What began as an uninvited guest has, for years now, been firmly seated at the negotiating table: carbon. It has no discourse, no aesthetic, no empathy. It does something worse, which is why it is terrifying: it is counted. And that counting, apparently technical, is beginning to determine everything else. It tightens calendars, limits journeys, reshuffles casts, and redraws collaborations, especially with non-European artists. In short, European dance is discovering that it does not move only through space; it moves inside a planetary budget, and that budget sets stricter restrictions than any passport control.
Carbon as dramaturg
For three decades, European cultural policy helped turn the travelling choreographer into an icon of integration. Cooperation programmes and distribution networks shaped the artist as an exemplary worker: flexible, permanently available, always ready to cross borders at speed. French sociology has described this regime of hyper-availability as a motor of the creative economy (Menger 2003). Across Europe, theorists have underlined how artistic labour becomes compatible with capitalism precisely by turning proximity, circulation, and readiness into professional norms (Kunst 2015, 3).
Dance internalized this logic with political flair. Moving was framed as openness, an antidote to national retreat. Yet carbon does not care about political symbolism. Measurement tools and mobility guides for the performing arts keep repeating a stubborn fact: Travel is usually the main driver of emissions, especially once flying enters the picture (Julie’s Bicycle 2010, 7). Even before the audience is factored in, touring is a story of kilometres, freight, nights, and fuel. Mobility is no longer a value; it is a variable.
Sobriety becomes an aesthetic, sometimes against its will
The result is familiar, if not always admitted to: productions shrink in size. Compressed set designs, simplified lighting plans, costumes that fit in a cabin bag. Sobriety used to be an aesthetic option, sometimes even a conceptual elegance. It is now simply environmental pragmatism. According to Julie’s Bicycle, a UK-based organization working at the intersection of culture and environmental sustainability, touring guidance is blunt: prioritize the train, and integrate emissions into decision-making as you would a budget line (Julie’s Bicycle 2015, 8). Backstage, the question is not only “what do I want to show?” but “what can I physically move?”.
This shift produces a specific discomfort: when constraint is sold as choice. The sector loves narratives where limitation becomes virtue. It is one of its favourite dramaturgies. But here virtue can be an economic camouflage, a logistical limitation, or a ready-made alibi. French scholarship has insisted that ecological transition in the performing arts cannot be reduced to a checklist of “good gestures”; it also requires new ways of thinking and organising production (Sermon 2021, 22; Urrutiaguer 2023, 34). In other words: fewer outward shows of environmental responsibility, more redistribution of work conditions.