‘Theatre is incredibly wasteful’: the grassroots effort to put sustainability centre stage
Shocked by waste across Adelaide’s performing arts scene, a stage manager began finding second homes for old set pieces — and has inspired similar efforts interstate.
‘How many productions of Mama Mia are presented annually, even in Adelaide?’ reads the Facebook post. ‘Well if this musical is in your future, here is an offer hard to refuse.’
The message is accompanied by photographs of two appropriately Aegean white-and-blue set pieces. Within a day of its posting in September 2024, it was amended with an all-caps update: ‘CLAIMED.’
Scroll up and down the same feed and you’ll also find an Addams Family’s house looking for a new home, a printing press from a production of Newsies, and the wood-and-steel body of the world’s largest playable guitar — all up for grabs with no strings attached.
This is all typical fare for The French Brace, a Facebook-based community platform that connects professional and community theatre-makers seeking to recycle and rehome old set pieces and other materials.
It’s run by Françoise Piron, a veteran stage manager and event producer who has spent years freelancing around Adelaide.
“When you’re freelancing you get to know a lot of people, and you see lots of rehearsal rooms, lots of theatres, and lots of funny little storerooms everywhere,” Piron tells InReview.
“People would be wanting to clean things up or get rid of things, and then I would spend time going, ‘Oh, I wonder who would like this?’, and go through my mental list of all my theatre designer friends.”
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Despite efforts to improve sustainability across the cultural sector, Piron saw firsthand how much material went straight from the stage to the skip at the end of a season.
“Theatre is incredibly wasteful,” she says. “You build a set, and some materials might get kept, but people look at the financials and go, ‘Oh let’s just put it in landfill’. And off it goes — I found that really shocking.”
In 2017 Piron started the Facebook page to help divert that behind-the-curtain clutter from the scrap heap. The page now has over 2,500 followers, who eagerly browse the strange and eclectic new listings Piron posts almost weekly, complete with photographs, measurements and pick-up details.
“A lot of that stuff will [eventually] end up in landfill because a lot of it is plastic-based, but at least it’s had another life,” Piron says. “And it’s going to a lot of people who have very little cash — you know, art teachers, amateur companies, independent artists.”
Linear to circular economy
Grace Nye-Butler is a former stage manager based in Sydney who now works in sustainability and ecology as a research fellow at Griffith University’s Performance and Ecology Research Lab.
“The performing arts currently works on a linear economy, we buy-use-dispose,” Nye-Butler tells InReview. “Theatre makers in Sydney (and across Australia) often struggle to choose sustainable options due to lack of storage to keep and reuse items, lack of time when sourcing and lack of money to select more sustainable products.”
Nye-Butler came across Piron’s Facebook page in 2020, and along with fellow theatre workers Ang Collins and Ryan Gareffa was inspired to start a Sydney offshoot — with some help from Piron.
"We wanted to help add another option for recycling and sourcing. We wanted to provide another way to find second hand items, but also to add things back into the circular economy."
“She was generous enough to have a meeting with us to share how she runs The French Brace,” Nye-Butler explains.
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The trio started their own page, Bump Out Sydney, soon after, which has now amassed over 2,200 users.
“We wanted to help add another option for recycling and sourcing,” she says. “We wanted to provide another way to find second hand items, but also to add things back into the circular economy.”
“We picked up the torture rack today! Thanks bump out,” reads one happy testimonial on the Bump Out Sydney page.
Amazing creative community
Back in Adelaide, Piron’s skip-induced despair was being replaced by something else.
“I don’t think I realised when I started that it would be such a positive thing,” she says. “But the most incredible thing is that I have discovered this amazing creative community all over Adelaide; teachers, art teachers, drama teachers, independent artists, people working in schools, all kinds of people are now on that page and ask for the craziest stuff.”
Piron is currently working at the Adelaide Festival Centre, where she cites the recently concluded Dream Big festival as an example of how the page’s network — and the mindset it encourages — can have a big impact.
“Only one major piece went into the landfill skip — we re-homed all the decorations, all the corflute. And because we talked about it early enough, everybody was conscious [of it], and I offered this service that nobody’s paid for. People think it’s great.”
While Piron briefly entertained building a website for The French Brace, for now it continues as a rare example of social media being used for the benefit of the community, connection, and sustainability over profit and consumption.
As for the name? It’s a nod to Piron’s French heritage, along with a tried and tested staple of the theatre world.
“It’s a triangular piece of set construction, and it’s amazing,” Piron says of the original French Brace.
“But it’s also a piece of equipment that you reuse over and over and over again, and that flat packs — so it’s everything that I thought environmental sustainability in the arts should be about.”
Follow The French Brace on Facebook