Latour and Balloons: Gaïa Global Circus and the Theater of Climate Change

Gaïa Global Circus, a theatrical performance that interrogates the contemporary climate change crisis, is the product of a collaboration between Bruno Latour and the playwright Pierre Daubigny that emerged from his activities with SPEAP, the Sciences Po—Experimentation in Art and Politics program. This review essay analyzes the September 22, 2014, performance of the play in New York in relation to Latour's lectures on the Anthropocene, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (2017), as well as the fuller range of publicfacing scholarship Latour has been involved with through SPEAP and museum collaborations in recent years. This essay also situates Gaïa Global Circus in the context of activist environmental theater, from Bread & Puppet Theater's Our Domestic Resurrection Circus to Arm-of-the-Sea Theater's eco-spectacles about the Hudson River watershed.