Fault Lines is a dance theatre performance that explores the climate crisis and aims to connect audiences with a deeper care for our planet. The work premiered in February 2024 and will continue to tour into 2025. It was adapted for rural touring in June 2024. Mortimer and Whitaker co-choreographed the work.

Fault Lines aims to respond to McKibben’s (2005) assertion that ‘when something is happening everywhere all at once, it threatens constantly to become backdrop, context, instead of event’. The work utilises aesthetic languages of the body and spoken text with integrated digital projections to explore the urgent interdependencies between time, human actions, and ecological systems and illustrate future landmarks of the Anthropocene's devastation as predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2018). Additionally, Carruth’s (2020) assertion that the climate crisis needs ‘new, positive narratives’, inspired images of a planet that has reached net zero and is moving towards balance.

An iterative combination of theory and practice shaped the work’s conceptual through-line (Nelson, 2013; Smith & Dean, 2009). The narrative structure of Fault Lines enmeshes the past, present, and future with an aim of deepening appreciation for the intertwined temporalities (Tsing, A. L., Swanson, H. A., Gan, E., & Bubandt, N, 2017) that shape human-environment relationships. Heidegger’s (1927) concept of spatiality and dwelling was utilised to devise the narrative; six survivors attempting to reconstruct a new world from the rubble of the old. Tsing et al’s ghosts and monsters (2017) and McKay’s geopoetics (2006) informed choreographic structures that juxtapose deep time of geological processes with the frenetic and ultimately exhaustive pace of human activity. Phenomenological notions of enmeshment (Merleau-Ponty, 1969) guided the dramaturgy alongside exploration of themes related to abandonment and saturation (Sartre, 1946).

By engaging local community casts in themes of world-making (Stewart, 2017), the project investigated how artistic engagements could foster empathy, social bonding, community resilience, and creative recovery. Online engagement with audiences embraced Newell’s (2020) actionable solutions. Fault Lines embraced green strategies to measure environmental impact, with an aim to create a new sector model for sustainable touring.