This August, Venue 13 becomes ground zero for one of the most urgent and imaginative undertakings at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe: the debut of the 2025 Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA). In celebration of its 10th anniversary, CCTA arrives in full force with an unprecedented three-week residency featuring 50 short plays and artistic encounters that grapple with the defining issue of our time — the climate crisis.

Presented daily at 4:00 PM from August 1st through August 23rd (with Mondays off), this living, breathing programme is anything but a traditional festival lineup. It’s a ritual. A provocation. A gathering place for grief, rage, joy, and radical hope. Every day offers something entirely different — and every single event is a one-off.

At the core of the CCTA model is a belief in decentralised, global storytelling as a catalyst for awareness and action. Since 2015, CCTA has mobilised thousands of artists worldwide to respond to the climate emergency through live performance. This year’s theme, “The Time Is Now,” underscores the rising urgency of the moment — and the opportunity the arts hold to shift not only minds, but systems.

A Micro-Festival Every Day

CCTA 2025 at Venue 13 is no passive experience. With each 4:00 PM event, the hall transforms — into a climate café, a galactic comedy, a ritual kitchen, an eco-cabaret, a post-human think tank, a collective funeral, or even a live-action Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

Opening night features Science is Dead! by David Geary and Space Cat by Lewis Hetherington, paired with a keynote welcome from CCTA co-founder Chantal Bilodeau and curators Anne Kelly and Ian Garrett. What follows is a revolving door of forms and formats: immersive installations, choreographic rituals, verbatim dialogue, satirical sketches, speculative drama, eco-somatic performance, and participatory play-readings.

You’ll meet grieving bees and arguing orcas. You’ll be serenaded by climate physicists, called to action by street theatre makers, and led through speculative forests by Indigenous thinkers, postcolonial food artists, and the odd talking snowflake. From Edinburgh-based collectives to international ensembles from Korea, Portugal, Canada, and the U.S., CCTA 2025 invites you into a deeply interconnected creative ecology.

Some Highlights Include:

• A Eulogy for the Future, a surreal, deeply human performance-café hybrid by Artsake Theatre and The Blue Loop
• Tango in Silk, a luminous cross-cultural dance and storytelling piece by Xi Liu
• JOY CENTERED, a ceremonial vegan nosh activation led by Aisha Lesley Bentham (with edible ingredients selected for their energetic resonance)
• Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency, a visually striking and politically searing film by Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens
• The Penguins, a satirical play performed by the largest audience-cast in Venue 13 history — where everyone becomes part of the story

Other events are curated in collaboration with Edinburgh Communities Climate Action Network (ECCAN), Arctic Lion Theatre, Fregoli Theatre from Galway, Switchboard Operations from Los Angeles, and international partners through the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts and the Arts & Climate Initiative.

Theatrical Action as Collective Practice

CCTA’s arrival at the Fringe coincides with a new era for Venue 13. Under new leadership and relaunched as Venue 13 Fringe Ltd and the Venue 13 Trust, the space is doubling down on its legacy of emerging work with a renewed focus on climate, care, and community. Ticket sales from the CCTA programme support both the artists and the venue’s ongoing development as a sustainable cultural anchor in Edinburgh.

More than just programming, this residency is part of a long-term commitment to using the arts as a tool for climate literacy, cultural renewal, and public imagination. These aren’t just plays about climate change. They are interventions. Invitations. Trials. Joyous acts of resistance.

Be Part of It

The climate crisis is not a future problem — it’s a present emergency. The artists of CCTA remind us that action begins with awareness, and awareness is shaped by the stories we tell. Venue 13 invites you to take part in that story. Show up. Get moved. Bring a friend. Change the ending.

🎟️ Book now: venue13.com

💸 Support the venue: crowdfund.edfringe.com/p/venue13returns

📍Find us: Harry Younger Hall, 3 minutes off the Royal Mile

📲 Follow along: @venue13fringe

As we announce the 2025 programme for Venue 13, we are especially proud to present Climate Change Theatre Action 2025 (CCTA 2025). This is more than just another production on our calendar—it marks the culmination of a decade-long project that has connected artists and audiences around the world through the power of theatre and the urgent need for climate action.

Founded in 2015 by Elaine Ávila, Chantal Bilodeau, Robert Levitow, and Caridad Svich, CCTA has grown into a global movement, sparking over 500 events across six continents. Managed by the Arts & Climate Initiative in partnership with the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts (CSPA), it has engaged tens of thousands in conversations about climate change through live performance and community gatherings. Hosting its Edinburgh Fringe debut at Venue 13 is both an honour and a natural fit.

This year’s edition celebrates CCTA’s 10-year milestone with a rich programme of performances, workshops, and interactive events responding to the theme “The Time Is Now.” Over the course of August, audiences will experience 50 short plays presented across 20 events, blending new commissions with highlights from past festivals. These works reflect diverse perspectives on the climate crisis, offering audiences a space for reflection, dialogue, and connection.

In collaboration with Culture for Climate Scotland, the Traverse Theatre, and other partners, Venue 13 will serve as a hub for these events during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It’s an opportunity to bring together local and international voices at a moment when collective action feels especially vital.

“This is the culmination of a decade-long dream,” says Ian Garrett, director of the CSPA and producer of the CCTA series at Fringe. “So many artists have created CCTA events in their own communities, and this year we have a chance to bring the plays to Edinburgh under one roof, at a moment when we need collective action more than ever.”

While the Edinburgh events are a focal point, CCTA 2025 continues its global reach, making these 50 plays available for communities worldwide to present in their own formats—from readings and performances to films, podcasts, and interdisciplinary art gatherings.

We’re looking forward to welcoming audiences, artists, and collaborators to Venue 13 for this special programme. Artists and companies interested in participating in Edinburgh’s CCTA events can submit expressions of interest via the CSPA website:

🔗 https://www.climatechangetheatreaction.com/join-us/

Tickets for Climate Change Theatre Action 2025 at Venue 13 are now available through the Edinburgh Fringe website:

🔗 https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/a-i-campfire

Further details on workshops, special events, and activities will be announced week by week on the Venue 13 website and social media channels. We invite you to stay connected and join us in this important conversation.

• Venue 13 was invited to attend Climate Change Theatre Action’s (CCTA) launch event, celebrating ten years of climate-focused theatre and marking the official launch of Venue 13’s 2025 programme
• The event featured the announcement of the festival’s 2025 theme, program, and how to get involved, and the launch of the latest CCTA anthology, which includes the 50 plays commissioned for the 2023 festival 
• CCTA 2025, in partnership with Venue 13, will open a call on March 14 for partner artists and companies to co-host 18 readings during the Edinburgh Festival in August 2025. 
• CCTA 2025 and Venue 13 will partner with organisations such as Culture for Climate Scotland and the Traverse Theatre for the series during the Edinburgh Festival. 
• This will mark the 10-year anniversary of CCTA and the last round of CCTA commissions of new plays, bringing a decade of impactful storytelling to a close.  
• Media images link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1AbuwaEPu7gx6Fh-LQsXXte8MUnXvh3z4?usp=sharing 

New York, 1st March 2025 – Today, at Theatre Row, the Venue 13 team joined Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA) as it proudly celebrates its 10-year anniversary with a preview of the 2025 festival and the launch of its latest anthology, “All Good Things Must Begin,” containing the 50 original plays commissioned in 2023, 

This celebration marks the official launch of Venue 13’s 2025 programme, with a selection of plays confirmed to grace Harry Younger Hall this August. 

During their milestone event, CCTA announced the writers of 10 newly commissioned plays, which will join a selection of works from the last decade to create the CCTA 2025 collection. . These plays, addressing climate-related themes, represent the culmination of a decade-long initiative to tell climate-conscious stories through theatre. Since 2015, CCTA has commissioned over 250 short plays and made them available for free during its biennial, global distributed festival. CCTA plays have been performed hundreds of times on every inhabited continent. 

During the event, guests enjoyed readings of a few short plays from 2023, learned about theatre artists and organisations in NYC engaging with the climate crisis and heard from a panel of previous event organizers. Partner organisations including Theatre Row, the Broadway Green Alliance, and New York City Children’s Theatre shared their efforts to green theatre practices. 

The celebration also featured a preview of CCTA’s exciting programme for the 2025 Edinburgh Festival, where Venue 13 will host 18 readings in partnership with other theatre companies to present all 50 plays. Information about how to participate in the Edinburgh Festival was shared along with how to participate in the global festival. This international gathering promises to bring together a global community of climate-focused theatre-makers and audiences to inspire action through storytelling.  

Notable partners for CCTA’s first ever self-organized reading series include Culture for Climate Scotland (CCS, formerly Creative Carbon Scotland) and the Traverse Theatre. The Traverse, whose resident playwrights will be featured in CCTA 2025 , will bring CCTA to their prominent theatre bookstore, and offer the full series of  anthologies, including both a new edition of the 2017 anthology “Where is the Hope?” and a chapbook of the ten commissioned  plays for 2025. 

This event also marked the culmination of the commissioning part of CCTA. Following this year’s festival, CCTA will continue to encourage people to read and perform the plays from its vast collection, and use them in class settings but year round instead of in a condensed festival format. It will also support the use of the plays, especially by people with little theatre experience, through the creation of educational materials and other resources

CCTA Co-Director, and Venue 13 Producer Ian Garrett, remarked: “This year marks 10 years of investing in the creation of new plays and the dramatisation of climate change. We’ve commissioned over 250 plays from playwrights from all over the world for performances on every continent. It is bittersweet to end the commissioning of new plays after a decade, having seen all of the creative ways this topic has been approached. We’ve seen a significant increase in climate change theatre everywhere, it felt like the right time for us to shift our focus. It is an honour for Venue 13 to showcase these plays at the Fringe Festival as an acclaimed farewell.”