Moving Beyond Recovery and Reconstruction: Imagining Extreme Event Preparedness Through Performing Arts

This chapter begins by examining the importance of resilience in response to extreme weather events, before considering the role of performing arts projects in dealing with the aftermath of disaster. Including First Nations approaches, examples from diverse cultural settings and the powerful potential of digital technology, it reveals how performing arts endeavours afford aesthetic opportunities that can give voice to and make sense of crisis experiences that precipitate mental health and wellbeing challenges as devastating as the events themselves. Drawing on critical research findings including those from the 10-year Beyond Bushfires study in Australia, the authors demonstrate how empathy and social bonding can be fostered through artistic engagements to develop personal and community resilience and support creative recovery. Forewarning the accelerating and intensifying unpredictable character of disasters driven by climate change, the authors go on to underscore the need for significantly greater preparedness for future crisis events. Engaging with a small body of existing work, the authors investigate the possibilities of ‘performing preparedness’ – embracing storytelling, embodied performance practices and digital technology as routes to developing agency, empowerment, understanding and strategies that can build capacity for dynamic readiness in rapidly evolving and unforeseen crises.