Photo credit: Chelsey Stuyt
“Eyes of the Beast” is an immersive production that adapts the stories of various survivors of climate disasters to foster community dialogue. A collaborative endeavor, this project brings the award-winning journalism of The Climate Disaster Project to audiences with the support of Neworld Theater, in partnership with SFU School for the Contemporary Arts. Blending documentary and live performance, the production has shows in Vancouver from June 18th to June 22nd, 2025 at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre. Get your tickets here.
The experiences of those who have witnessed intense floods, heat domes, wildfires and landslides are traumatic, yet complex in unique ways. By highlighting their truths, there is much potential to learn about adaptation, to prepare for similar emergencies looming in the future.
Photo credit: Chelsey Stuyt
This show has two components. The first is an hour-long theatrical recreation of testimonies provided by various survivors. An Indigenous matriarch who runs a school in Lytton recounts escaping a wildfire, an enthusiastic actor who performs outside the BC Legislature building experiences a heat stroke, a community elder elsewhere gets stranded in her home during a flood, waiting to be rescued, and emergency response workers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside narrate harrowing tales of serving the needs of vulnerable members in the neighborhood during a heat dome. A roster of talented students from SFU School for the Contemporary Arts bring the stories to life with compelling grace. The visceral experience of various climatescapes is recreated via environmental sound design by Mary Jane Coomber. Smaller LED screens and piles of wooden furniture elevate the production from spoken-word storytelling into a multi-sensorial, at-times hypnotic, immersion into the documented stories of escaping and surviving nature’s wrath.
Photo credit: Chelsey Stuyt
The second component of the production is a dialogue among the audience, facilitated by a journalist representing the Climate Disaster Project. The space opens up opportunities for commiseration and grounding reflections. The concluding statement is provided by a policy advisor to the BC government, who responds with important takeaways regarding the ideas that dominated the preceding discourse.
We live in times of poly crises and climate calamities. For those of us living in productivity-oriented urban centers, it is easy to ignore an impulse to pause and name the nuanced, existential anxieties that drive our collective consciousness. News stories about natural disasters tend to focus on sensational imagery, reducing complex lived experiences to numbers and statistics. There is little to no follow-up on the long-term efforts needed to rebuild and rehabilitate the lives and homes of survivors.
Many stories discussed in “Eyes of the Beast” make it difficult to ignore poignant realities and ineffective strategies by centralized systems that tend to get overwhelmed during times of crises, often leaving those in distress to the mercy of corporations and landlords who profit from suffering. The need to build grassroots networks for emergency responders who are trained to address accelerated deterioration in the ecosystems and weather patterns of the Pacific Northwest shines as the primary message of the production.
-Annapoorna Shruthi