Our Special Projects
Montana InSite Theatre believes that arts play crucial roles in addressing environmental peril of our world today. We use theatre as a foundation for communicating about the challenges facing our ecosystems, suggesting opportunities to address and solve problems.
Globe 4 Globe International Conference
September 12-13, 2025
In 2025, Globe4Globe returns with the Shakespeare and Environmental Justice Symposium. Taking place live and online across 24 hours, this Symposium follows on from the 2021 Globe4Globe: Shakespeare and Climate Emergency Symposium.
The Globe4Globe 2025 symposium draws together scholars, practitioners, activists and educators to explore how Shakespeare’s works relate to ideas of environmental justice - historically and in the present. The Symposium will feature voices from across the globe working at the intersection of Shakespeare, performance and environmental justice.
Register to participate in this exciting event, and hear from the world's leading minds on topics including the depiction of environmental issues in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, climate justice, intersectional justice, environmental justice in theatre practice, outdoor, site-specific and place-based Shakespeare, eco-dramaturgy, ecocritical and ecofeminist readings of Shakespeare, and environmental education.
View the full program and register to watch this free online conference here
There is no cost to register for Globe4Globe 2025.
Event organisers:
Katie Brokaw (The Shakespeare at Winedale Regents Professor of English at University of Texas, Austin)
Claire Hansen (Senior Lecturer in English, The Australian National University, Canberra)
Gretchen Minton (Professor of English, Montana State University)
This event is supported by Shakespeare's Globe and the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the Australian National University.
A message from MIST’s Gretchen Minton:
“Along with my collaborators Claire Hansen (Australian National University) and Katie Brokaw (University of Texas), I am excited to announce the upcoming Globe4Globe: Shakespeare and Environmental Justice symposium, happening for free and online over the course of 24 hours, September 12-13.
We have 52 speakers involved, including scholars, activists, and theatre artists from around the planet, who will be talking about modern performance, environmental history, intersectional scholarship, teaching, and more. Plenary speakers are Madeline Sayet, Elizabeth Freestone, Rebecca Laroche & Jennifer Monroe, and Sandra Young; Globe artistic director Michelle Terry will give a welcome, too.
You’re welcome join in at any times that are convenient for you to watch presentations and hear live Q&A sessions. After the conference, all talks will be archived on the EarthShakes Alliance’s YouTube page (which still hosts talks from the 2021 Globe4Globe).
I encourage you to pop in for whatever sessions interest you; please also pass this information on to colleagues, theatremakers, or students who may be interested.”
All best,
-Gretchen
A cooperative work between Gretchen Minton, Fulbright Australia, and James Cook University of Townsville, Australia
Gretchen Minton is working with James Cook University in Townsville Australia under the aegis of a Fulbright Scholarship, along with Dr. Claire Hansen (Australia National University), the Blue Humanities Lab (Cairns Institute), and several TheatreiNQ actors to adapt Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night into an eco-drama based on the history of the Townsville region and environmental upheaval on the North Queensland coast.
Salt Waves Fresh
Salt Waves Fresh tells the story of a shipwreck that occurs near Townsville just as a cyclone hits and causes widespread floods and destruction. Set in recent times, it explores the characters' relationship to the land, to the natural world, and to each other. The action unfolds during a time of environmental catastrophe, featuring shipwreck survivors, developers hoping to profit regardless of damage, marine scientists, a black cockatoo, and citizens of the town trying to get on with their lives as they face loss after loss.
The adaptation weaves together Shakespeare's language, Indigenous poetry, historical accounts, and much more in order to find a multi-vocal register for creative, adaptive thinking. Our intention with this adaptation is to create an eco-drama that can be easily adapted and used by local communities across the world as a lens for examining their own role in environmental catastrophes, but also potential solutions.
Symposium
A one-day symposium on April 28 highlights work that uses Shakespeare and performance to speak about environmental issues. Theatre practitioners and academics from across Australia will gather to present their work in the fields of adaptations, eco-drama, and site-specific theatre. We will demonstrate some scenes from Salt Waves Fresh and speak about our approach to using theatre to explore climate change perils and solutions.
Outcomes
This work culminates in an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, entitled Salt Waves Fresh, which has been developed to be available for local theatre companies across the world to easily adapt this play and present it to their own communities. For more information please contact us at montanainsitetheatre@gmail.com.
Ecological Shakespeare in Performance
EarthShakes Alliance
MIST is proud to be part of the EarthShakes Alliance, a global collective of Shakespearean theatres and companies of all sizes, each of which pledges to put environmental concerns at the heart of their practices and productions. EarthShakes Alliance has a great web page filled with information, connections, and current ecoplays in performance around the globe, a fascinating webpage to visit: https://earthshakes.ucmerced.edu/.
This initiative launched in April 2021 at the Globe4Globe conference on Shakespeare and Climate Emergency. Watch the video below on MIST’s Timon of Anaconda that was made for this conference.
Globe4Globe Conference
The EarthShakes Alliance website has great links to useful articles, videos, full movies, and connections to other theatres around the world who are doing theatre about the environment. See especially the full roster of video presentations that were featured at the conference: https://earthshakes.ucmerced.edu/globe4globe-videos