Return of the Megafauna

15 tickets per show

Return of The Megafauna - an outdoor, promenade style physical theatre piece featuring large-scale puppetry - invites the audience to rediscover a familiar public space as they encounter a family of prehistoric Sloths moving through the landscape.

Scientists are very close to de-extincting some prehistoric animals, mixing the surviving DNA with their closest living relative to create hybrid creatures. What sounds like science fiction is quickly becoming fact, and Return of The Megafauna encourages us to pause and consider the ethical, ecological ramifications of such actions.

Return of The Megafauna is part of a series of new Bad New Days works in development that use our signature brand of physical theatre and puppetry to explore ethical, speculative ecological futures through the lens of Posthumanism*. The mandate of our Posthuman research is to propose utopian, rather than dystopian, images of the future. Were tired of fiction that shows us how bad things can get. We want to speculate about a better future, a future where humans and all life forms can coexist in a non-exploitative, mutually sustainable relationship.

Our Posthumanist* theatrical research began with a piece entitled Flashing Lights, presented at the Kick and Push in 2018. This piece explored our relationship to screen-based technology. Return of The Megafauna pushes our creative research further, touching on themes of extinction, de-extinction and climate change. Return of The Megafauna invites the audience to ponder these ethical questions as they spend time with a prehistoric family of sloths as they roam freely, transforming an outdoor public space into a speculative landscape where the prehistoric past, the present and the future intersect in a large scale, spectacular puppet piece for all ages.

*Posthumanism is a vast, interdisciplinary field of philosophical and artistic research and practices that seek to displace the human from the centre of global, social and environmental narratives.