This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

Through Persistent Acts, I look at the intersection of performance, climate, and politics. How does hope come to fruition, even in the most dire circumstances? What are tangible alternatives to the oppressive status quo? My Persistent Acts series considers questions of this nature to motivate conversations and actions on climate issues that reverberate through politics and theatre. The Persistent Acts series continues, zeroing in on the particular politicized topic of reproductive justice through the story of the Jane Collective.

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Near the end of Women’s History Month, and in preparation for the annual New York Abortion Access Fund (NYAAF), a cohort of political theatre activists, the Back to Work Collective, staged a reading of the 2018 screenplay Ask for Jane. We organized this reading to raise money and awareness for NYAAF, which provides safe and accessible abortions to anyone in New York.

White supremacy, colonization, and patriarchy – which keep people of color impoverished and LGBTQ+ people marginalized, and seek to restrict women’s right to choose when and how to have a child – are the same power structures that attempt to control nature, assert humans as the dominant species, and prioritize profits over anything else (including the future of life on Earth). Therefore, what happens to women and underrepresented communities cannot be separated from what happens to nature.

Ask for Jane image by Paul Bedard.

Ask for Jane is based on the true story of the Jane Collective, an underground network of abortion providers in Chicago. In the years leading up to the Roe v. Wade decision, these women adopted the Jane moniker to support one another when needs arose for safe and affordable abortions. I had only heard of this story as an organizer of the Back to Work reading, but the Janes had a rippling effect on the movement for legal abortions, and for reproductive rights in general. As one of the Janes and author of The Story of Jane: The Legendary Feminist Abortion Service, Laura Kaplan, puts it:

Those of us who were members of Jane were remarkable only because we chose to act with women’s needs as our guide. In doing so we transformed illegal abortion from a dangerous, sordid experience into one that was life-affirming and powerful.

The impetus for the Jane Collective is inspiring because of this empowering energy. These young women saw the needs of their peers, recognized that establishments were not going to help, and thus took matters into their own hands. Close to fifty years later, as state restrictions counter the Roe v. Wade ruling and abortions are again driven underground, women are still leaning on and learning from one another.

March in support of Roe v. Wade: WBUR.

When the creators of Ask for Jane embarked on their project, they thought the country would be in a much different position at the time of the film’s release. Instead, we’re sliding back to the same place as the conditions prior to Roe v. Wade. The film took on a new urgency, as we followed characters who faced similar conundrums to women today: from feeling option-less when it comes to reproductive “choices” to the insurgence of #MeToo and #TimesUp in the face of sexual violence. The underlying system of patriarchy has remained intact, pitting female (or non-binary) experiences as less worthy than a cis-male experience.

Ask for Jane is the tip of the iceberg in the abortion and reproductive rights conversation. It is also a significant instance of activism and organizing by and for the people. Bringing such stories back to life is an important step in undoing oppressive systems like patriarchy, to look back, remember when times were tougher, and recognize that for some, the circumstances haven’t changed. How can we not just look back on history and learn from it, but also take tangible steps towards equity? Shouldn’t the successes in justice of the past live on, so that we are continually building a world by and for everyone, not just the few?

About 200 members of the Women’s Coalition marched south on State Street from Wacker Drive on May 15, 1971, to the Civic Center demanding equal opportunity, free child care and free abortions. (James Mayo, Chicago Tribune)

In a blink, I’m feeling history fold over itself. Hard-won rights and steps toward equity and inclusion are being threatened and trampled. What is different now, than in the early 1970s for example, is the proliferation of the Internet and digital media, to communicate, magnify, and organize. How can we take learning from history to another level, to get to the root of the oppressive systems, and take actions to stop repression in its tracks? A start is to tell and retell the stories from the margins, amplifying successes of the past and drawing courage from those who have come before. The arts play a role here, as I experienced in hearing Ask for Jane. Despite the differing decades and cities, the necessity of reproductive rights felt more urgent than ever. I am educating myself on stories of struggle and triumph, interrogating dominant narratives, and reevaluating my assumptions of history as static, to build on the momentum of the original Jane Collective and the contemporary Janes, and to tear down the patriarchy.

Take Action
Learn more about reproductive issues and how to take action via the Our Bodies Ourselves organization and the National Network of Abortion Funds.
Meet other performance initiatives on reproductive rights, including Words of Choice and writings by original Jane member Judith Arcana.

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Julia Levine is a creative collaborator and vegetarian. Originally from St. Louis, Julia is now planted in the New York City downtown theatre realm. As a director, Julia has worked on various projects with companies that consider political and cultural topics, including Theater In Asylum, Honest Accomplice Theatre, and Superhero Clubhouse. She is on the Marketing team at HERE Arts Center and is Artistic Producer of The Arctic Cycle. Julia writes and devises with her performance-based initiative to bring questions of food, climate, and justice into everyday life.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

As climate changes continue to impact upon the world, we as a species will need to create truly resilient systems for humanity to live in the natural world with more consideration. An excellent starting point could quite simply be to begin reconnecting with where our food comes from, how it is produced, and what we do with the waste. Thus, as an artist and anthropologist I began to consider ways in which I could find out more about how connected and aware our communities are of the food systems that sustain them.

In January 2018 I presented the creative installation Food for Thought at Rainbow Serpent Festival, an internationally-renowned festival drawing over 20,000 people for a four-day weekend of music and creativity in the Victorian bush in Australia. The installation sought to engage festival goers into dialogue about fresh food consumption and waste practices. I asked: Where does your fresh produce come from and where do you put the waste? The bigger question behind this is, of course, how we can achieve sustainability and resilience within our food systems.

The installation consisted of seven “pods,” each a little over 5-feet tall, with ribs made from marine grade ply, a middle hoop and a mesh fabric skin, hung from trees, lit up at night, and set in sympathy to the site. Natural and found objects were used to construct a walking maze around the pods, which represented different sites of fresh food purchase and waste disposal commonly used by people. In the centre, the earth pod showed four common consumption profiles that you could match your own food print to.

The food mapping installation seeks to provoke and make conscious questions about food consumption and our relationship with the natural world. Inside each of the source pods is information about how far your food has travelled to get to you. Each of the waste pods contains information about what happens to the waste and how it breaks down. Participants were asked to answer a simple question by clicking a hand counter inside the pods. Icons then allow participants to get a sense of their own food print profile from the accompanying information board. You can see more on the food prints here if you want to explore your own.

Our creative research method crosses the disciplinary boundaries of artistic practice and social research. As an interactive installation, the work has an educational and research basis grounded in empirical evidence. Part of the beauty of researching via art is that the piece was specifically designed to inspire curiosity and play, conversation and contemplation, while asking simple survey questions that allowed us to illustrate the consumption and waste practices of festival goers. Alongside this, my collaborators and I collected ethnographic insights on the kinds of conversations and experiences people shared with each other while engaging with the installation.

We estimate from the observed interactions and survey data that around 5,000 people actively engaged with the research side of the project. Throughout the long weekend, we witnessed numerous types of interactions ranging from vague acknowledgements that a pod was hanging down and needed to be sidestepped, to people settling down within the space and actively engaging with the work. Children ran through and around the installation, spinning the pods so that the tendrils splayed out to reveal the openings, leading to further interaction. We overheard people discuss their consumption and waste practices with others, and reflect on how their food print influenced their lifestyles. I also witnessed a grown man hanging and swinging off one of the pods – not the ideal behavior an artist wants to see in relation to their work, but it was good that the pod was robust and resilient enough to take it.

A key finding of the research to date is the sense of guilt and shame felt by many people. Working with Dr. Alexia Maddox and other collaborators, I have run three Food for Thought creative interactive research data collection installations, with the installation at Rainbow Serpent Festival being the latest iteration. High levels of consumption guilt (not linked to behavior change) became apparent in the first two installations. The data collection process in each of these installations asked participants to input their responses to the questions by using a potato or carrot stamp with egg tempura ochre paint onto a collaborative canvas. The first installation was in a gallery and featured a large community created artwork. The second installation took place at a market stall where children and adults alike added their potato or carrot ochre stamps to the initial collaborative piece. At both events, we occupied the installation space and struck up conversations with people about the work. The shame or guilt became known when participants made their marks on the canvas, along with statements like “I wish I could say that I do differently, but I shop at the supermarket and I dispose of the organic waste in the rubbish bin.” On occasion, people would express that they felt as though they had little control over these patterns of consumption and waste. These insights have led us to other questions about how we can, as a society, make it easier for people to behave in ways that they know are good for the planet. This finding on consumption guilt obtained in the first two installations was cemented for us during the festival weekend.

Red cabbage, 153cm x 76cm.

This mobile practice and multi-site installation work is part of a long-term research project that I hope to bring to a variety of places. The purpose is to collect representative data from people across the greater Melbourne region to creatively map fresh food consumption and waste patterns. The final component of the installation will draw together the other creative works, including my large-scale paintings of vegetables, into a collective installation.

Human interaction and perception of the natural world are common themes in my work. As an artist and anthropologist, I thoroughly enjoy the merging of the two disciplines. My new works aim to focus more upon memory spaces, value systems, and the ways in which humans engage with the natural world be it through resource extraction, waste production, or recreational activities. By designing creative low-tech interactive art installations, I ask for contribution from participants in order to stimulate thought and conversations, and encourage input on how we as a species relate to the natural world. Hopefully, this will unearth new and positive ways to relate to the planet that are reflective of different ontological understandings of the natural world.

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Dianna Tarr is an artist and anthropologist located in the Yarra Valley, east of Melbourne, Australia. Informing her creative practice is a deep interest in the ontological understandings of cultural relationships with the non-human, other, life, and the natural world. She explores ways to stimulate thought, response, and action through creative research methods that encourage conversation about some of the world’s most “wicked” problems. Dianna has been awarded numerous grants for creative research and has exhibited extensively over the last twenty years.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

I teach a class at New York University Abu Dhabi called Laughter. I hesitate to even say I teach—it’s more like… I lead a chaotic and artistic lab that produces different results every time, based on who is in the room.

Laughter is part of NYUAD’s Core Curriculum; students explore a big question and engage with different modes of thinking. In Laughter we ask: How does laughter function within us as individuals, in our relationships, and our greater communities? We look at sources of laughter (comedy and humor), and my students and I also become subjects of that inquiry. Every semester my fifteen students are from about ten different countries. They bring themselves—their social and cultural contexts and experiences, their overwhelming intelligence, their amazing sense of humor—to the room and to the work. Using my actor/theatremaker sensibility, I guide them through performances and presentations, collaborative and solo creative writing, devised group projects, peer feedback, and critical response to course texts—a curated compilation that includes live performance, play scripts and films, scholarly writing, and memoir.

Selfie of Aysan and her Fall 2017 Laughter class. Photo courtesy of Aysan Celik.

One such required “text” for our class was a performance of short climate change plays organized as part of Climate Change Theatre Action 2017.

On 8 October 2017, NYUAD’s Theater Program hosted a CCTA event which I co-curated and directed with my colleague and force of nature Catherine Coray. Our global company of NYUAD students, staff, and faculty read eleven plays by various playwrights. The readings were followed by a panel of climate change theatre activists: ecocritic and theatre scholar Una Chaudhuri, playwright Abhishek Majumdar, interdisciplinary artist and director Sarah Cameron Sunde, with Environmental Studies and Public Policy Professor Sophia Kalantzakos as moderator.

Many of my students told me they were surprised by what theatre could do or be, and how quickly the room could shift from joy to awkwardness to pain. They had a strong response to the experience of comedy and laughter with these plays. In this context, for them, laughter did not diminish or dismiss or distract. Rather, it enabled a kind of listening. That’s what interested me most about their response: the fact that laughter created a space, a gap, a gasp, a moment of relaxation to really hear an idea. My student Nikoloz Adeishvili wrote:

[…] the most important part of the whole theatre action was hidden under the punch lines, humor, and beautiful acting. Climate change is the problem we are facing today, but no one really wants to properly talk about it. People usually get bored at very formal events or get overly amused at informal humorous events […] The reading performance managed to grasp the golden middle of the two extremes.

Two moments in particular caused strong reactions: one from Chantal Bilodeau’s Homo Sapiens and the other from Katie Pearl’s Appreciation.

In Homo Sapiens, we’re in the future and audience members are the ancient remaining surviving homo sapiens on display at a nature park. My students were utterly charmed by the characters: evolved humans from the future intrigued by the homo sapiens in front of them, scanning them with their phones for their species name, taking selfies, offering them chocolate, carefully tickling them under their chins. At the end of the play, one character is left alone with the homo sapiens. I think my students were disarmed by the humor so when it came to the character’s last speech they had no time to brace themselves:

[…] you know, whatever happened, I’m sure it was complicated, these things always are, so I’m gonna go out on a limb here and assume that you tried your best. It was a mess, some of you fucked up, some of you fought hard, and here we are. And isn’t it wonderful? You evolved. All of the shit you went through made you evolve into me, a new species, which, granted, is not the greatest thing since sliced bread but it’s a step forward. I mean, think about it. Six extinctions! Not one, not two, six! Six times the earth was nearly wiped out of all life so the odds that you and I would be standing here today…[…] So, thank you. Yeah… Thank you. Whatever you did wrong, you also did a lot of things right and that’s the story I want to remember. That’s the story I want to tell. That’s the story we need to celebrate: us, here, six extinctions later. I’m proud of being your kin, I really am. And I hope the species that comes after me will be proud of being mine.

When I read Katie Pearl’s Appreciation, the students did not immediately realize it was a play; they thought I was just warming the audience up, as co-host of the event. In Appreciation, the lines are a series of prompts to get the audience to applaud for different things (Katie’s stage directions to the actor include “whip them up”). The lines start innocently, with the actor asking the audience to give her a round of applause, and then picking someone in the audience to uproariously applaud for. The actor then prompts the audience with climate change related events that have a hopeful note:

Ok now me again. But wait, first imagine me as um, ice. Not ICE the immigration guys but ice. Like, I can be an icy glacial shelf that is trying not to break off a frozen landmass in the Antarctic. Can you imagine me like that? Ok here I am: I’m holding on tight, trying not to fracture… ok go! Applause!

[Audience applauds!]

Ok great!

Ok now I’m you. No, you’re you. No I’m me and you’re all a piece of land that went to court and won rights as a person, that won HUMAN RIGHTS! Let’s give that a round of applause, that is amazing! That took a lot of work!

[Audience applauds.]

A few lines later, increasingly devastating scenarios are introduced:

Ok now it is 2011 and a man is going diving in the ocean in Japan, looking for his wife who got swept away by a Tsunami.

Ok now it is 2011 and you are the mother who is still floating a lunch down into the waves for her daughter who never was found from that same tsunami.

Can we give that some love, a little applause, I mean: talk about commitment!!

The play continues on, brilliantly so, shifting back and forth to different images related to climate change, based on past, present or future possibilities.

Many of my students expressed that was the moment when they knew they did not want to applaud—for the man diving into the ocean and the mother sending the lunch into the waves. That moment interests me. The shift in the room could be physically felt: the quality of the silence was incredible and awful. My sense is that their experience was something like this: they breathed in, preparing to laugh and clap as they had done repeatedly. They listened in a kind of shocked suspension, and in that gap, in that open-ness they heard and felt that image in a whole different way.

NYUAD students, staff, and faculty read Oh How We Loved Our Tuna! by Amahl Khouri. Photo courtesy of the NYUAD Theater Program.

The same student, Nik, wrote:

We as humans constantly “clap” for issues like climate change, we recognize the problem, but our only response is clapping, liking stuff on social media, or reading an article. What humor—and in some cases, dark humor—manages to do is raise awareness through joy and fun. Maybe more performances like this will make people do more than just clap.

During the panel discussion afterwards, Una introduced the idea of toggling back and forth between right now and a larger sense of time. What a perfect lens to examine how theatre might help us grasp and respond to climate change. In those two moments I described from Appreciation and Homo Sapiens (and many more), laughter facilitated that toggling. The experience of laughter popped us into a very present, in-the-moment space of sensitivity to the reality of a not-too-distant future. It enabled us to imagine the consequences, right now. Could laughter, as counterintuitive as it may seem, catalyze connection, accountability, and action? At the CCTA event, for my students and I, it did: carefully, intelligently, artfully so.

(Top image: NYUAD students, staff, and faculty read Oh How We Loved Our Tuna! by Amahl Khouri. Photo courtesy of the NYUAD Theater Program.)

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Aysan Celik is an actor, theatremaker and Assistant Arts Professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. She is a founding member of Theater Mitu and is a Civilian. She was recently seen in The Civilians’ The Undertaking at 59E59 and the rolling world premiere of Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s The Making of a Great Moment at Merrimack Rep and Z Space. With Mitu, Aysan recently co-created and performed Juárez: A Documentary Mythology. Aysan is originally from California, and splits her time between Abu Dhabi, New York, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

I have been doing work at the intersection of arts and climate change for over a decade, and though I have no scientific data to back what I’m about to say, I have observed that women climate much more than men—that is to say, this particular intersection is overwhelmingly female. I have found this to be true again and again, whether I’m leading workshops, commissioning playwrights, or publishing essays by artists who engage with the issue. As soon as you say “arts” and “climate change” in the same sentence, the traditional male/female ratio gets reversed.

In a world where we have to fight tooth and nail for equal representation, how did women manage to claim a space, let alone that space, for themselves? Although this state of affairs seems to be true in all of the arts, including the theatre, it is certainly not true in the sciences. According to the National Girls Collaborative Project, women make up only 29 percent of the science and engineering workforce. And my own unscientific observations, based on who I meet at universities and climate change conferences, confirm that there are far more male climate scientists than female. So, what is it about the intersection of arts and climate change that attracts women, or, at the very least, that hasn’t caught most men’s attention yet?

Gaia. 8838: Tellus. Roman relief, 13–9 BC. Marble, Ara Pacis. Royal Cast Collection, Copenhagen.

Since we are the primary caretakers of children, I suppose it follows that we would be the primary caretakers of the planet. How we bond with our offspring must be similar to how we bond with nature and our environment. In almost all cultures Mother Earth is female so there is clearly a deep-rooted connection; think of Gaia (Greek), Pachamama (Inca), Jörð (Norse). Not to mention the countless female deities associated with nature such as goddesses of water, wild animals, mountains, forests, etc. But while this reasoning may be partly true, I hesitate to see it as absolute and reinforce traditional gender roles. If the nurturing impulse was the sole driving force, we would be a majority in more than one discipline that has climate change as its primary focus.

Could this gender imbalance be a function of the deeply entrenched inequalities in the arts, which keep women in the margin, away from economically viable opportunities and the eyes of the public? Used to being cut off from the mainstream, we may be turning to where we feel we can have an impact. With climate change being so politically charged, small and nontraditional venues are more likely to engage with it than large institutions. Those venues are also more likely to have a woman at the helm, which, in turn, increases the chances of women artists working there. Since commercial success is mostly inaccessible to us, maybe we choose to focus on issues that are personally meaningful rather than financially rewarding.

In addition, according to UN Women, climate-induced disasters exacerbate entrenched gender inequalities. Or, as the title of a WomenWatch article aptly describes it, The Threats of Climate Change are not Gender-Neutral. In impoverished countries, women and girls face greater health and safety risks as resources become scarce or compromised, and they are more likely to become victims of gender violence. Women also have less access to decision-making and economic assets that may mitigate the effects of climate change. Female artists may be especially attuned to this reality and understand the need to address climate change as an imperative to protect ourselves.

I brought up this question of gender in relation to arts and climate change in a few conversations recently to see if anyone had any insight. A colleague from the UK cited women’s ability to collaborate as a possible factor influencing female artists’ decisions to engage this issue. Climate change mitigation and adaptation requires collaborative problem-solving across many sectors and an ability to bring multiple partners together. Since women show greater proficiency in this skill than men, she posited, wouldn’t they naturally gravitate toward a field that requires working across disciplines and establishing successful collaborations? I did a bit of research to see if there was data out there that supported this claim. This is what I found:

According to an article from BBC News, a worldwide study conducted in schools shows that girls outperform boys at collaborative problem solving. Girls “show more positive attitudes towards relationships, meaning that they tend to be more interested in others’ opinions and want others to succeed.” Another study done by the School of Management at the University of Buffalo reveals that “when male-dominated work groups foster collaboration and communication, it’s women who are more likely to emerge as leaders.” Because groups tend to choose leaders who exemplify their values, when those values include communication and increased interactions between members, women have a leadership advantage.

Women in Uganda carrying water from a shallow well in plastic jerricans. Photo from waterjournalistsafrica.com.

Further research produced another interesting article published by Stanford Medicine about the cognitive differences between men’s and women’s brains. Women retain stronger, more vivid memories of emotional events than men do. They also recall emotional memories more quickly, and the ones they recall are richer and more intense. As a warning not to jump to easy conclusions though, the Stanford article concludes: “Trying to assign exact percentages to the relative contributions of ‘culture’ versus ‘biology’ to the behavior of free-living human individuals in a complex social environment is tough at best. … The role of culture is not zero. The role of biology is not zero.”

In light of these studies, it seems reasonable to say that women tend to work more collaboratively than men, and that this propensity may be a factor in why female artists are taking on climate change in greater number than their male counterparts who are better equipped at solving problems alone. And if women do, in fact, have stronger and more vivid memories of emotional events then men do, and recall them more quickly and intensely, wouldn’t it be harder for us to turn away from the tragedies brought on by climate change? Wouldn’t we feel compelled to expose them in every way we can and work to prevent more from happening?

All of this suggests that there isn’t one reason but, more likely, multiple reasons why women climate more than men. And these reasons are both internal and external. They have to do with who we are biologically, how our genetic makeup predisposes us to seek or excel at certain things, and how we relate to our life circumstances and exist in a world where our chosen roles are affirmed or denied by our communities.

OK. This is perfectly logical, but entirely uninspiring. Let’s try something more radical.

Is it possible that female artists are intuiting the world’s need for certain skills, know that they are ours to offer, and actively seeking ways to use these skills in service of a different future? Are we slowly establishing ourselves as leaders by using the arts, a fairly benign point of entry, to show what is possible? Are we engaging with climate change because it’s urgent, yes, but also because it’s the most obvious leverage point in creating a more gender-balanced world?

Forgive me for waxing poetic here but I do believe there is truth to the saying “The Future is Female.” It’s no coincidence that the #MeToo movement is happening in this very moment and that women all over the world are taking to the streets. Yes, it took a corrupt, racist, misogynist, narcissistic, and generally disgusting president in the United States to galvanize us, but the abuses perpetrated against women—whether sexual or other—are no different from the abuses perpetrated against our planet.

Luckily, the systems that have made those abuses possible are starting to crack. And we saw what happened last summer when a crack in the Larson C ice shelf grew to the point where an iceberg the size of Delaware, weighing one trillion tons, broke free from the Antarctic continent. Cracks are to be taken seriously. If you keep chipping at them, they invariably turn into earth-shattering events.

Perhaps after millennia, the cosmic pendulum is finally swinging back toward the feminine. Thanks to women everywhere, perhaps the yin is finally reasserting itself and reclaiming its share stolen by the yang. And perhaps just like our days running our economy on fossil fuel are numbered, our time running the world on testosterone is over.

And to the men out there who may be wondering what’s going on, I say: Join us! We need you! We need you in the #MeToo movement. We need you in the environmental movement. We need you making deep, challenging, beautiful, provocative, earth-shattering work at the intersection of arts and climate change so we can all find our way forward together. A number of your peers—brave male artists, including wonderful theatre artists—are already doing this work, but we need more. And don’t be mistaken: this is not about hugging trees (though if you’ve never hugged a tree, I highly recommend it). This is about figuring out whether we have it in us, as a species, to continue living on this earth with justice and integrity.

Before I sign off, here’s a last bit of statistics from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs:

The evidence is clear: wherever women take part in a peace process, peace lasts longer. In fact, a peace agreement, which includes women, is 35 percent more likely to last at least fifteen years. And without the solid foundation of peace, development is doomed to be unstable and unsustainable.

Climate change. Justice. Peace. We got it.

Now, Ladies. Let’s climate some more, shall we?

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Chantal Bilodeau is a playwright and translator whose work focuses on the intersection of science, policy, art, and climate change. She is the Artistic Director of The Arctic Cycle – an organization created to support the writing, development and production of eight plays that look at the social and environmental changes taking place in the eight countries of the Arctic – and the founder of the blog and international network Artists & Climate Change. She is a co-organizer of Climate Change Theatre Action, a worldwide series of readings and performances of short climate change plays presented in support of the United Nations COP meetings.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

Despite being more connected than we ever have been, today’s world is, arguably, more fragmented than it has been since we entered the era of the global village. We can track the shift: think Brexit, Trump, and the rising of imaginary walls in what seems like a regression to Cold War-era isolationism.

But let’s not be too quick to become despondent. I believe the fault lines we’re seeing emerge are probably the last hurrah of old, staid ways of thinking. Traditional power is in a corner, and right now it happens to be screaming the loudest. The more people feel their way of life (or thinking) is under threat, the more likely they are to retreat into silos where all ideas are familiar and comfortable.

That’s where the artist comes in: to challenge, to disrupt, to interrogate what makes people uncomfortable, and push us towards understanding ourselves and the world more fully. Good art is often not born out of comfortable spaces, but comes from conflict and collision – and it’s not until there’s difference that people collide. Through collision there’s an exchange of ideas and perspectives, and through that exchange, if those involved are really listening and applying themselves, art, as well as the acknowledgement of a shared humanity and connection to the planet we live on.

“Every culture has its origins in hybridization, interaction, confrontation. In isolation, by contrast, civilization dies out. The experience of the other is the secret to change,” writes Octavio Paz in an essay on art and culture.

Young people today feel less defined by national borders, and increasingly see themselves as global citizens. Modern technology and media connect us all. We are increasingly becoming aware of “the other,” of how their differences manifest in their perspectives, and we are learning to listen, sometimes readily, sometimes with more resistance. If we accept our role as artists, and take responsibility for creating art that grasps at truth, we can tap into the collision and the difference, experience others, and challenge each other, as well as our audiences. Art is, after all, confrontation. We can become a collective made up of a kaleidoscope of culture that pushes new modes of expression.

But to do this, we need to think outside the box. We need to go outside the box if we are to collide. We need to be curious, raise questions, and be understanding, even if we don’t find the answers that we sought. We need to think differently about booking art, making it, marketing it, curating it and selling it. We need to dismantle traditional ways of thinking to build newer, more nimble models that adapt to the world’s changing dynamics and reflect our myriad of truths, through our practices and experiences.

This work is already happening in museums, in art centers, in hospitals, in academia, in businesses. It’s happening everywhere, in all the spaces in which there’s tension, where we push ourselves in new and potentially unknown and brave directions. I like to call our generation, especially the youth of today, the “slash” (/) generation because we’re not afraid to throw caution to the wind and try our hands at new and exciting things. Today’s artists, myself included, wear many different hats.

In addition to my roles as theatremaker, educator, and international arts advocate/consultant, and underpinning all of them, I’m a connector. I’m curious about people and I encourage them to be curious about one another. I’m fortunate enough to be able to facilitate the exchange of ideas and practices through programming conferences and hosting long tables where the art “elite” sit alongside young cultural innovators. These forums are vital sites for disruption because artists are the real cultural diplomats, as their creations speak to the people, their audiences, the loudest, and make further linkages possible.

Too often I hear people say they “can’t.” “How?” they ask. They get so bogged down by that question that they don’t even think about the what. They don’t realize that the closer they get to the what, the clearer it becomes, the more the question of how begins to fall away. When I hear an artist say, “I can’t,” I ask: “How do you work in a field of imagination, of dreams, of access, and say it cannot be done? You are here, in this field where we have the privilege of engaging with ideas and expression, and with that, comes responsibility. You must speak your truth. You are a thought leader. Discover what you have to offer, acknowledge it, and let it radiate from you. You’re here. You have power. You’re in a position to make a difference and create change.”

There’s a dire need in art, and the world today, for voices to speak, limbs to tweak, brushes to streak, from a new, diverse generation of artists. The current fragmented world this generation grows up in, just like others before, is a particularly fertile ground for the creation of art. Increasingly, our communities are rich with people from all walks of life. It’s an ideal space for collision, for learning, for artistic expression. Let us not pigeonhole what culture should be. Let us not build walls around our traditions. Instead, let’s allow ourselves to engage and collide with all the “others” around us, and march to the tune of a future that’s pregnant with potential. Let’s tap into our moment of political and ideological fission to create art that does not shy away from difference or shirk uncomfortable questions. Engage. Learn. Create. The world is our audience…as well as our teacher.

(Images: I-DENT-I-TIES, a large-scale interdisciplinary performance project with 50 students of the University of the Free State Qwa Qwa Campus, South Africa. Creative Team: Djana Covic, Nico de Rooij, and Erwin Maas.)

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Erwin Maas is a New York based theatremaker, educator and international arts advocate from the Netherlands. He has worked extensively in Australia, Europe, South Africa and USA. In New York, he directs numerous productions Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway as well as Site Specific. Maas is the Artistic Director of the International Society for Performing Arts (ISPA), Artistic Associate & Director of the Fellowship Program for the International Performing Arts for Youth (IPAY), Co-founding Director of the Pan-African Creative Exchange (PACE), and the Programming Director for the Off Broadway Origin Theatre Company. 

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

I have travelled to many out-of-the-way places but the Antarctic landscape, or my imagined Antarctica, has been on my mind for as long as I can remember. It was like a mythical place that was rumored to be real. I visited Antarctica two years ago in January and feel like a part of me is still there.

Before leaving I read several books, but nothing could have prepared me for what I experienced while there. My initial impression was one of suspended belief – I had no point of reference for what I was seeing, making it impossible to take in. The scene from the ship felt like a backdrop for a movie or a play. When I finally kayaked and spent time with the landscape, I began to absorb what I was seeing and close the physical and mental distance I felt at first; I had to touch it to believe it was real. Because Antarctica is so quiet and the color palette limited to mostly grays, blues, and white, I could take in more than usual: limited distractions amplified my perceptions. Time felt suspended and this slowed-down quality allowed for increased sensitivity to my surroundings. Even my ability to listen seemed more acute. Sounds consisted of the ocean, wind, creaking glaciers, penguins, and whales blowing and breaching. Calving glaciers sounded like cannons going off – it was beautiful and terrifying and more alive than any landscape I have visited. The poet John O’Donohue wrote: “the landscape is not just matter but it is as alive as you.” The place has a palpable power that is indescribable.

Real Blue, 2017. Pigment print with gouache, graphite, and charcoal.

Antarctica is enormous in every way and the idea of “capturing” it with anything, including a camera, seemed ridiculous and not something I was capable of. I shot a lot of footage not knowing what I was going to do with it. After I got back, it took a year before I looked at the images. Instead, I researched and read to try to make sense of my intense response and the trip’s lingering resonance. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s essay  “Eye and Mind” was interesting and helpful. He writes about the world and the body being made of the same “stuff” and the “undividedness” of things. I read about “jouissance” from the perspective of Hélène Cixous and gained further insight from Donna Haraway’s brilliant book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. These readings and more helped me understand the recalibration that occurred while I was in Antarctica. I realized I have always been uncomfortable with our culture built upon a platform of human exceptionalism. I experienced a place as alive and deserving of respect as any human being.

Blue Flow, 2017. Pigment print with ink and graphite.

I decided to document the feeling of Antarctica and continue to learn from it in my studio. I traced the architecture of the icebergs and glaciers with graphite and charcoal as a way of remembering the nuances of its form. I emphasized certain remarkable traits such as the impossible neon blue color as well as the millions of variations of blue. While studying my photographic documentation, I tried to mimic Antarctica’s palette and made almost invisible markings on the photographs with ink, charcoal, graphite, and gouache. When printing the final pieces, I played with the density of the photograph only to emphasize certain elements that I remembered but worried were easy to overlook at the reduced scale. I hope the viewer who hasn’t been to Antarctica might experience some of what I experienced. I would love to have the opportunity to take this work outside of art venues to the broader population, and share these observations with as many people as possible. The more the human population embraces the Earth as a companion needing our care, and not as a supply house and a sewer, the better our chances of stopping the destruction.

Lone Glow, 2017. Pigment print with charcoal and ink.

I’m still working on the Antarctica images in the studio and don’t know when I’ll move on to another body of work. I’ve never worked on a particular series this long but I can’t seem to let go. Since Antarctica is melting and could disappear soon, it’s difficult to stop. The government is working against us and Trump has no interest in accepting climate change or in protecting the environment. I feel committed to Antarctica as both a powerful teacher and a critical place that must survive if we are to maintain a thriving world.

Iceberg Study #2, 2017. Pigment print with gouache and graphite.

(Top image: Electric, 2018. Pigment print with ink and graphite.)

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Liza Ryan uses her work in photography, video and mixed media to explore themes such as the presentation and disruption of the visual narrative; the fluid psychological relationship between real and imagined spaces; processes of release, dispersal, and disappearance; and the intimate, undeniable connection between humans and the natural world.  Travel and extensive multi-disciplinary research are integral to her practice. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. She is represented by Kayne Griffin Corcoran Gallery in Los Angeles.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

The question of impact in the arts is a vexing one. Not only is impact difficult to define, it is almost impossible to quantify. Talking about impact can create the expectation that the transaction between art and audience is predictable and replicable. But it is not. Good art is unpredictable and unique, and its impact doesn’t translate neatly into a spreadsheet. As a young playwright, I used to think that impact was measured by the size of the audience: How many people bought tickets? Eventually, I came to realize that this view was reductive. By focusing on numbers alone, I was overlooking smaller, subtler clues that revealed a much more profound and, I suspect, lasting impact.

Four groups, organized in concentric circles from smallest to biggest, are invited to experience the impacts of a work of art: the artist(s), the audience, the field, and the larger community. In the theatre, many artists – actors, directors, dramaturgs and designers, to name a few – are involved in the production of a play. Therefore, before the work is shared with an audience, it has the potential to affect many people. This became apparent to me when I was working on productions on my play Sila in 2014 and 2015. Set in the territory of Nunavut, Sila examines the impact of climate change on the Canadian Arctic and local Inuit population. As the themes from the play emerged through the rehearsal process, actors and directors became more attuned to the reality of climate change, dramaturgs formulated new research topics, and designers developed an interest in sustainability. That is impact.

Artistic Vibrancy Onion – a way for arts organizations to conceptualize their impact and strategic investment. Courtesy: BYP Group.

After the artists, the next group to experience a work of art is the audience. In this case, numbers do tell a story. But by themselves, they don’t tell the whole story. Numbers are a refection of interest, not impact. Impact happens later, in the privacy of one’s home. It happens a day, a week, or even a year after encountering the work. And it is subtle. A friend once explained to me that political campaigns divide voters into categories, building a pie chart that separates groups into their political inclinations. The categories go from far left to far right, with a number of variations in between. The goal of the campaign is not to convince voters on the right to vote for the left, or vice versa. The goal is to move voters to the adjacent category in the chart. To affect one small, incremental change.

My plays focus on climate change. It would be tempting to think that impact means turning non-believers into activists. Or believers into fanatics. But that is unrealistic. Art opens up a space for conversation; it doesn’t, or shouldn’t, relentlessly push an agenda. We have to meet people where they are, and allow them to take their own journey, at their own pace. At best, I hope I can encourage people to move one step: to the adjacent category in the pie chart. Perhaps someone who doesn’t believe in climate change will be open to hearing more about it. Or perhaps someone who already believes will be inspired to take a more active role. That is impact.

Beyond the immediate transaction between artist and audience, the third group that can potentially be impacted by a work of art is the field. Every play is part of an ongoing conversation with the entire theatre community. As such, every play has the power to influence the next play – to expand our ideas about process, form, aesthetics, and ideology, and to shine a light on a conversation that may be missing from the stage. In collaboration with some colleagues, I have been working on a project called Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA) in support of the United Nations Conference of the Parties. CCTA is a series of worldwide readings and performances intended to bring awareness to, and foster discussion around, climate change. For our last iteration in 2017, 140 events were presented in more than 20 countries. Many of these events are intimate; they take place in classrooms or rehearsal studios, with only a handful of people in attendance. But the conversation within the theatre community is far-reaching. Already, the project has shown that it is possible to address climate change without sacrificing artistic integrity; that local action can translate into a global movement and that the theatre is a powerful tool for social change.

CCTA also creates community. Fifty playwrights wrote 50 shorts plays that were made available to collaborators worldwide. For each event, collaborators select the plays they want to present and send us the list. We publicize this information on social media and connect collaborators with playwrights, and other collaborators. In addition to the local conversation happening around each event, a greater conversation is taking place across time zones between artists who have never met. Plays adapted into short films in California are being screened in Germany and India. Playwrights in the US are reading their plays live on Skype for events in Australia. And so on. Some of these relationships may outlive the project and lead to more collaborations. Some of these events may inspire other organizations to do similar events. That is impact.

Sophorl Ngin, Reneltta Arluk and Nael Nacer in the Underground Railway Theater production of Sila. Copyright: A.R. Sinclair Photography.

Finally, the biggest of the four concentric circles is the larger community. Typically, this is not a group we think about. I certainly didn’t until I started focusing on climate change. Yet to achieve maximum impact, conversations have to transcend the walls of the theatre. With my play Sila, and the other seven plays of The Arctic Cycle, I strive to bring together people who may not normally encounter each other. I hope to build bridges between disciplines – science, policy, technology, humanities, and the arts. This means presenting the play in non-traditional settings such as academic conferences, scientific institutions, or university classes. It also means collaborating with earth and social scientists early in the process, inviting community stakeholders to participate in talkbacks, and engaging local environmental organizations. In 2014, excerpts of Sila served as the keynote for the conference “Warming Arctic: Development, Stewardship, Science” at Tufts University. The play introduced the topics that were going to be discussed during the conference, but framed them within personal narratives. It set a different tone for the conference and challenged scientists and policymakers to think beyond numbers. It also created a dialogue between science, policy, and the arts.

The same is true for the CCTA project. For one of the events in New York City in 2015, we invited a NASA climate scientist to talk about COP21 and the role of narrative in effecting social change. A dance company in Brooklyn, New York, invited a representative from the local chapter of the international organization 350.org to talk about their current initiatives. And various universities are incorporating their CCTA event into a larger conference that includes earth and social science, or in one case, leaders from three different faiths. This kind of cross-pollination promotes a better understanding of how people from different disciplines are tackling climate change, and how we can best support global efforts. It also creates a model for the kind of cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural collaboration that is possible in dealing with this global issue. That is impact.

Increasing self-awareness and affecting social change on a global level won’t happen overnight. It is unlikely someone will walk out of a play, sell his or her car, and sign up to Greenpeace. We do ourselves a disservice when we look for immediate impacts based on metrics. From time immemorial, the role of the arts has been to create the narrative that holds culture together. Rewriting that narrative won’t be easy. It is without a doubt the biggest, most fundamental shift humankind has ever had to make. Our job then is to celebrate every small step along the way. Our job is to recognize that there is potential for impact in every idea, every interaction, every performance, no matter how modest. Spreadsheets may lure us into thinking we are doing important work. But the faster we learn to see where meaningful impact is, the better our chances of creating the sustainable culture we desperately need to ensure our survival.

An earlier version of this article appeared in Fresh Perspectives 4: Art for the Planet’s Sake, published by IETM International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts, in December 2015.

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Chantal Bilodeau is a playwright and translator whose work focuses on the intersection of science, policy, art, and climate change. She is the Artistic Director of The Arctic Cycle – an organization created to support the writing, development and production of eight plays that look at the social and environmental changes taking place in the eight countries of the Arctic – and the founder of the blog and international network Artists & Climate Change. She is a co-organizer of Climate Change Theatre Action, a worldwide series of readings and performances of short climate change plays presented in support of the United Nations COP meetings.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

Certain species of fish spawn in different locations. Pods of gray whales no longer overwinter at the equator. Yellow cedars are moving north. Those observations were related to us, a group of artists engaged with climate change, while we were traveling through Southeast Alaska as part of the Tidelines Ferry Tour in April 2016. It didn’t matter whether we were in Kake, Ketchikan, or Kodiak. The specifics differed, but the story was the same: Patterns of migration are changing.

The purpose of the tour, organized by the Island Institute in Sitka, was twofold: 1) to share our work with the communities we visited, and 2) to host public conversations where people were invited to talk about the changes they are witnessing in their respective environments. Throughout the month, we visited nine communities ranging in population from 600 to 300,000, hopping on and off the ferry, often in the middle of the night, and relying on strangers to open their homes to us. When we were lucky, we were invited into tribal houses and treated to stories about life in Alaska.

I was there to do research for a play about migration. This play is the third in a series of eight plays titled The Arctic Cycle that look at the social and environmental changes taking place in the eight Arctic states. The first two plays, set in Canada and Norway, deal with oil, sovereignty, cultural identity, responsibility, and legacy. I had been searching for a different angle with which to approach the play set in Alaska, the United States’ Arctic territory. When I came across an article about Syrian refugees crossing the border between Russia and Norway on bicycles, I decided to look at migration.

Migration is universal. Whether human or animal, voluntary or forced, fluid or disrupted, it is one of the most important survival skills we possess. We migrate for food, security, and better climate. We migrate to escape predators, birth our young, and seek opportunity. We migrate because the route is mapped in our genes, and because we yearn for change.

Porcupine caribou migration. Downloaded from http://www.learner.org.

At the top of the world, where everything is magnified, migration is a spectacular annual event. Whether it is porcupine caribou on the coastal plains, snow geese in the Matanuska Valley, or salmon in the Chilkat and Copper rivers, the astonishing number of individuals who gather in one spot year after year boggles the mind. And perhaps less visible but just as significant in shaping the Alaskan landscape are the waves of human migration that have washed over the state in the last several thousand years: the first inhabitants who crossed the Bering Land Bridge, Russian and British settlers, fortune seekers during the Gold Rush, and job seekers during the oil boom.

Sadly, with the onslaught of climate change, migration has taken on negative connotations. Increased warming has changed the Arctic environment. Some migratory birds now arrive too late in the spring and miss the most nutritious vegetation growth, sometimes causing massive die-off. The northern movement of shrubs is impacting caribou, muskoxen, and other animals that depend on tundra habitat. And several human communities are facing relocation due to severe erosion that threatens their villages and infrastructure. For months, I have agonized over this information, wondering how to write about it. What does this mean for our world and for us? Where is the poetic lesson? Where are the hidden metaphors that could point to possible ways forward?

Sunset on Kodiak Island. Photo: Chantal Bilodeau.

These questions were swirling in my head when, in September 2016, I participated in the first Citizen Artist Incubator hosted at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria. During the residency, I reached out to a number of scientists, including economist Jesus Crespo Cuaresma in the World Population Program and Ulf Diekmann, Program Director of the Evolution and Ecology Program. I asked about climate change and migration. I asked about evolution and intelligent design. And I asked about human nature.

In a cruel twist of fate, I lost the notebook that contained all this precious information a few months later, but two important points stayed with me. From Diekmann and his group, I learned that adaptation is a response to an immediate challenge. Then, as those challenges evolve, so does the response. In other words, any given species doesn’t start by migrating thousands and thousands of miles. The original migration was probably very short, but as the environment kept changing, the length of the journey slowly increased. The second point came from Crespo Cuaresma. After spending an hour poring over a Global Migration Data Sheet that showed human migration flows between 2005 and 2010 and discussing the pros and cons of immigration, I asked him if there was anything I could communicate in my work that he would like people to know. After the briefest of pauses, he said: “Migration is a positive thing.”

Downloaded from http://www.global-migration.info.

Sometimes changing the color of your lens makes a world of difference. I don’t mean to make light of the incredible hardship suffered by both humans and nonhumans who are forced to migrate under dire circumstances. But if we just put aside the cause for a moment and focus on the action itself, don’t we have plenty of reasons to rejoice? As an adaptation strategy, migration is an act of resistance. It’s the species learning to survive under new conditions. It’s life affirming its creative power.

Yes, we need to address climate change—even more urgently now that we have an administration determined to ignore it. Yes, we need to understand the risks and prepare for what’s to come. Yes, this is a scary time. But—and perhaps this is where the poetic lesson lies—let’s not forget all the ways in which we manage to survive. Let’s celebrate the determination and courage of those who either migrate for the first time or modify their age-old migration route. They are our climate change heroes.

I recently learned that beluga whales are delaying their migration south and staying in the Arctic longer because sea ice takes longer to freeze up each fall. Of course, we have no way to predict whether this will be a successful adaptation strategy, but while before, my first reaction would have been to fear for the beluga, today I say thank you. Thank you for adapting. Thank you for doing everything you can to survive. Thank you for giving me and the Earth the miracle of your continued existence.

(Top image: Traveling through the inside passage on the Alaska ferry system. Photo: Chantal Bilodeau.)

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Chantal Bilodeau is a playwright and translator whose work focuses on the intersection of science, policy, art, and climate change. She is the Artistic Director of The Arctic Cycle – an organization created to support the writing, development and production of eight plays that look at the social and environmental changes taking place in the eight countries of the Arctic – and the founder of the blog and international network Artists & Climate Change. She is a co-organizer of Climate Change Theatre Action, a worldwide series of readings and performances of short climate change plays presented in support of the United Nations COP meetings.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

The seventh in a year-long series on artists who are making the topic of water a focus of their work and on the growing number of exhibitions, performances and publications that are popping up in museums, galleries and public spaces around the world with water as a theme.

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Music reflects the cultural mood of a society and, at the same time, is a powerful medium for promoting change and encouraging action. Throughout American history, songs of dissent have influenced the outcome of wars and social movements. During the 1960s and 1970s, voices like Woody Guthrie, Sam Cooke, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Jimi Hendrix, Nina Simone, James Brown, Marvin Gaye and numerous others engaged an entire generation in protesting against an undeclared war with no end in sight and for civil rights with songs like We Shall Overcome, The Times They Are a Changing, Ohio, What’s Going On, Change Gonna Come and We Shall Not Be Moved, etc. Outside the United States, inspiring songs such as L’Internationale, a 19^th century anthem of revolution worldwide, continues to call to the oppressed to rise up against tyranny. Today, artists like Beyoncé (Freedom) and Kendrick Lamar (Alright) are reaching global audiences with current anthems of discontent against racial and social injustice. By embedding a message in music, a single voice can inspire millions.

Understanding just how effectively music can shape public opinion and behavior, the government of Cape Town, South Africa, in partnership with the finance firm Sanlam, has sponsored an innovative project that directly impacts the conservation of the city’s critically diminishing supply of water. They commissioned ten of South Africa’s leading musical stars to adapt their existing songs into a 2-minute format to help residents limit their daily showers to exactly 120 seconds in compliance with current regulations. The 2-minute songs were consolidated into an album that is free and easily accessible for downloading on a dedicated website and on YouTube. According to instructions on the 2-Minute Shower Song website: “start the song and turn up the volume…when the song ends, so should the shower.”

South African rapper Kwesta recording a song for the “2-Minute Shower Songs” album. Courtesy of Sanlam.

The 2-Minute Shower Songs are not merely a response to the abstract concept of conserving water for a shortage projected to occur sometime in the distant future. Cape Town is on the verge of becoming the first major city in the world to completely run out of water within a few months. Day Zero, the date when the city’s reservoirs fall to 13.5 % capacity, is currently set to occur on July 15, 2018. The city’s drastically reduced water supply is the result of three consecutive years of very low rainfall. Of the 50 liters or about 13 gallons of water a day that is the recommended allotment to residents, 20 liters or 40% of the daily water limit is consumed during a 2-minute shower. Without severe conservation and significant rainfall, the taps will be turned off on Day Zero, forcing the entire population of 4 million to line up for daily water rations.

Theewaterskloof Dam, a major source of water for Cape Town on January 25, 2018, in Villiersdorp, South Africa. Courtesy of Brenton Geach, Gallo Images, Getty Images.

The 2-Minute Shower Song project is the brainchild of the King James Group, a creative team that developed the original concept of a billboard campaign into a way of “tapping into almost everyone’s hidden pleasure of singing in the shower.” In a February 8, 2018 interview for the South African on-line publication, Bizcommunity, Susan van Rooyen and Moe Kekana of King James Group explained the creative process behind how the campaign was devised:

The project originally began as a billboard brief, trying to figure out how we could communicate or give people a way to save water. And when the City of Cape Town urged everyone to cut down water in the bathroom specifically, we found our insight: Many of us, whether we like to admit it or not, sing in the shower. And if we could use that to manage how long people spent in the shower, we could help save water. But an idea that size wasn’t going to fit on a billboard. And so, the #2minuteshowersongs were born: Songs you can sing along to, but that also tell you when your shower time is up.

Rooyen and Kekana noted that the artists’ commitment to the project was “phenomenal.” In response to a question about the recording process and the results of the campaign, they summarized:

In just four days they recorded the ten songs and produced an album in under two weeks. The sense of urgency in the songs, the urgency to make it happen, was a reflection of the crisis. There is something so pure, yet so powerful about music. And that’s what we needed to really make our message heard.

Our campaign spread further than we anticipated. Not only were Capetonians singing along to shorten their showers, but they were singing on the radio, and even created their own versions of our shower songs in an effort to keep water use down. Word also spread across international waters with our campaign being featured on the climate change section of Time.com and on BBC radio.

The ten artists and their songs include: Kwesta (Boom Shaka Laka); Mi Casa (Nana); Good Luck (Taking it Easy); Fifi Cooper (Power of Gold); Francis Van Coke (Dit raak beter); Jimmy Nevis (Day Dream); Rouge (Déjà vu); Desmond & and the Tutus (Teenagers); Youngsta (Wes Kaap); and Springbok Nude Girls (Bubblegum on My Boots).

Promotional photos of artists, courtesy of Sanlam.

The 2-Minute Shower Song website includes all of the songs and a “Behind the Scenes” video showing a brief excerpt of the recording process. Musician Good Luck expressed his motivation for participating in the project by stating, “I worry that if everyone stays nonchalant about the seriousness of the situation, then they’re going to wake up one day and realize there’s no water coming out of the taps.”


(Top image: Courtesy Associated Press.)

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Susan Hoffman Fishman is a painter, public artist, writer, and educator whose work has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries throughout the U.S. Her latest bodies of work focus on the threat of rising tides caused by climate change, the trillions of pieces of plastic in our oceans and the wars that are predicted to occur in the future over access to clean water. She is also the co-creator of two interactive public art projects: The Wave, which addresses our mutual need for and interdependence on water and Home, which calls attention to homelessness and the lack of affordable housing in our cities and towns.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

Through Persistent Acts, I look at the intersection of performance, climate, and politics. How does hope come to fruition, even in the most dire circumstances? What are tangible alternatives to the oppressive status quo? My Persistent Acts series considers questions of this nature to motivate conversations and actions on climate issues that reverberate through politics and theatre. The Persistent Acts series continues, juxtaposing questions from Naomi Klein’s recent book No Is Not Enough with Blake Sugarman’s solo performance, Prelude to the Apocalypse (For What It’s Worth).

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Climate change. Refugee crisis. Gun control. Globalization. Reproductive rights. Hunger. Poverty. Obviously, this isn’t the first time in history that systems have gone awry. As I consider our current political climate and the facts of climate science, I wonder what the tipping point will be: when the higher education bubble will burst, when Social Security will run out, when racial and economic divides will become full-on civil wars, when the Earth will no longer sustain life as we know it. When will the systems that have gotten us to where we are collapse, or, ideally, when will power and resources become equitably and sustainably redistributed? I wonder when my society will utter a collective “enough” with the destructive status quo, and the work of activists and progressive organizers will become the norm.

I also think about “enough” in terms of what I do to thwart the daunting “when” questions. Am I doing enough? In the midst of the current political shitshow, I’ve turned to Naomi Klein’s No Is Not Enough: Resisting the New Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need. In addition to outlining the atrocities of the current US administration, and therefore justifying my anger, Klein highlights successful resistances to oppressive and pollutive systems, including instances of unionizing laborers, countering exploitative globalization, and more. She combines her experiences in journalism and activism to unpack the power dynamics that led us to our current socio-political system. Klein especially criticizes neoliberalism, an ideological project which, as she describes, “holds that the market is always right, regulation is always wrong, private is good and public is bad, and taxes that support public services are the worst of all.” As a major influencer on global policy, neoliberalism has structured cultural and political values around capital, which is to say not ecosystems and especially not sustainable energy. The thesis of No Is Not Enough posits that in undoing the damage of hierarchical ideologies like neoliberalism, we must not only say “No,” we must forge realistic alternative value systems – a series of “Yeses” to rally behind.

Illustration © Oliver Stafford from “Naomi Klein’s Guide to Resisting Power” on Huck Magazine.

Klein offers an option, composed by activists and union organizers, called The Leap Manifesto: A Call for a Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One Another. A project spearheaded by sixty movement leaders in Canada, The Leap Manifesto is focused on “building a world based on caring for the earth and one another.” It looks to restructure cultural values, prioritizing Indigenous sovereignty, clean energy, and public infrastructure. Jobs that are already low-carbon, such as teachers, nurses, social workers are valuable in our culture and should be treated as such. This looks like, in one of my favorite examples, the expanding purpose and value of a postal worker, who is not only responsible for delivering mail in a green vehicle, but can also deliver fresh meals to the sick and elderly. Taking a step further, The Leap, an ongoing project that has grown out of The Leap Manifesto, seeks to build places like post offices as community hubs, “where residents can recharge electric vehicles; individuals and businesses can do an end run around the big banks and get a loan to start an energy co-op.” The Leap Manifesto, by placing value on jobs outside of the carbon economy, lays out realistic ways to leap Western culture into sustainable systems, because we don’t have the time for incremental change. This is where my theatre practice comes in, because I utilize and participate in theatre to instigate difficult conversations and practice alternative, sustainable realities, which The Leap exemplifies and offers. My introduction to The Leap is juxtaposed by my recent theatregoing experience at Prelude to the Apocalypse (For What It’s Worth) by Blake Sugarman.

I met Blake working on Theater In Asylum’s The Debates. Blake is an artist and activist who uses his solo performances to interrogate dominant ideologies, similar to the ones dissected in No Is Not Enough. I am continually motivated by the ways in which he brings his activism to his art, and vice versa. For Prelude to the Apocalypse, Blake’s activism is heavily featured, as his program note shouts out to Sunrise, a burgeoning movement of young people fighting for climate action. Knowing that Sunrise was in the context of the show, I was curious to see what stories, questions, and feelings would arise.

Part of the show dropped me into despair, as Blake juxtaposes stories of climate deniers with the hard facts of climate science. Tackling climate issues raises all kinds of questions, which Blake posits throughout the show – from how we relate to one another, to what effect time has on us, to whether we’re paying attention. By the end of the performance, Blake fully breaks the fourth wall, coming into the audience, offering a “penny for our thoughts” in response to the question “What is enough?” This was at once a vulnerable and powerful position to be in: the opportunity to voice my politicized view with a room of strangers.

I shared that my go-to thought of “enough” is life off the grid. That “doing enough” looks like “unplugging” myself from our current energy grid, living without a cell phone, or any other mode of digital communication. In other words, to do “enough” on climate change is to forgo my life as I know it. But would taking my own life off the grid have an impact on our national or global energy policy? To me, the disaster of capitalism is the underlying factor in human-caused climate change, and so my individual choices won’t undo such a deeply ingrained system that puts economic profits over people’s lives. So, is it enough to take an ideological stance against a capitalist structure? If such an ideology is backed up by realistic alternatives, then yes, in my mind that is enough to get us started on the work of publicizing and modeling a more equitable way of life.

Yes, it does feel like we’re presently in a prelude to the apocalypse. But as Blake illuminates, that’s only for what it’s worth, not an end-all-be-all outlook. Something is happening here, and it’s up to the people – not greedy governments – to build the world we need, one that is equitable for all beings, one that is sustainable for future generations. This work is happening, especially in grass-roots organizing, so that whether or not that tipping point or the apocalypse arrives, people are working to take the future into their own hands.

Take Action
Learn more about and support The Sunrise Movement
Get involved in The Leap

(Top image: Blake Sugarman.)

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Julia Levine is a creative collaborator and vegetarian. Originally from St. Louis, Julia is now planted in the New York City downtown theatre realm. As a director, Julia has worked on various projects with companies that consider political and cultural topics, including Theater In Asylum, Honest Accomplice Theatre, and Superhero Clubhouse. She is on the Marketing team at HERE Arts Center and is Artistic Producer of The Arctic Cycle. Julia writes and devises with her performance-based initiative to bring questions of food, climate, and justice into everyday life.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

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