Dramatising deindustrialisation: experiential authority, temporality and embodiment in a play about nuclear decommissioning

Abstract

The play Green Meadow is a participatory theatre production exploring how the residents of the Lithuanian nuclear town of Visaginas experience the nearby Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant’s decommissioning. In this chapter I discuss how the theatre production, and my own ethnographic research in the town, challenge dominant ways of knowing and representing postindustrial spaces that are rooted in tropes of melancholic loss and spectacular decay, focusing instead on community transition and endurance, and on how lives are made liveable in the present. By dramatising and personalising the politics of energy transition, the play foregrounds the experiential and community effects of wider economic and political processes. Playing with scale and temporality, it moves between singular events and longue durée histories, meshing the affective present with geological time. Drawing on script excerpts and fieldwork in Visaginas, the chapter demonstrates how participatory theatre can generate experiential authority, giving voice to those whose everyday lives, memories, and hopes for the future and are shaped by their relation to the decommissioning plant and contributing to wider debates on affect, community and deindustrialisation.