The Kelp Cure

This essay develops a new approach to dramaturgical thinking and making in performance in collaboration with seaweeds and marine ecologies. The author proposes “more-than-human dramaturgy with seaweeds” as a new dramaturgical framework that engages with material ecological and storied entanglements between humans and seaweeds across a range of practice-based experiments and case study examples. This approach draws on fields of material ecocriticism, posthumanism and ecodramaturgy to illustrate a new way of working with seaweeds as co-creators in practice-based performance research, which includes experiments in pickling, foraging and storying with kelps. The author proposes that this more-than-human dramaturgical lens can reimagine human-seaweed relationships across past, present and future ecologies and demonstrate a new model for multispecies practice-based research that engages with the impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems.