The Broadway Green Alliance has just announced the winner of another new award!
The College Green Captain prize was created to reward College Green Captains for their greening efforts on campus productions.  We are pleased to announce that Travis Blackwell, Green Captain at the University of Memphis Theater Department, has won the 2015 prize. To apply for the prize, College Green Captains submitted a one-page summary statement explaining their greening efforts and a cardboard poster showing off the best elements of their greening program. There were three finalists for the prize:  Travis Blackwell, Piper Rasmussen of Barnard University, and Jade Zaroff of Emerson College.The posters of all three finalists were displayed at the BGA booth at the USITT Expo last week.
Travis is in his third year at Memphis working towards his BFA in Theatre Design and Technical Production with an Emphasis in Stage Management.  Travis helped make environmental awareness a part of daily life by including “Green Facts†in paperwork sent to the cast and production team. Daily emails that contained tips and tricks on how to make your day-to-day life more environmentally friendly (thoughts on how to recycle to what kinds of light bulbs to buy) paired with encouraging cast members to recycle waste and reuse supplies, created an overall awareness throughout the cast and department as a whole. Travis will be presented with a framed plaque at USITT and will also receive tickets to the Broadway or touring production of either WICKED or LION KING along with a professional backstage tour of the production and a meeting with a current Broadway Green Captain.
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The Broadway Green Alliance was founded in 2008 in collaboration with the Natural Resources Defense Council. The Broadway Green Alliance (BGA) is an ad hoc committee of The Broadway League and a fiscal program of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights Aids. Along with Julie’s Bicycle in the UK, the BGA is a founding member of the International Green Theatre Alliance. The BGA has reached tens of thousands of fans through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other media.
At the BGA, we recognize that it is impossible to be 100% “green†while continuing activity and – as there is no litmus test for green activity – we ask instead that our members commit to being greener and doing better each day. As climate change does not result from one large negative action, but rather from the cumulative effect of billions of small actions, progress comes from millions of us doing a bit better each day. To become a member of the Broadway Green Alliance we ask only that you commit to becoming greener, that you name a point person to be our liaison, and that you will tell us about your green-er journey.
The BGA is co-chaired by Susan Sampliner, Company Manager of the Broadway company of WICKED, and Charlie Deull, Executive Vice President at Clark Transfer<. Rebekah Sale is the BGA’s full-time Coordinator.
This week on HowlRound, we are exploring Theatre in the Age of Climate Change. How does our work reflect on, and respond to, the challenges brought on by a warming climate? How can we participate in the global conversation about what the future should look like, and do so in a way that is both inspiring and artistically rewarding? I have admired Sarah Cameron Sunde’s work as a director and translator for many years. Recently, she added another string to her bow. In order to address the pressing environmental questions that were on her mind, she became a performance artist. —Chantal Bilodeau
The water is rising. We know that now.
(How) will we survive? Will we find a way to rise to the challenge?
Instruction to self: zoom in and zoom out on a daily basis.
In August 2013, I spent ten days at an intimate artist residency on the coast of Maine. The project I was developing with Lydian Junction (my interdisciplinary live art collective) started with a question of survival on a personal scale: What does it take to survive as an artist in this late-capitalistic society we live in?
Because of New York’s new relationship to water due to Hurricane Sandy, I was also considering the bigger picture. The next time a storm hits, will my beloved city survive? Hurricane Sandy made me understand temporality in a new way. It hit me in the gut. Even a seemingly indestructible city is vulnerable, and will some day disappear. If we don’t find a way to adapt, that day might come sooner than we all think. We are lucky to be living here during New York City’s golden age. A hundred years from now, this space that we occupy may be completely changed.
Mohawk Arts Collective’s barn sits beside a tidal bay on the quiet side of Mount Dessert Island in Maine. Every six or so hours, the visual environment is completely transformed—from brown mud flat to picturesque blue bay—because of the tides. Despite having grown up in California near the coast, I had never before witnessed such quick and drastic change. It was mind-blowing. I couldn’t stop watching the water.
In the Maine iteration, the water just starting to fill up the bay, and then several hours later—
On the morning of my third full day of residency, I watched the bay swallow an enormous rock and an image struck me: water enveloping a human body slowly, but surely. Will this be our fate if we don’t get our act together soon? Most major cities in the world are by the sea. What will happen to all the people? It seemed like a perfect metaphor.
Three days later, on August 15, 2013, I stood in Bass Harbor Bay for the full twelve hour and forty-eight minute tidal cycle as water engulfed me up to my neck, and then receded back down to mud flat. It was cold and uncomfortable, and it took everything out of me to get through the day. And that was the point.
I also felt alive and connected to the water. I realized I had to keep playing this duet with her. It was the beginning of a series.
Exactly six months later, on February 15, 2014, I performed a research version of36.5 / a durational performance with the sea in Akumal Bay, Mexico, and exactly one year later, on August 15, 2014, the next iteration happened in Aquatic Park, San Francisco. Now I’m gearing up for Amsterdam this summer, and working on launching the project into a global realm. The plan is to execute seven to ten performances on all six livable continents over the course of the next three to five years, culminating with a large-scale event in New York City: more than 100 people standing in the water, and many more elsewhere around the globe, all considering the water on the same day in August 2020.
In the San Francisco iteration, after a few hours, one man in a suit joined in, and then another. Suddenly we were many.
I am a director and maker of interdisciplinary live art. I didn’t intend to create work that I had to perform in. My initial thought was, “Who can I convince to execute this crazy feat of endurance?†But I quickly realized I couldn’t ask anyone else to do something so physically challenging if I wasn’t willing to do it first. The piece is about struggle and resiliency, both physical and mental. It tests the limits of my body as it represents an individual, an artist, a member of society, and a human. It lives in the tradition of Performance Art and I had to take on the challenge directly.
Scientists recently predicted a three-foot rise in the coming fifty years. This is hard to comprehend because as the human species with the ability to record knowledge, we’ve never witnessed such a change. The project aims to connect back to the natural world, namely the sea, and encourage daily awareness of the changes that are coming our way.
36.5 / a durational performance with the sea acknowledges the permanently temporary nature of things and functions in two forms: 1) a series of live performance events that exist in real time and space around the world, and 2) through text and imagery that remain and represent the project (online and in exhibition form) before and after each performance event takes place. The action of the live performance is clear: it occurs and then it is over, ephemeral as the form. This part comes naturally to me. The text and imagery portion (how the project lives in between iterations) is trickier to hone.
In his 1983 book Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Vilem Flusser reminds us that time and space exist as separate functions on the camera. He also makes a case for photos as tools for activism: the camera provides “for the use of society as a feedback mechanism for its progressive improvement.†At its best, an image or a piece of text functions as an opening for new thought, a way into a new concept or idea. How do we allow space for people to take in the idea in today’s fast-paced, information-inundated world?
Is documentation of the event effective enough to speak to people? Both in the live event and in the online representation, my goal is to find the moment of impact where the audience perceives time in a new way—either it speeds up or slows down—through seeing, feeling, or simply understanding that the water is changing. My hope is that this encounter will lead to greater understanding of our future, and prepare us to be flexible enough to adapt.
The challenge is how to create a work of art that can live effectively in multiple forms. Contemporary technological innovations allow for us to communicate with people around the world, so how can we use technology most effectively to connect back to nature? There are no easy answers. I continue to practice zooming in and zooming out. 36.5 / a durational performance with the sea will continue to live in the questions, just as I do.
Photos 1 and 2 by Maridee Slater, 36.5 / a durational performance with the sea, Bass Harbor, Maine, USA, August 15, 2013.
Photo 3 by Irina Patkanian & Gus Ford, 36.5 / a durational performance with the sea, Bass Harbor, Maine, USA, August 15, 2014.
Thanks to Scott Donaldson for sharing this article The law of the forest and the freedom of the streets on openDemocracy. Forests play an important role in the evolution of public space in England. The Magna Carta was followed in 1217 by The Charter of the Forest.
The Forest Charter formalised the right of unbonded men to access and use of the goods of the royal forests (grazing, fuel, food), while implicitly assuming the right to wander freely in the landscape as well as providing a place of refuge for those cast out of the social order.
Forests not only played the role that cities now play, forests also offer a conceptual tool for thinking about the public realm in cities today.Â
ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.
This week on HowlRound, we are exploring Theatre in the Age of Climate Change. How does our work reflect on, and respond to, the challenges brought on by a warming climate? How can we participate in the global conversation about what the future should look like, and do so in a way that is both inspiring and artistically rewarding? Canadian science writer Alanna Mitchell is an inspiration. We crossed paths at the Mount Royal University conference Under Western Skies 2: Environment, Culture and Community in North America in Calgary in 2012. Since then, I have been avidly following her transition from the page to the stage.—Chantal Bilodeau
Let me say right up front that I never harbored secret dreams of working in the theatre. I never wanted to be onstage. I confess to evanescent musings about someday writing a script, or, more likely, a screenplay for, say, a sitcom, or a music video, or a no-budget film. These were not high aspirations.
I mean, I’m a journalist who writes about science! I used to go to a play and watch the performers in much the same way I might have watched a heart surgeon at work in an operating theatre: it was marvelous, transcendent, incomprehensible. It seemed to me as though actors were capable of doing something effortlessly that I felt I could not do, even with the utmost exertion.
And then I met Franco Boni, artistic director of The Theatre Centre in Toronto. He heard me give an off-the-cuff talk about my book Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis to a UK-based group called Cape Farewell, which aims to bring artists and scientists together to spawn a cultural response to the high-carbon world we’ve created. Franco wondered if I would make the book into a one-woman play. And perform it. And that, as they say, was that.
I remember the first meeting over coffee with him and Claire Sykes, who works with Cape Farewell in North America. (The brilliant Ravi Jain would later join Franco and me to create the script and he would help Franco direct.) I wouldn’t have to memorize, would I? Oh, no, said Franco. Will it be broadly the same as the Sea Sick talks I’ve been giving for years? Oh, yes, said Franco. And then, to his credit, he demurred: Of course, we’ll have to have a new beginning and a new ending. But not much more than that.
I was hooked. I had absolutely no idea how profoundly different it would feel to be in the theatre, performing. Different, I mean, because instead of sitting in my garret imagining how people might respond to my writing—as I am now—I would be standing onstage feeling the energy field of the audience, the power of the experience we were sharing.
It was, as I discovered, a conversation. I could never have imagined that.
The process of making the script should have alerted me. Franco, Ravi, and I were closeted in a cold room on Queen Street West in Toronto with only chalk and a blackboard. I was trying to explain not only what I had found out during the research for my book, and the one I wrote before it, but also why I had wanted to know. Every time I thought I had explained it enough, either Franco or Ravi would look me straight in the eye and say: There’s more. And I would excavate more and more deeply into topics I hadn’t thought about for years—if ever. What is science? What is journalism? What is art? How do they feed each other? Why?
Of course, when it came to the ending, we were stuck. The basic narrative ended up being straightforward: I, the gormless storyteller, am on a quest to figure out what our species is doing to the chemistry of the ocean and why it matters. I travel the world meeting famous and charming and terrifying scientists who explain some of the pieces, which I then put together into a whole. (The blackboard, which we transported to the stage, features prominently here.)
We stumbled through a beginning, which Ravi, with his comic genius, did the first drafts of. But the ending just wasn’t there. I mean, how do you tell people that life as we know it is in terrible danger, and then leave them with something profound and catalytic, without a scrap of preachiness or self-pity?
We had some ideas. These were things I was secretly thinking about, researching, painfully writing down, often amid tears. It felt like every line was impenetrable poetry, not fit for human ears. I was embarrassed about what I wrote. I couldn’t understand why it meant so much to me. Franco and Ravi did not laugh, however. I kept expecting them to tell me to buck up and go back to my keyboard and start over.
It was clear even during the first performances that the ending wasn’t perfect. It was a little glib. In retrospect, I think it was because I had not understood about this conversation that would happen with the audience. I hadn’t known how much I longed for the conversation.
We’re in the third ending now. It’s better. Here’s the radical thing: It’s about forgiveness. It’s about whether we are capable of having a species-wide conversation about the high-carbon world we’ve created together. It’s about whether we can stop with the mindless anger and blame and guilt and despair and leap over it all to get something done.
Forgiveness is a tricky topic, we’ve found. Dreadfully unfashionable. Members of the audience simply didn’t know what it was. Christian? Modern? Hocus pocus? In the third ending, I define it. Forgiveness runs like a drumbeat through all human faith traditions over time. More than that, it is part of an age-old psychological release for the one who forgives. It is saying: Yes, I’m in pain. No, this should never have happened. But I can leave the pain behind and move on.
Ultimately, forgiveness is the resolution of grief.
And so what if, in a mad bid to give ourselves permission to evolve away from the carbon patterns that are threatening us, we could forgive ourselves for all the ways we’ve helped screw up the planet? What if we could forgive each other? What if we could forgive our species? I think it would help spring us from this paralysis of guilt about what’s happening to the world.
Oh, and just for the record. In the end I did have to memorize the ruddy thing. All 10,000 words. In a row. Yeesh.
The initial notion of hosting the final GALA meeting in Glasgow arose out of the desire to highlight the emerging green arts network and progressive sustainability goals of the city. The Glasgow Green Year 2015 celebrates the city’s aspirations to be a leading example of social, economic and environmental sustainability. Here at Creative Carbon Scotland we realise the importance of including the arts and cultural sector within this movement for a brighter, more sustainable future.
What is culture and how is it connected to sustainability initiatives?
A broad definition of culture is our way of life, incorporating our language, food, politics and values as well as the arts and humanities. What we often term ‘culture’ – the arts, museums, film, TV, design, advertising – are some of the ways in which we express this wider culture and are also an important way in which this culture is shaped, informed, disseminated and changed. Therefore not only does the cultural sector have huge potential to change and influence the society in which we live, it is essential to doing so.
Creative Carbon Scotland’s vision is of a Scottish cultural sector that is playing a central role in shaping a sustainable Scotland. We believe the cultural sector can do this through the work it makes and presents, the way it operates, and what it says and how it speaks to the public. This represents a significant change to the status quo, and one we believe to be both necessary and possible.
What does the final GALA general meeting represent?
The 2015 GALA meeting is a way of starting this process of shifting the status quo, responding specifically to the wealth of cultural activity and creative resources available in Glasgow. This final GALA general meeting is a representation of a larger network that is very much alive and growing in Scotland.
The first two days of the GALA general meeting will instigate discussions and collaboration between the GALA network and the institutions that represent Glasgow’s cultural communities, including Glasgow Arts and Museums, Glasgow Life and Glasgow City Council. The third day (14th March 2015) is open to the public for Glasgow’s Green: Imagining a Sustainable City. On this day, Tramway will be transformed into a hub of green arts activities, with 18 artist-led workshops and drop-ins. However, this day offers much more beyond the workshops.
We invite you to come along to Glasgow’s Green: Imagining a Sustainable City to participate in the larger group discussions about arts and sustainability at the beginning, middle and end of the day. There will also be a community-created map in the upper foyer; participants can pin and share projects on this map to help create a visualisation of the green arts community. Feel free to bring along your own resources, ideas, project information and critical thoughts to share with others about the connection between arts and sustainability.
The 2015 GALA general meeting offers a significant chance for discussions and collaborations. We are certainly looking forward to experiencing the energy that this event is sure to bring!
What are your thoughts on the influence of arts in building a more sustainable future?
Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.
In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.
We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.
Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:
Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.
This December the United Nations will call all the world’s leaders to Paris forCOP 21 to make a crucial agreement to limit climate change. We want to use the opportunity of COP 21 to raise awareness of the links between sustainability, climate change and the arts.
Join us for our April Edinburgh and Glasgow Green Tease events which will explore how artists and communities across Scotland can respond to or engage with COP 21 and how Creative Carbon Scotland can support this.
Sign up here for our Edinburgh (Monday 27th April, 3 – 5pm) and Glasgow(Tuesday 28th April, 3 – 5pm) events. As always we’ll have tea, coffee and biscuits on arrival!
COP 21 (or the 21st Conference Of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, to give it its full title) will aim to agree legal limits on the amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere that will reduce a global temperature rise of a just-about manageable 2â°C. Already China and the US – big emitters and barriers to previous agreements – have made significant commitments that suggest success may be in sight.
ArtCOP21 is a parallel event taking place in Paris in December where artists will use their work to raise awareness of the issues and encourage the leaders to take bold steps to protect the environment and humanity. Alongside this, we’re interested in the idea of ArtCOP Scotland that sees events and activities throughout Scotland highlighting the Paris discussions and placing the focus on how they involve and relate to all of us here – at home, at work, at school. We want to widen the debate in December to include artists and communities across the country.
Sign up here for our Edinburgh (Monday 27th April, 3 – 5pm) and Glasgow(Tuesday 28th April, 3 – 5pm) events.
Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.
In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.
We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.
Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:
Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.
This week HowlRound is  exploring Theatre in the Age of Climate Change. How does our work reflect on, and respond to, the challenges brought on by a warming climate? How can we participate in the global conversation about what the future should look like, and do so in a way that is both inspiring and artistically rewarding?
It all began with a research trip to the Canadian Arctic. After being commissioned by Seema Sueko, then Artistic Director at Mo`olelo Performing Arts Company, to write a play about the intersection of race, class, and climate change, I found myself on a plane heading to Iqaluit in the territory of Nunavut to learn more about the Great North and its inhabitants.
My initial idea was to write about the opening of the Northwest Passage. With sea ice melting and the possibility of an Arctic shipping route opening soon, there was going to be significant impact on local Inuit communities. But after spending three weeks in Nunavut, after talking to scientists and government officials, Inuit activists and elders, environmentalists and tourists, after hiking the pass in Auyuittuq National Park and eating arctic char and caribou, I realized that my idea was too simplistic, and that to capture the complexity and magnitude of the drama unfolding at the top of our world, I needed to rethink how I wrote my plays.
We will all be affected to different degrees, but no one will escape. And since greenhouse gases permeate the global atmosphere, there is no way to address the problem locally, without taking the entire system into account. This is particularly true in the Arctic where the Inuit population is being disproportionately affected by warming temperatures, yet produces very little carbon emissions. The Inuit cannot, on their own, protect their home because the forces threatening it are coming from places that are not under their jurisdiction. If they are to remain in the Arctic, where they have lived for millennia, they need the help of big emitters like the US and the rest of Canada. They also need to develop their economy, which translates into resource extraction. And they need to contend with a federal government that, given the new geopolitics in the Arctic, has huge stakes in maintaining a strong presence.
Once I understood this situation, it became clear that writing a play using a traditional narrative structure didn’t make sense. I define “traditional narrative structure†as being a narrative driven by a central character whose journey gives us a perspective on a particular subject. It generally presents a dominant point-of-view, with secondary characters acting in support of, or in opposition to, that dominant view. In essence, it is to theatre what perspective is to visual arts. As John Berger describes in his book Ways of Seeing, “the convention of perspective … centers everything on the eye of the beholder. It is like a beam from a lighthouse—only instead of light traveling outwards, appearances travel in. … The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God.â€
The single narrative voice supports the assumption that reality can be described as the experience of a single observer, and everything else becomes subordinate to that observer. (It is, for the most part, how history is written.) But if there is one thing we are learning from climate change, and from the very etymology of the word “Anthropocene,†it is that positioning humans at the center of the universe has disastrous consequences for the planet, and is no longer viable. We need a new consciousness. We need a new aesthetic.
Good art has always been both a reflection of the world we live in, and an attempt to push society forward. The existentialist movement of the mid-twentieth century moved us beyond rationalist thinking and into the realm of individual sensory perceptions, with plays like Waiting for Godot capturing the angst of the post-war era. Later on, postmodernism introduced the concept of bottom-up thinking, empowering people to have a say in how their lives were shaped, and artists to break free from the idealized perfection of the modernist movement. In the theatre, this translated into textual innovations, multidisciplinary works and an emphasis on questioning rather than providing answers, as exemplified by the works of Caryl Churchill and Tom Stoppard. But now that the world is changing again, how are we reflecting that change and furthering the conversation?
It is possible to write plays—even good plays—about climate change using the traditional narrative structure. I have seen a few, and been both moved and inspired by them. But if we want to be active participants in shaping our future, we need to move beyond writing plays about climate change to writing plays thatare climate change—plays that embody, in form, content, and process, the essence of the issues we are facing. Plays where the concept of climate change is so integral to the work that the term doesn’t even need to be uttered. New problems cannot be solved with old solutions. A new consciousness requires new artistic constructs.
I returned from Baffin Island knowing I couldn’t tell any one part of the story I encountered without contextualizing it within the bigger whole. If I privileged one voice over the others, I would be cheating the people and place I wanted to honor, and inviting audiences to take sides. So instead, I created an ensemble of eight conflicting voices held together by a shared breath and a sense of place. And this became Sila—a play where everyone belongs and has a say, including animals and gods, but no one holds the definitive view; a play where every language is spoken, and every realm (here on earth, below and above) is represented; a sort of cubist story, guided by the concept of interconnectedness, where it is impossible to reduce the work to a single perspective.
And this was just the beginning of the journey. As I was writing Sila, I realized there was much more to explore than could be done in a single play so I expanded the project to eight plays—one for each country of the Arctic—and baptized it The Arctic Cycle. I also gave myself the challenge, for each play, to collaborate with an artist from a different discipline who lives in the country where the play is set. (Again, more than one voice.) For Sila, I worked with an Inuit spoken word poet. For Forward, the second play of the Cycle, I am collaborating with a Norwegian electropop singer/songwriter.
Sophorl Ngin, Jaime Carilllo, and Nael Nacer in Sila. Photo: A.R. Sinclair Photography.
With Forward, I built on the idea of multiple voices and created a structure that spans over a hundred years, and includes close to forty characters. Forwardpresents a poetic history of climate change in Norway from the initial passion that drove explorer Fridtjof Nansen to the North Pole, to the consequences of over a century of fossil fuel addiction. Woven through this history is the passionate love affair between Nansen and Ice (Ice appears as a character in the play). While in Sila, the breath was shared across the land, in Forward, it is shared through time with one exhale becoming the next generation’s inhale. Interconnectedness again, but vertical rather than lateral.
Sophorl Ngin, Reneltta Arluk, and Nael Nacer in the Underground Railway Theater production of Sila. Photo: A.R. Sinclair Photography.
I don’t know where this will lead but I know I have my finger on the pulse of a brand new movement. We often talk about the cultural shift needed to embrace climate change and address it efficiently. But the shift is already happening. We are in it. Over the last several years, I have observed certain trends, both in the theatre and in the art world at large, that point to a new climate change aesthetic:
Indigenous thought, which is characterized by interconnectivity, has become more prominent. There is an effort to reposition humanity as an integral part of nature rather than as separate from it.
Many artists are looking to other fields, such as science and policy, for inspiration, modeling in their art practice the kind of cross-disciplinary thinking that is needed to address global issues.
A shift from a concern for the individual, to a concern for communities, is giving rise to multidisciplinary collaborations and an increased use of new technologies. Work is becoming more hybrid allowing artists to express concepts that couldn’t be expressed before.
Values such as compassion and connection are replacing the cool and hip detachment of previous decades. It is no longer useful to create a distance between the audience and the work. Deep emotional engagement is needed.
Principles of sustainability are being embraced as creative challenges in order to reduce the work’s footprint.
There is a concerted effort to take the work outside of traditional venues and into communities.
No one can define a movement on her own. But I am passionate about the search—that’s why I have put together this series on Theatre in the Age of Climate Change. I want to hear from other artists who are struggling with similar questions. How do we do it? Why do we do it? Why does it matter? And I want to share what I learn with all of you, my theatre colleagues.
Throughout the course of the week, you will hear from writers, directors, designers, composers, performance artists, and artist supporters from the US, Canada, Australia, and Norway. You will hear about sustainability, of course, and activism, but also about grief and hope and the burning desire to make a change. The artistic strategies are as varied as the artists themselves but holding them together is the breath, that almost imperceptible manifestation of life that keeps us bound to each other and the planet, that intimate sharing of air molecules that contains both the beauty and mystery of our existence.
If we can remember this fundamental truth and use it as the underpinning of the new climate change aesthetic, we are well on our way to shaping a culture that has the tools to deal with the challenges it has inadvertently created for itself.
Dr. Alys Longley – University of Auckland, New Zealand
If Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous quote, “the limits of my language are the limits of my world†proves accurate, then I think we are in deep trouble. My sense is that the limitations of especially the English language are preventing many of us from realizing, articulating and understanding our roles in ecological systems.Â
If we extend our understanding of ‘language’ to creative practices such as design, dance, visual art, music, and performance, we greatly extend what we are able to attend to, articulate, know and share in relation to place, space and meaning. Such practices carry affective resonance, enabling complex, optimistic, playful and imaginative responses to ideas around sustainability and ecology.Â
The Fluid City project brings together diverse scientists, social scientists, artists, architects and educators to engage a wide range of people in Auckland City to consider the issues and values around water sustainability. In 2012, the project was staged in a high-density urban area on Auckland’s waterfront. In 2014, the team worked with a secondary school over a four-month project to co-create a new iteration of the project for the local community. Attempts to map and document this project are generating innovative approaches to social sciences methodology, which bring together research practices drawn from both artistic and qualitative research techniques.Â
This seminar will discuss a series of research iterations emerging from the New Zealand-based project Fluid City, which have been responding to the following research questions: How can we give voice to water in all of is vulnerability and necessity? How can we place liquid perception at the centre of our methodology? How might we present ecological thinking across disciplinary borders, merging spaces between information and imagination to value the importance life forms beyond our own? These questions are addressed through photography, documentary and animated film, poetry, sound recordings, ethnographic journaling, creative workshop designs, maps, choreography, drawings, architecture and fleeting public responses to art installations. These artistic methods allow space for the evocation of meaning at the edge of linguistic sense – for affect and presence, for space and place, for a becoming-fluid of communication.Â
The seminar will be web-broadcast live as an eSeminar of the ‘Culturizing Sustainable Cities’ project, which is supported by (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal (FCT).
Alys Longley is a performance maker, researcher and teacher. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Dance Studies Programme at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Alys’s research interests include practice-led research, interdisciplinary projects, creative writing, somatic practices, cultural mapping, ecology and inclusive dance education. She has recently led the project fluid city, an art-science-education project on water-sustainability. Her artist-book The Foreign Language of Motion presents a series of experiments in choreographic writing, and was published in 2014 with Winchester University Press’s Preface Series.
