This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Creative Carbon Scotland’s presents our 10 sustainable top picks for the week ahead. We have scoured through the programme of each and every festival to find the best and brightest acts engaging with art and sustainability. From shows to exhibitions, talks and discussions to events, I hope you enjoy our list of the sustainability crème de la crème on show in Edinburgh this week.

1.   A Cinema in South Georgia

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

An exciting, new piece of ensemble theatre written by Jeffrey Mayhew (Swift, Bright is the Ring of Words,) and Susan Wilson (daughter of whaler William Watt). Based entirely on first-hand accounts they bring to life the experiences; bitter, hilarious, rueful and heart-warming, of some of the last men to follow the millennia-old tradition of hunting the whale. It is a celebration, in words and song, of four Eyemouth men, who, at differing points in their lives, in different ways and with differing attitudes and outcomes risked their lives among the Antarctic ice floes.

Shortlisted for the 2015 Fringe Sustainable Practice Award

2.  Antigone

Edinburgh International Festival

Juliette Binoche plays Antigone, a Theban noblewoman whose brother is deemed a traitor after fighting to the death in a vicious civil war. When his body is left unburied beyond the city walls, Antigone defies King Kreon to bury her brother with the honours he deserves.

 

 

3.   Bayou Blues

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Enter the dream, the drowning dream of a girl named Beauty in the bayou of New Orleans. Dive into her conscious, journey into the waters that flood the bayou. Carrying residue of slavery’s damaging effects on black beauty and identity. This story is filled with the rich history of New Orleans taking the audience through Mardi Gras, Congo Square, bounce music and more. True elements to the poetry world now meet the traditions of monologue and dance. Exploring animation and how it relates or challenges visual projections of the world on stage and in Beauty’s world.

Shortlisted for the 2015 Fringe Sustainable Practice Award

4.   Frankenstein

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Lindel Hart’s thrilling new adaptation of Frankenstein highlights the prescience of Mary Shelley’s classic novel. As we lumber headlong into the myriad manmade crises of our era, Frankenstein asks us to examine the monsters we create, and the ones that live within us. What have we done? And perhaps more importantly, what do we do now? Can we transform our story from dominance over nature to a new interconnectedness? Can the human race learn to thrive in respectful relationship with the planet? Three actors portray six central characters as they spiral through the interface between science and humanity.

Shortlisted for the 2015 Fringe Sustainable Practice Award

5.   Garden

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

‘I stick my tongue out a tiny bit. Just a tiny bit. To see what the soil, the ground, the earth tastes like…’ At Insignia Asset Management Lucy is in charge of the photocopier, printer, scanner, shredder and binder. She’s starting to wonder how this fits into The Grand Scheme Of Things. One day Lucy rescues the abused office pot plant and her world alters. Inside her flat 24 floors up, she starts to plant, cultivate, nurture her own personal wilderness. Written and performed by Lucy Grace, Garden tells of one city dweller’s journey into the natural world.

Shortlisted for the 2015 Fringe Sustainable Practice Award

6.   Photosynthesis

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

The first exhibition in Scotland by artists from the Dutch art collective Tropism. Featuring photographs of plants taken with unusual, often scientific, visualisation techniques, the exhibition provides a surprising and spectacularly different view on plants. Botanical installations located around the Garden will fuse art, poetry and science and combine audio, video and classic museum displays. The Tropists are a group of artists that work with phenomena occurring at the edge of perception: events that are hardly noticed, but which lead to a reaction similar to the manner in which a plant responds to light.

Shortlisted for the 2015 Fringe Sustainable Practice Award

7.   Sing For Your Life

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Notorious taxidermy artist Charlie Tuesday Gates has scraped up roadkill, bought deceased dogs on Gumtree and revived her family pet to bring you this five-star, death-defying and hilariously unsettling musical comedy… starring real dead animal puppets. Hold on to your conscience – it’s the greatest show that ever died. ‘A powerful howl of injustice with a distinctive creativity and grotesque charm all of its own.’ ***** (C of E Newspaper). ‘A mass of contradictions … incongruously clever. A sordid, sardonic Sesame Street’ **** (Londonist).

Shortlisted for the 2015 Fringe Sustainable Practice Award

8.   To Space

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

To Space is your telescope into a future and capsule that will preserve the past. Scientist and performer Dr Niamh Shaw has dreamed of space travel from the age of eight. After a year of interviewing astronauts, astrophysicists, space industries and potential future colonists of Mars, she’s discovered that what was once her childhood dream may soon become a reality. In a multimedia immersive performance that buzzes with new technologies, she explores the beauty, darkness and humanity of Space. What is our attraction to Space? What are we chasing – or escaping from?

Shortlisted for the 2015 Fringe Sustainable Practice Award

9.   Tree No. 5 (from the Jadindagadendar) – Charles Avery

Edinburgh Art Festival

Charles Avery’s The Islanders is an evolving lifelong project, dedicated to describing the inhabitants, flora and fauna of a fictional island. At the heart of the island is Onomatopoiea, whose municipal park is called the Jadindagadendar, and is filled, not with living botanical specimens, but with artificial trees, flowers and shrubs, an expression of the islanders’ refutation of nature. For the Improbable City, the theme for this year’s Art Festival Commissions, Avery will realize a tree from the Jadindagadendar. Over five metres tall and ripe with strange fruit, it is cast in bronze, and draws entirely on mathematical equations (including the square root of 2 as well as the Fibonacci sequence) for its design.  Part plant, part sculpture, part temple, Avery’s tree sits within our world and outside it, offering a meeting point, or a place for momentary escape and contemplation.

10.  UN at its best?

Just Festival

Supporters claim the Millennium Development Goals galvanized unprecedented efforts to meet the needs of the world’s poorest people; critics say there’s been very uneven implementation of the goals by topic, country or world region. Will the Sustainable Development Goals be any different?

Chair: Andrew Bevan I Speakers: Joanna Keating, Gillian Wilson, May East, Prof. Pamela Abbott

[Top Image courtesy of Visit Scotland]

The post #GreenFests Top 10 Things to See in Edinburgh This Week appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

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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.

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