoicism that the Australian farming and grazing community tends to be characterised by is clearly apparent.

This episode centres on the gradual realisation that Lochie, who they have not been able to contact since the fire, and who did not return once the road was opened, might be among the dead. There is tension between Kath and Brooke that permeates all their early scenes. It is characterised by a sense of cultural difference. Kath admits that she’s “never taken Brooke and Lochie seriously” in terms of their relationship. She sees Brooke as a city girl, not really invested in dairy farming. Each character battles grief in their own way and Kath’s apparent inability to show vulnerability in the face of trauma ensures that the unfolding story is a profoundly sad experience. The day-to-day farming jobs that must continue despite the enormity of the losses—milking the dairy cows, cleaning out stalls, etc.—are performed in a silent and robotic fashion by the distraught Duncan and Kath.

A photo of a landscape silhouette with a hilly range and a setting Sun in the background and broken houses in the front.

The entire episode is emotionally taut and only allows a few small moments of release for the characters and the viewers. The moment Duncan finds Lochie’s burnt-out ute in the back roads is deeply moving. We follow him as he tries to retrace Lochie’s movements, mapping out road closures, thinking through how Lochie might have responded to approaching fires and wind, saying out loud to himself “where did you go”, and then he finds the truck, a white carcass in the midst of smoky, black, burnt-out trees and ashen landscape. Duncan realises that Lochie was trying to take a shortcut to get back to the farm with a pump to assist with the efforts to fight the fires and protect the farm and Brooke, while not realising that his parents had been evacuated. The scale and ferocity of the fire is rendered clearly in both the charred landscape and the figure of Duncan as he negotiates the scene.

While this episode differs in its focus on the aftermath of the fires rather than on the acts of preparing, evacuating and experiencing them, it plays an important part, as it gives a roundedness to the series in attempting to invite audiences in to see and understand that the impacts of devastation and loss are myriad and that they happen to complex, messy and ongoing lives—the lives of people with stories, with pain and with unresolved relationships.

One message that can be seen in the aftermath of years of ever-increasing fires and floods is that our narratives and practices around responding to climate emergencies must evolve. To consider this need, we provide some brief perspectives on how this might be realised from our disciplines and how applications of advanced media and technology may support this goal.

In terms of thinking about the evolution of artistic practices in theatre and performance, it is easier to see how artists can work on the ground with communities either pre- or post-disaster, than to think about the role of theatre and performance more broadly (beyond the applied or community context) in adapting to, or preparing for, extreme events. While there are examples of innovation, some of which we have discussed in this chapter, a focus on developing practice that draws on advances in technology to imaginatively envision or render scenarios and therefore assist spectators in gaining a deeper understanding of these is crucial. For those artists and companies interested in ecological art or performance in the context of a rapidly changing climate, the advantage of collaborating with digital artists is one that offers myriad possibilities for opening how we see, experience and understand this new “normal”. As examples described in this chapter demonstrate, the immersive potentiality of these technologies allows for new kinds of spectatorial encounters—indeed, a move beyond spectatorship into a process of participation in the unfolding of experiences, events and scenarios. Engaging with these technologies will transform the potentiality of performance to deal with complex and difficult topics but will also expand the opportunity for deep understandings of what an extreme weather scenario is or can be.

As an expansion of this idea, the documentary, and especially the docudrama, provides opportunities to explore how “pre-construction” (as opposed to re-construction) might be considered a type of adaptive engagement. Such an approach would require close attention to ideas of narrative and spectacle and their joint capacity to engage the audience in a deep sense of place and time. Technology, not just in the production of the moving image but also in the way it is experienced, offers a way to heighten the influence of the documentary as a pre-constructive mode. Immersive simulations also offer a new way to experience documentary. Moreover, rethinking our settled assumptions about time and the moving image has significant potential to help retrain our perception and thus responses to extreme events. One avenue for exploration is nonlinear interaction and instances where people can reshape the sequence of the narrative, individualising both the experience and its emotional impact. Landmark interactive documentaries (or I-docs) which ask viewers to engage with more-than-human worlds include Bear 71 (2012), The Shore Line (2017) and The Whale Hunt (2007). These offer an important starting point for conceptualising this role for documentary. Elizabeth Miller’s pioneering works, SwampScapes (2018) and As the Gull Flies (2023), are examples that explore documentary’s potential in VR and AR form. Yet another exploration might interrogate individuals’ perception of time, adjusting the duration of events and cause and effect relationships to productively customise perceptual adaptation for individuals and groups.

Architecture plays a complex role in the imagining of these immersive possibilities for place and community. It is neither as fixed nor as anodyne as it is often portrayed on film, in books and in computer games. Furthermore, in the modern world, and in contemporary disaster preparedness practice, we can no longer treat buildings and landscapes as immutable; they are active and often unpredictable components of our responses to natural disasters. Future research is needed to envision what a less passive architecture or a nonlinear, interactive exploration of the landscape would bring to the creation or maintenance of a sense of place or community as sources of both protection and danger. Simulations using advanced technology, as either interactive digital narrative or cooperative computer games, can provide a laboratory for developing these ideas, while creative hubs in the community offer a way of implementing or disseminating the new knowledge they produce, supporting the evolution of our current models of practice into a new, more dynamic model for the future.

For Casey, “the climate crisis is the ultimate crisis: it threatens to destroy life in the oceans and the atmosphere as well as on land. It presents us with a circumstance in which biological life, always fragile and on edge, will be faced with a new and final challenge: how to remain robust enough to survive the [extremes] of climate chaos” (2017). In this dire situation, we return to the focus of this chapter, which is on how our different disciplines imaginatively engage not only with the status quo but with creating works that assist communities to build resilience, to plan for and consider in advance the extreme scenarios that are likely to happen. To do this in the context of theatre studies, screen studies and architecture is, we believe, to engage in a process that supports communities to narrate their present and imagined futures in ways that empower them to be “robust enough to survive”. This narration needs to be multifaceted. It must accommodate localised interventions with vulnerable groups as well as avant-garde imaginings of scenarios and events. It must also adapt and be relevant to contemporary audiences by drawing on key technological advances in VR and AI, in developing works that are immersive, stimulating and engaging and that can involve them in imagining future scenarios and, therefore, position them to think about how they must act to survive in places vulnerable to extreme events.