Launching its Carbon 13 show, Ballroom Marfa starts a 3-day symposium on climate change and sustainability Aug. 31 with author Michael Pollan, critic Rebecca Solnit, and theater artist Cynthia Hopkins (who brings a climate-themed work to the Walker in March).

“Rather than attempting to explain why Mark Rothko’s paintings are meaningful [John Logan’s newly opened play Red] shows two people arguing over a roomful of canvases, some finished, some works in progress.”

At Portland’s Time-Based Art Festival, “artists are often in the room and the audience is invited to be in concert with them.” Opening Sept. 6, this year’s edition features Miguel Gutierrez, a Buckminster Fuller film project featuring Yo La Tengo, and more.

France’s unique unemployment benefits for workers in the arts has been deemed financially unsustainable. The system could come to an end in 2013—which, if it does, is expected to spark industry strikes similar to when the bill came under review in 2003.

Habit, a 90-minute theater installation, is coming to New York. The show will be performed in a fully-functioning house repeatedly for eight hours a day and, though the dialogue will be the same for each performance, the staging will be totally improvised.

After a January Walker performance about cellphones and the Syrian revolution, Beirut-based Rabih Mroué’s new work, presented in Berlin, turns stills from a first-person video of a possibly fatal sniper attack in Syria into an immersive “action memento mori.”

Archaeologists outside London have unearthed remains of The Curtain theater, where Shakespeare’s company performed from 1597 until The Globe opened two years later. Opened in 1577, the theater was discovered behind a Shoreditch pub.

The Walker’s just-announced 2012-13 Performing Arts Season is “like the Neiman Marcus Christmas Book,” writes Pamela Espeland. “You turn the pages, you see a lot of things you want and a few eyebrow-raisers.”

Dubbing it “theatre hacking,” Olivier Choinière’s recent project is raising ire in Montreal: He gave MP3 files to audience members at a Moliere play at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, treating them to his wry running commentary on the remounting of classic works.