SBTD: Guide to Sustainable Materials for Theatre Design
A Guide to Sustainable Materials for Theatre Design is produced by the Society of British Theatre Designer’s Sustainability Working Group. The working group started in 2020.
The group established ongoing projects, including carbon literacy training and sustainable costume management across the theatre sector in the UK. Each project was motivated by helping the theatre industry to become more environmentally sustainable, given the importance to find modes of working that limit the effects of climate change. For example, processes that do not heavily rely on fossil fuels, excessive material extraction or the production of large quantities of material waste.
Research into sustainable materials was another project established at the inception of the working group. Given the time pressures on setting up a theatre production and designers often being thrown into unfamiliar surroundings on a job by job basis, many designers do not have the time to research and test new and experimental materials within their work. This guide seeks to respond to this issue and be a place of reference that collects together pragmatic, aesthetic and ecological information about materials which have been investigated by theatre designers for theatre designers. In this sense, the guide hopes to bridge the gap between material science and theatre practice in order to give designers the agency to advocate for sustainability and to develop a critical eye as to how we define and measure sustainability in a qualitative sense.
Sustainability can sometimes come with the connotations of limiting artistic practice because material abundance and some material processes have large environmental costs. The guidebook wants to challenge that notion as research into new materials and ways of using materials can be framed as an exciting, and often thrifty area for theatre design. It opens more doors than it closes. The guide has been written in the spirit of positioning sustainability as a creative opportunity to make theatre in ways that have not yet been done before.
