By Sustainability Research Fellow, Katie Koenig
Introduction
Emerson abounds with strong storytellers and narrative-based career paths. Tushar Mathew, an assistant professor in the Performing Arts department, has around a decade of experience in theater, theater-making, and connecting audiences with nonhuman narratives, like involving animal protagonists. In the several years he’s also worked at Emerson, he’s brought his extensive experience into his classes by focusing on how movement, the physical nature of acting, is integral to portraying emotions and telling compelling narratives and characters.
He has also worked closely with Emerson’s Engagement Lab which provided a platform to produce projects related to social justice and environmental topics. Although the Engagement Lab is now closed, Tushar has an eye out for future programs that offer similar opportunities.
Independent Theater
Much of Tushar’s work and performances have been self-produced, and he co-founded Otherland Theater Ensemble with Becca Finney in 2017. With that in mind, he explained to me that smaller productions, by nature, need to be waste-free (or reduce excess, at the very least). With small budgets and limited resources, they keep an eye out for reusable props, costumes, and set pieces.
From buying second-hand to using the same materials for multiple years of a long-running show, Tushar explained that, particularly for expensive resources like lights, reuse is the name of the game. Anything that can be reused for multiple years, especially if it can be used in multiple ways or for more than one production, has the most value in Tushar’s theater productions.
Productions at performing arts centers, particularly schools like Emerson, often have invaluable resources like prop and costume shops that allow students to rent or borrow the materials they need for a particular production without blowing the budget or creating a lot of waste. Plus, maintaining partnerships between theaters, another strategy Emerson does, helps organizations share props.
Tushar explained that, although he hasn’t been in Boston long enough to know everything about the theater production scene here, there are a lot of costume shops similar to Emerson’s own in Mumbai where he started his career. However, hygiene and quality aren’t guaranteed, so buying second-hand often allows for similar benefits—lowered costs and reused materials—while having more control over quality.
Big budgets may make it easier to source materials easily, but it isn’t necessary to put on moving performances. Tushar is currently producing a show that requires himself, a couple hours of time, and someone’s home to produce it in. His goal is to bridge the gap between the more familiar spaces of life, like a literal living room, and an art form like theater that’s often outpriced for many individuals. The sustainability of it is a beneficial, though secondary, consequence.
Another large emissions producer—travel—proved to be similarly simple to reduce. In theater, a lot of the creative process before actual rehearsals and performances doesn’t require the entire team to be in a single location. For the Otherland Theater Ensemble, with members split between different states, Tushar has found that working remotely for the majority of the work is not only feasible but simpler and faster than coordinating everyone’s schedules to travel to the same place at the same time for the whole process.
The Mentality of Art Creation
Tushar emphasized that sustainability doesn’t begin with external opportunities in the theater industry and independent theater-making. Instead, the mindset we have as creators is often the first step to involve the environment into our work. How do we tell stories? What is needed to bring a story to life? Do we really need massive budgets and excess waste just to connect an audience to characters on stage?
Tushar cited Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer as inspiring his focus on mindset and the idea that theater-making, at its core, requires us to consider exactly how we view art. Prioritizing big budgets, although convenient, distracts from the ultimate goal which is to “tell compelling stories that really move people.” Higher budgets, too, result in higher ticket costs. It presents a large financial barrier to art, including a lot of amazing art, keeping it to those wealthy enough to be able to afford tickets, rather than democratizing the practice as a form of emotional connection.
External opportunities may help with this, from budgets and funding to costume shops and collaborative partnerships, but even—especially—actors are more than just their career, rather being fellow storytellers with the internal capacity to create. From a large-scale Broadway theater to someone’s living room and a couple hours of time, Tushar regularly demonstrates through his own work that questioning all parts of the traditional theater industry results in innovative productions and a greater connection to more people, especially those that might not be able to afford to attend high-budget productions.
Another book that has greatly informed his view is Fathoms by Rebecca Giggs, another nonfiction work that studies whales’ existence and their impact on the environment, and how climate change has impacted them as a species. Although I’ve never read it, Tushar explained that one conclusion Giggs comes to is that non-human beings can be better off if we simply leave them alone, even when they’re endangered. Sending people to study them, interfere in their habitat, and inspire other tourists to gawk at them can result in greater harm than good.
Unfortunately, we as humans often need to see another being, whether human or not, in order to care about them. Their visibility and accessibility in our own lives helps build empathy towards them and their struggles, whoever and whatever they may be. Tushar directly negotiates this conflict between access and empathy in his own productions that center non-human protagonists. He centers his art around telling stories about others—other species—that inspire as much of a connection with familiar human stories.
Even by expanding the hero narrative to a community cast of protagonists, he challenges traditional Western narratives of the exceptional, singular, and even isolated hero, like in the hero’s journey, to demonstrate how groups are integral to inspiring change.
Conclusion
At the end, I asked Tushar if there was anything he felt we had overlooked during this conversation about storytelling and empathy. He responded with a simple but moving analogy. The United Nations approaches sustainability efforts with their seventeen Sustainable Development Goals, and one thing that might be surprising when you first encounter them is that they delve into topics well beyond simple environmental conservation and recycling practices.
Similarly, sustainability in our own careers is all-encompassing. I’ve discussed in prior posts that it is an incredibly vague term, but one benefit of that is that it umbrellas all the many ways sustainable mindsets and management intersect with our lives. Its interconnectedness also inspires us to think critically about our own lives, from our daily actions to our career paths and friendships to our political involvement and the practices that we vote into being. Just as each industry has a diverse approach towards sustainable development and practices, from advertising to energy efficiency to budgeting, each industry also connects to each other, examining and informing our cultural norms, mindsets, and the ways we tell stories, from nonfiction like Braiding Sweetgrass and Fathoms to plays and movies and this article, too.