Posted July 8, 2024

Behind the Scenes – Going Green: Minimal Waste in Theatre

For people that aren’t familiar with Theatre SKAM, would you like to give us a quick overview of the theatre and the types of work that you do there?

Janine: Theatre SKAM is a theatre company that was formed by four artists and friends in 1995, which focused on doing innovative and daring—sometimes silly—works. Our ethos now is to focus on producing original Canadian art and supporting emerging and mid-career artists, so we really try to hire and collaborate with people who are a little bit earlier in their theatre careers. We want to focus on creating high-quality, engaging art that has that spirit of cheekiness that we feel the name embodies. “SKAM” is based on the initials of the first names of the four artists that formed the theatre. But, you know, when you contact people and you’re saying, “I’m from Theatre SKAM,” people are like “Theatre scam?”

I noticed that your mission statement says something about “never being boring.” I thought that was really fun! It’s interesting that you’re looking specifically for artists in their early careers because so often it’s hard for those people to break in.

Janine: Back in 1995, when Sarah, Karen, Amy and Matthew started the company, they were in their mid-to late 20s. They performed out of their apartments, in cafés. That’s the origin story of SKAM.

When we decided that we’d like to do an article about green initiatives and theatre, the SKAMpede Festival caught my eye. Janine, could you give us a really brief description of what SKAMpede is?

Janine: SKAMpede is an outdoor site-specific performance festival where audiences can go on bike or pedestrian tours to watch numerous different companies and artists perform a variety of work. It’s not just theatre, it’s also clowning and dance and all sorts of things. It initially started as a bike ride, so it was focused on the cycling community, which is very strong in Victoria. And since then we’ve built on that and we’ve added pedestrian tours, and we’ve really shifted towards encouraging people to both walk and bike. We’re just trying to work with the existing community in Victoria and what they love to do, and to bring them art in a public space and get them thinking and caring about these kinds of things.

Sadie: It is actually quite a challenging event to explain, but sometimes I call it “an outdoor decentralized performing arts festival.” But that doesn’t quite do it justice.

Should we talk about Theatre SKAM green initiatives in general first, or talk specifically about SKAMpede and the waste reduction that happens with that?

Sadie: Well, I honestly, I think that the two feed into each other. This will be my sixth year collaborating on the SKAMpede Festival with my local small business, the Sustainable Fox. I focus on waste reduction through an intersectional lens, which means we meet an organization or an individual where they’re at with the resources, the knowledge base, with what’s available in the neighbourhood, even in terms of different resources that can be drawn on. We’ve been doing this work for going on six years now. It all started with a chance meeting between me and Kate Wallace, who was one of the heads of Theatre SKAM at the time when I was I was performing in Grownups Perform Plays Kids Wrote, one of those very fun SKAM projects, and the thank you payment for that was a pizza lunch. And at the end of the event, I was going up to do the networking thing and say, “Hi, thanks so much for having me.” And pizza boxes were going into garbage bags and instead of doing the good networking thing, I said, “Is there a compost here?” And it started this really long relationship of shared values and interest in seeking a better way of looking at and dealing with our waste when we’re in shared spaces and doing events. That led to being asked if I’d like to collaborate on the SKAMpede Festival and it has ballooned into this core ethos of what the festival is, the minimal waste aspect. Over the years we’ve been doing it and collecting data, we can say that we have never thrown more than 5% of the entire festival’s waste into the garbage, from setup through strike. That happens through a lot of different bits of process.

But to jump around a little bit and come back to your more holistic question, because this work was happening on the SKAMpede Festival, it really did sink into the ethos of SKAM, from my outside perspective, and it became hard, I think, to operate the rest of the year without at least some attention to the waste. There was so much learning that had been done working on the festival in particular, that SKAM has really gone the extra 100 miles compared to other spaces that I’ve seen, in terms of trying to provide an infrastructure for people to make better choices with their waste.

That’s fantastic. When you mentioned that no more than 5% goes into the garbage, does that also include what the audience for the festival produces?

Sadie: Yes. In fact, I’ve got a little list of “keys to success” here that I could list off. I think just the more widely we can share it, the better. One of the really important aspects of how we achieve this at SKAMpede is that it’s part of the entire planning process, and so everything that’s being handed out is chosen really intentionally. And throughout the structure of the festival, systems will shift to mean that there is less waste; that’s built into the whole planning process. And that is key to seeing the kinds of numbers that we achieve in a SKAMpede. So the audience waste ends up being the most recyclable and compostable because we’ve chosen it all. What ends up being hardest are some of the more technical things, like gaffer tape ends up being a big part of what’s actually garbage at the end of the day.

But I want to hear Janine’s perspective on how sustainability sits in the organization because Janine is one of those core staff members who’s there all the time and hears me yap about it on this side. And I love just hearing how it sinks in.

Janine, do you have something to add?

Janine: I was brought on when Theatre SKAM was in its third year of working with you. Sadie has organized it so that at the office, sorting our waste is as accessible and explanatory as possible. It’s also very colorful—they’ve done all these signs and everything, and we have a really nice system. And I find that it’s so much easier than sorting waste when I’m at home, because it’s very clear and I know exactly where everything goes. And now it’s a routine. So that’s really nice. And then when it comes to the festival, Sadie’s involved in all the production meetings. We also collaborate quite extensively, just because from a communications standpoint, we really want to make sure that the audience is excited about this and knows about it. So we do things like a bingo game to encourage audiences to learn a little bit more about sustainability.

Being an outdoor festival and being a site-specific festival, and because so many shows are also about the environment and waste, there’s a lot of engagement. You know, it’s not just that you have Sadie in with their booth and their bike, going around picking up waste and educating people. You also have shows that are getting you to think about the ecosystem. There’s usually at least one of those on every tour. So there’s always something to get you thinking about it. And being an outdoor festival, and being along a major historic waterway, I think that that lends to kind of the whole environmental excitement around waste reduction. You know, when you’re on the Gorge and you see the waterway, it makes you want to take care of the space, and you know, keep it for the people to have—accessible and family-friendly, whether you’re with family or with friends.

We also do litter-picks. We started doing litter-picks so we can get staff here and the audience and artists together to get the trails cleaned up before the festival. And that is a whole educational experience in itself because you learn sorting with things that aren’t a nice little cup that you can rinse out…You know, you’re out and about, and you have to make certain choices. So that’s really cool. And it’s kind of inspirational. I live on the gorge and so there is a lot of litter. When I’m doing these litter picks, it motivates me. I’m like, “I want to do this!” I feel like we’ve made it really positive and really fun—and achievable as well. 

Sadie: I just want to jump in on that at the end of that thought if I can. Like Janine, I think the achievability is something that we’ve done a really good job of bearing in mind. We are expanding what we do and really holding on to, again, the fun of it and the success, and finding ways of connecting it to people’s real lives and making it an enjoyable experience to engage with. Because so much of what we hear about the environment is bad news, right? People get discouraged because, you know, we’re not seeing the successes.

Sadie, you mentioned you have a list of keys to minimizing waste. Do you want to share those now?

The main tips are:

1. Sustainability is easier to implement as a forethought. Planning beforehand is really important. It is so much easier to achieve those high diversion rates if you do that planning in advance, rather than trying to deal with picking up garbage later.
2. Have a well-integrated team member or producer whose job it is to be dedicated to sustainability. A dedicated team member has a huge impact in making sure that those considerations actually have a voice at the table and in your planning process. It’s easy for environmental concerns to get forgotten—because there are so many important things to consider when planning an event. But having a key person, hopefully a person who has some local expertise with your waste systems, can make a huge difference.
3. And the third one is: Be really intentional with your language. At SKAMpede we’re very intentional about using the language “minimal waste festival,” for example, which is obviously an alternative to zero waste. And I’ll talk about that in just a second.
4. And then the last one: Don’t hand out garbage. Just really simply, wherever you can, plan to avoid it. Don’t hand out garbage. Those are the four main tips.

It sounds so simple when you say it like that.

Sadie: It is. That’s what it really comes down to, I think. What we’ve discovered is that at a certain level, it is really simple. It’s about asking some simple questions and being willing to make changes that are also simple, but maybe different from what we’re used to. Being willing to be open to it.

So, “minimal waste” is a term that I’ve landed on at the Sustainable Fox as our preferred method of looking at waste reduction. For us, it’s more inclusive than zero waste for a few different reasons. One of them is that it’s a goal that you can keep improving at, and you can always invite others to join in, regardless of where they’re at on the journey. Unlike zero waste, it’s not a pass/fail goal. It’s something that, regardless of where you’re at, you can start doing right now. And it acknowledges that sometimes there is going to be some waste, that sometimes there’s going to be a little bit more waste than others. It also allows us to acknowledge that both recycling and compost are still waste; they’re just a preferable kind of waste, you know? But it’s not accurate to call it zero. The term “minimal waste” also removes a certain amount of judgment for health and accessibility related waste, which just is unavoidable for some folks. It takes that harshness out of the language about it and allows those people to be a part of our success. I think the term has been really important for us and it just straight up it feels more accurate. It’s one of those terms we’re happy to throw out into the world if it helps people have more accurate conversations and helps them to actually reduce their waste.

You just shifted my own mindset in that minute and a half!

Sadie: I’ll add that in the last few years, we’ve been trying to set new goals for ourselves. Last year, I biked over 100km with my bike and trailer to achieve the festival with no vehicle trips (at least for the waste management) until we did load out with the waste. That was our big goal last year, Logan at Theatre SKAM challenged me to do that, so we did that. I may or may not achieve that again this year. That took a lot out of me! But this year our goal is to litter-pick more waste than we create. We’ll see if we actually achieve it. We’ve got at least one full-on litter-pick scheduled, and then I generally do some throughout the actual festival. We’re continuing to figure out what to ask, how to push what it means to be reducing our waste. And, you know, our percentiles are so high that it’s kind of offsets now.

I love the playful nature of the challenges and games—the way that you have fun with it.

Janine: There’s a lot of, you know, apocalyptic imagery people have about the environment. A lot of doom and gloom and shame and guilt, and I feel like Sadie has really succeeded in making it joyful and fun. At the end, it really feels like a victory to have reduced this much waste. I see so many people in the zero waste movement apologizing for what they can’t compost, recycle, etc. This doesn’t feel like an apology. It feels like a celebration of our efforts.

Oh, that’s a beautiful place to end it, Janine. Thank you!