This year, Emergence, in association with Resurgence, Schumacher College, Volcano and Culture Colony is making a landmark documentary series of 6 hour-long conversations with Satish Kumar, one of the greatest living teachers and visionaries of the 21st century – and we want you to help us make it happen. We are doing this.
From April 27th to May 29th 2015, we will run our very first crowdfunding campaign to enable us to create these documentaries. We’re writing to you in the hope that you will support us by helping to spread the word as widely as possible via your networks. Here’s more information –
What is Emergence?
Emergence is an arts and sustainability collective based in Wales. We make art with one agenda: to change the world for the better. Satish Kumar is one of the main inspirations behind Emergence and his philosophy and activism continue to inspire our work.
Who is Satish Kumar?
Born in 1936, Satish became a Jain Monk aged 9 and then, aged 18, joined the Gandhian non-violent, land reform movement. In 1964 his 8,000 mile, Peace Walk took him from Delhi to all the nuclear capitals of the world, without a penny in his pocket, carrying only a message of peace.
He later settled in the UK and went on to become Editor of Resurgence Magazine championing ecology, art and spirituality. He founded the world’s leading college for activists and change-makers, Schumacher College, now celebrating its 25th anniversary.
“Satish is a truly remarkable manifestation of the human spirit. Working at the juncture of curiosity and compassion, he’s inspired so many to do so much!† - Bill McKibben, 350.org
“Visionary, earthy, filled with wonder – Satish Kumar and his work holds a door of possibility towards a future worth serving.†- Jonathon Porritt, Forum for the Future
In his tireless teaching, writing and speaking over eight decades, Satish has changed countless lives. But never before has there been a record of his life and work that deeply investigates all that he stands for and advocates.
Why make a documentary series?
We live in extreme and scary times, yet we lack the political leadership we need to bring our planet back from the brink of ecological, social and economic crisis. This situation leaves many of us feeling isolated and disempowered. The message at the heart of Satish’s teaching is that individuals can and do change the world for the better. He is a living example of Gandhi’s maxim that we should “be the change we want to see in the worldâ€. At times like these, we all need to be inspired to change – and Satish is one of the most inspirational teachers the world has ever seen.
In making this series, we want to bring Satish’s words and teachings to as wide an audience as possible and, at the same time, create a legacy of his lifetime of learning for generations to come. This won’t be a hagiography, a simple glorification of a man’s life and work. We will challenge Satish to communicate his philosophy as never before through six hours of intense, enlightening and enriching conversations.
What will the series be like?
We live in the age of the sound-bite, short attention spans and ‘quick-fix’ culture. We want this series to be the opposite of that – an opportunity to spend quality time in Satish’s company. The series will present Satish in deep conversation to really draw out his ideas and stories.
To ensure rigour of debate, we have chosen as our interviewer Jane Davidson, like Satish a teacher and activist, and also former Minister for the Environment and Sustainability in Wales – the woman behind the radical One Planet One Wales initiative.
Amongst the many legacies of Jane’s time in post, Wales is now committed to sustainability as a core organizing principle – the first government in the world to take such a stance. Jane is really looking forward to the conversations with Satish, keen to find ways of drawing out his ideas and bringing them firmly into the mainstream. Jane and Satish share the same values and ideals yet approach them from very different viewpoints. These conversations are sure to be a terrific meeting of minds that will bring real insight into the huge challenges we all face – and offer practical ways to change things for the better.
You can watch a short video of Jane talking about the project here.
These six hour-long films will be filmed in summer 2015 and released as a limited edition, beautifully presented, DVD box-set in autumn 2016 – Satish’s 80th year and the 50th Anniversary of Resurgence.
How will we be funding the series?
In keeping with the spirit of Emergence, we will be raising the funds via a campaign on the crowdfunding website, Indiegogo. By supporting our campaign and investing in the project, backers will be literally pre-ordering their copy of the documentaries – either by download or the DVDs – and we’ve also put together a terrific package of benefits, including signed books, subscriptions, the chance to attend the final interview or even to become a co-producer! This is a strictly not-for-profit project. All monies raised will go into making it happen.
How can you help?
We are initially approaching a number of influencers to help us. These are people we know who are committed to social change and have wide networks of contacts. We are approaching YOU as one of our influencers who, we hope, will endorse our project by flagging it up to your friends, colleagues and networks. Of course, we also hope you will back ourcrowd funding campaign.
This email is to give you advanced notice of our campaign. We have just 33 days to raise our budget of £30,000. When the campaign goes live we will send you an email linking to our page on the Indiegogo site with all the details you’ll need to share with your networks.
We’re really excited about creating this landmark documentary series and we hope you will join us in making it a reality. OUR CROWDFUNDING CAMPAGN WILL GO LIVE ON MONDAY 27TH APRIL AND WILL RUN UNTIL FRIDAY 29TH MAY. During that time it would be wonderful if you could share our campaign emails, tweets and Facebook posts with your networks andencourage them to do likewise. The more people that hear about it, the morechance we have of reaching our target and making this happen.
We will be back in touch again soon, in the meantime if you want to know more please get in touch.
The Agnes Denes Award for Environmental Art, sponsored by the organization New York Loves Mountains and named in honor of pioneering environmental artist Ages Denes, will be awarded to an artist whose work has been or will be shown or performed in New York State between June 2014 and June 2015. This award is designed to recognize artists who are working with the intention to bring about awareness, discussion and action in response to current global, national, state or local environmental challenges. This award aims to support work that goes beyond grief, anger and irony to point to sustainable alternative practices and guiding ethos in realms such as urban planning, electrical systems, consumer resource use, transit, and energy politics. This award supports the idea that art is a crucial means of communication about contemporary environmental concerns in that it defies the current social tendency toward specialization at the cost of recognizing imbalances that affect all humans on multiple levels. This award will honor an artist who demonstrates unique vision and courage in concert with artistic skill and talent toward raising consciousness about humanity’s evolution toward truly sustainable principles and practice.
Amount of Award: $2,000
Eligibility: Any artistic work shown in New York State between June 2014 and June 2015. Submitted work may include an original song, a film or video, visual art, or a theatrical performance. Please send any queries about the eligibility of a piece to agnesdenesaward@gmail.com
To Apply for the Award
If you would like to apply for the Agnes Denes Award for Environmental Art, please submit the following to agnesdenesaward@gmail.com no later than June 30, 2015:
A 300-500 word cover letter explaining the piece you’re submitting and the reason you feel it fits the criteria for the award
6-10 photos or a video (approximately 2 minutes in duration) providing an accurate and complete visual representation of your piece
Any relevant publicity or press surrounding the show or performance in which your piece appeared
A list corresponding to the images giving references to title/ description of works.
Nominations
We also accept nominations for the award. Nominations may be emailed along with artist name, the title of the nominated work and the artist’s contact information to agnesdenesaward@gmail.com
Decision
The decision, made by a panel of artists with a final selection made by Agnes Denes, will be announced in October 2015.
About Agnes Denes:
A primary figure among the concept-based artists who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, Agnes Denes is internationally known for works created in a wide range of mediums. Investigating science, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, poetry, history, and music, Denes’s artistic practice is distinctive in terms of its aesthetics and engagement with socio-political ideas. As a pioneer of environmental art, she created Rice/Tree/Burial in 1968 in Sullivan County, New York which, according to the renowned art historian and curator Peter Selz, was “…the first large scale site-specific piece anywhere with ecological concerns.”
Her work Wheatfield – A Confrontation, which the scholar and curator Jeffrey Weiss has called “perpetually astonishing . . . one of Land Art’s great transgressive masterpieces” (Artforum, September 2008), is perhaps Denes’s best-known work. It was created during a four-month period in the spring and summer of 1982 when Denes planted a field of golden wheat on two acres of rubble-strewn landfill near Wall Street and the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan (now the site of Battery Park City and the World Financial Center).Wheatfield is almost better known than the forests Agnes has planted in other parts of the world. The largest reclamation site in the world, Tree Mountain—A Living Time Capsule,of 11,000 trees is a 400-year project to create the world’s first manmade virgin forest. Other forest work includesA Forest for Australia,of 8000 trees in Melbourne, and a new forest she is in the process of creating for New York City. Her forests clean the air by absorbing carbon emissions, and clean fresh water for Earth’s growing population.
Works by Agnes Denes are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Kunsthalle Nürnberg and many other major institutions worldwide.
She has received numerous honors and awards including four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and four grants from the New York State Council on the Arts; the DAAD Fellowship, Berlin, Germany (1978); the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award (1985); M.I.T’s highly prestigious Eugene McDermott Achievement Award “In Recognition of Major Contribution to the Arts” (1990); the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (1998); the Watson Trans-disciplinary Art Award from Carnegie Mellon University (1999); the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2007); and the Ambassador’s Award for Cultural Diplomacy for Strengthening the Friendship between the US and the Republic of Hungary through Excellence in Contemporary Art (2008). She lectures extensively worldwide and speaks at global conferences.
Denes is the author of six books and is featured in numerous other publications on a wide range of subjects in art and the environment, including the recentEco-Amazons: 20 Women Who are Transforming the World.She is currently in the process of planting 50,000 trees in New York City. A flowering pyramid she is creating at Socrates Park, also in New York, reminding us of the dynamics of nature, will open this April. Her exhibition “In the Realm of Pyramids: The Visual Philosophy of Agnes Denes†is on display at the Leslie Tonkonow Gallery in Manhattan now through May 9, 2015.
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? For the last entry in this series, I wanted to get the perspective of people who support theatre in the age of climate change. I reached out to Jennifer Sokolove, Program Director at the Compton Foundation in San Francisco, and asked her to tell us why Compton does what it does.—Chantal Bilodeau
In a February blog about writing and transgender characters, playwright MJ Kaufman asked, “How do I write the world I want to see? And how can I do this while also revealing the painful truths of the world I live in?†These two questions strike me as the fundamental challenges of any piece of theatre, or any art, that seeks to truly generate social change.
At the Compton Foundation, we have supported work to advance social and environmental change for more than half a century. But only in the last four years have we really begun to explore grantmaking at the intersection of art and activism. For many years, our grantmaking focused on fairly traditional methods for advancing environmental change; we funded community organizing, litigation, policy advocacy, and public education and outreach. We supported a lot of great work, and, outside our windows, in the actual world, things got worse and worse on all the issues we care about, including climate change.
In 2011, we took a step back to reflect on our priorities. We realized that the primary obstacle to the kind of world we want to bring about is the kinds of stories we tell ourselves, at a societal level, about who we are and what our relationships to each other and to nature should be. With that in mind, we started to explore what grantmaking to change those stories might look like. One of the obvious directions to explore was art. What other sectors tell such powerful stories about what is and what might be? Who better than an artist to help us see, hear, taste, and strive to touch a new reality?
The question of impact remains a challenge. Building a clear picture of the degree to which any one artistic endeavor changes conversations or behaviors can be tricky. And it’s even trickier if we want to support art, not just instrumental propaganda. While we believe there is a need for good propaganda on our issues, we want to support work that is less polemic—that opens space for its viewers to ask new questions and think in new ways.
To be fair, we had the deck stacked toward art in a way most foundations do not. Almost half of our board was comprised of practicing artists, and the two family members who were serving as president and vice president of the board (as they do now) are artists. That experience and inclination gave us the space to look around and see where and how our priority issues—not just climate, but also reproductive rights and justice, peace and security, and money in politics—were intersecting with the art world. Our artist leaders encouraged the board and staff to delve into the range of possible connections between creativity and activism, and to spend some time learning which artists were engaging with social and environmental movements by making a wide variety of experimental grants before arriving at a particular funding strategy.
Residents of Miami map the potential flood zone in their neighborhood as part of the High Water Line project. The project, initiated by Eve Mosher, helped to spark the creation of the community-based group Resilient Miami. Photo by Jayme Gershen.
Since then, we have been on a steep learning curve. Our broad focus has forced us to learn an enormous number of practical things about a wide range of artistic fields, like the typical timing from project idea to launch, distribution patterns for finished work, and the economics of each artistic industry. It has led us to notice some striking patterns:
Artists want to engage. We wondered whether or not there would be a pipeline of projects, but we’ve seen no lack of desire from the art world.
Artists and activists operate in different cultures, and typically know little about one another’s worlds. This can make it difficult to collaborate, arguably limiting the effectiveness of creative work. The most successful projects in our portfolio, and, we hypothesize, more broadly in the world, have thoughtful strategies for spanning that divide.
Different art practices offer different kinds of visions, access to different audiences, and radically different timelines from concept to production. An effort to support art directed toward changing the world must have some sense of what the social and political context will be when the work is completed, how it might fit into the ecosystem of organizations working toward change, and how it might ride a wave of public attention to a particular issue.
Some creative fields are better organized to support this intersection of art and change. Other fields have less infrastructure making it more challenging for philanthropy to find the artists who most want to drive social and environmental change, and to support connections between those artists and the movement organizations that could help them.
The question of impact remains a challenge. Building a clear picture of the degree to which any one artistic endeavor changes conversations or behaviors can be tricky. And it’s even trickier if we want to support art, not just instrumental propaganda. While we believe there is a need for good propaganda on our issues, we want to support work that is less polemic—that opens space for its viewers to ask new questions and think in new ways. The good—and under-reported news—is that demonstrating the impact of art is not that much trickier than measuring the impact of most other funding. There are almost always too many variables at play over what is usually a long time frame to provide any convincing data on causation. This makes impact another space where creativity is critically important; our most interesting conversations on all of our grants, including those to artists, are usually about how they will know if their work makes a difference in the world.
Activists (and funders) have hoped for almost two decades that simply sharing the facts about issues like climate change will make people, and the politicians who lead them, alter their behaviors and their policies. Evidence suggests that this is rarely the case. As human beings, we are not rational in our decision-making. For Compton, that suggests that we must explore funding other approaches to social and environmental change work, approaches that engage emotion in addition to intellect, that help audiences get a visceral feel for the world we have, and the better world we might inhabit. That world is often out of reach in part because of our limits of imagination. Who better to help us shed those constraints than an artist?
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 met Norwegian composer Marte Røyeng in Oslo after reading an articlein The Foreigner about her company’s work with school children, using musical theatre to explore issues of sustainability. Subsequently, I discovered Marte’s own beautiful and haunting climate change songs. —Chantal Bilodeau
When I was little and heard the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, I imagined hearing ghosts—muted wailing from hidden voices. I wondered about the children lured away by the Pied Piper into the depths of a mountain: Wouldn’t they still be alive, only out of sight? Who would care for them?
It’s an unsettling story. It ends with an entire town’s children disappearing. Their parents refuse to pay the Piper for ridding the town of rats, and for this they receive the worst possible punishment—sons and daughters are taken away in the night, never to return.
Hardly a nice ending for a family musical.
But it is a great story for a family musical addressing sustainability. By taking away the children, the Pied Piper essentially robs the town of its entire future.
In the spring of 2012, the Oslo-based group Scenelusa Productions premiered a brand new musical, Rottefangeren (The Rat Catcher). It explores how a community responds to difficult changes, eventually overcomes greed, and realizes what’s truly valuable.
The Project
Six months earlier, Scenelusa Productions—which consists of Mari Andersen, Anna Stenersen, and me—was taken aback by the number of young people turning up to audition. We selected a group with as much diversity as possible in terms of age (ranging from seven to fifteen), stage experience (many having none), culture, and background.
An athletic girl played a poor boy called Limper, the greedy and manipulative mayor was portrayed by a teenage girl with an arresting voice, and the enigmatic Pied Piper was played by a boy with an air of patient determination. The rest of the ensemble embodied the eclectic “townspeople,†with different quirks and qualities.
In a sense, the group formed a “town†in real life too, creating an overlap between the message of the play and the social goals of the project. Each person was an important part of something bigger, with the responsibility of making rehearsals a safe place to grow and develop.
So here they were, forty young kids and teenagers with their own experiences, values, and moral views coloring their perception of what they were doing. They were to perform a musical about the nature of poverty, envy, secrecy, and greed. Handing out the script, we wondered if the message inside it would resonate with them at all.
The whole idea of building a sustainable world would have to come throughthem, on their own terms, as young people growing up in a country where most of their peers have plenty, and where poverty, climate change, or any other dark global issue is not exactly visible inside the frame of their daily lives. What would strike a chord in them?
Outsiders and Insiders
In the musical, we see how the rat problem—a furry natural disaster—not only disrupts the well-ordered town life, but also reveals a cemented mindset among its people. The townspeople do not generously invite others into their community. Borders are drawn and strangers are treated differently. Even inside their community, there are outsiders—the town’s poor people. The calculating mayor fears the Pied Piper’s magic flute, and fosters an ungenerous atmosphere. Ridiculing the idea of magic, he makes sure that people distrust the stranger instead of questioning his own lack of solutions.
Limper is an outsider. He knows he has less and wonders why it matters. Limper’s story questions why having is considered the norm, and not having earns you a different treatment.
In one scene, the kids gang up on Limper and bully him because of his bad leg, singing over sharp-edged chords that there’s “no need to try/you’ll never make the climb anyway.†They push, kick, punch, and bring him down. Audience members commented that it was difficult to watch—almost real. There was a similar reaction to the scene where the townspeople rally to hunt down the Pied Piper, waving sticks in the air, promising to hit hard. This, along with a later scene when parents are mourning the lost children, seemed to clearly engage our audience.
Against the gloomy backdrop of climate change, young people have every reason to be angry or sad. It seems crucial to invite youth to engage with their world, to react openly by creating something powerful for others to witness.
Limper sings: “You have a spark inside you/waiting to show itself.†Everyone has the potential to matter. It’s a message we can’t tell young people enough—and with the musical, we wanted them not just to hear it, but to feel it.
Digging Deeper
Forty young actors singing on stage ask their audience:
Who’s on the inside?/Who is part of “we?â€/ Where is the border—is it a line around our homes? Or is it wider like ripples on the water? Does this “we†get to shut the rest of the world out? Because where does that leave us in the end?
There’s a need for those who can dig deeply to find the root of the problem.
Limper and the Pied Piper show the town that the solution is not simply to get rid of rats, but to become more generous. For their future to be sustainable, people will need to look further than their doorstep. They have to consider the voices of the invisible, counting those who are far away and out of sight.
Limper’s morality makes him set out to rescue the other children, regardless of how badly they treated him. They are part of his world, and so what hurts them hurts him too.
The musical does get a nice, happy ending. The Pied Piper returns the children when the town finally realizes what matters most.
But for the young people on stage, what was important about all of this? What holds value to them, in their reality?
My guess: To have someone pay attention. And listen.
This week on HowlRound, we are exploring Theatre in the Age of Climate Change. How does our work reflect on, and responds 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? Florida-based performance artist Elizabeth Doud, with whom I co-moderated the panel Climate, Action and Cultural Collaboration at the Cultural Mobility Symposium & Conference in January (Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, New York), discusses the role of artists as activists, the need to infuse climate change work with poetics, and having the courage to put ourselves out there for the love of our planet.—Chantal Bilodeau
I am an out post-post-modern tree-hugging vigilante mermaid and cultural industries agent, and a citizen of the Kickasspora: A new territory of systems change and fused multiplicities where art is not a luxury, but a necessary tool that we wield in a larger project of remembering, witnessing, reimagining, and celebrating a radical insurgency of love and reverence for this amazing planet we like to call home. No, I’m serious. It’s not as touchy-feely as it sounds. It’s actually slogging, tough, and paradoxical work that is not for the queasy.
The climate movement is so complex that it needs to be poetic to affect change in consciousness, and penetrate the depths of our seemingly impossible current paradigm—and shake it up. Artists who relentlessly create images, texts, operas, music, performances, and films about this issue are infiltrating into spaces that many activist campaigns and government advisories can’t reach. We have the tools to hypnotize and beautifully permeate a subconscious. We break hearts and incite laughter one-on-one in intimate spaces of image and visceral transference. We make rituals, and allow communities to witness new propositions with an emotional vulnerability that unites us in our humanity, and in our greater universal connectedness.
The Mermaid Tear Factory, photo by Afonso Santana.
It is one of the best things we do as a species. Our ability to construct new realities, which shift souls, spark revolutions, and appeal to our higher order inter-relatedness is so perfect for handling a crisis of this magnitude, that it has to play a role in doing what our governments and industries have failed to do.
Making theatre in the Age of Climate Change or the Age of the Anthropocene, or dead smack in the middle of what writer Elizabeth Kolbert eloquently unpacks as the Sixth Extinction, is what I like to call the radical practice of walking the awkwardly heroic path of near impossible catastrophe evasion through poetics. And it is, I think, one of the hardest jobs out there today.
As a multi-disciplinary performing artist, I instinctively shifted towards making work about the larger meta-story of the climate crisis about eight years ago, interested in how vast and complex the micro-narratives and metaphors were. How extremely real and urgent they felt—and still feel—with tentacles reaching into all areas of the human and non-human experience. I’ll simply never run out of story…oh, and I live in Florida. ’Nuff said.
The Mermaid Tear Factory, photo by Giovanni Luquini.
A brief context of our climate change sitch-y-a-shun and the small problem of extinction:
Human societies are facing the unprecedented challenges of climate change and the subsequent environmental collapse caused by the extraction of resources from the earth, and the rampant processing and consumption of these resources. Communities, industries, cultures, and governments around the world are facing these challenges with responses ranging from urgent pro-activity (the minority) to mild or complete denial (the majority). This crisis has been precipitated by the industrialized systems of capitalism, underpinned by fundamentalist ideologies of a globalized free market and rising neo-liberalism. There is an international policy debate on the best ideological path we must take to avoid total extinction, but the overwhelmingly in agreement global scientific research community says we have no more time for discussions. The only solution is a drastic contraction of resource consumption, and total reformation of the systems that encourage and support this consumption. Because the anticipated consequences of the collapse of our economies, societies, and the biosphere in general are so violent, we can postulate that this crisis will test our moral character as nothing before in history. There is a lack of understanding of this massive danger in the human population and less willingness than ever to take action on the part of governments and industries. Naomi Klein has written brilliantly about this in her latest book This Changes Everything: Climate Versus Capitalism. This is why when we refer to climate change’s causes, we are really pointing to deeply damaged political, economic, and social systems, which need to undergo urgent and radical structural reworking in order to stave off the devastating climate shifts underway.
So, I know exactly why I want to be making this work, yet I feel a tension between wanting to create specific stories for my admittedly limited audiences, and feeling the need to leverage my craft for bigger moves in service of the climate—and even larger systems—change movement. I am asking all of my friends, colleagues, and artists I know and meet the following questions:
What role should artists play to fill this gap in action?
How can artists create performances/narratives about the climate crisis with a sense of urgency and act efficiently and poetically?
In several informal micro-summits of artmakers and organizers, a series of compelling sub-questions have surfaced, which I think provoke valuable reflection and guidance in our process of making theatre in this context.
How can we transform the emergencies caused by what author Rob Nixonterms as slow violence into narratives and theatrical experiences dramatic enough to arouse public sentiment and ensure socio-political intervention? His thesis is that our spectacle-driven attention span has programmed us to overlook and undervalue slower moving impacts so that we are not reacting to the devastating threats of the climate crisis with the urgency they deserve.
What is the role of “hope†in the poetics of this issue, and how can we look at it critically as a tool of philosophical manipulation and a needed dramaturgical mechanism? Is hope what we need, or should we replace it with creative intention?
How can we produce work that has an impact with varied global/local tensions and meet those needs working in collaboration with affected communities?
Besides a low-grade dystopian reverie about the power of arts in the larger climate movement, there are some key points to consider so that we better grasp the myriad complexities and impossibilities that inevitably emerge in the process:
➢ Any artistic theme that speaks of the climate crisis or the area of environmental justice is glocal or lobal (Local and Global) by definition.
This is often distracting for narrative makers as we focus on a local story. We might be addressing the plastics pollution on an island in northeastern Brazil and the death of the local fisheries, but also know that the planet’s oceans are choked with garbage gyres that overshadow, in terms of magnitude, the less-visible, or not-so-news-worthy litter on a local beach. From a dramaturgical standpoint, telling the massive global story is not as interesting as the local story—it’s vaguer, slower, and has way too many players to have emotional connectivity—but it’s inextricably connected to our local narrative, and can, if we are crafty, emerge through our careful telling of specific local issues.
➢ Any culture project involving a study of the climate crisis or the area of sustainability in the environment is interdisciplinary by definition.
The trans-multi-intra triad isn’t new to contemporary artmaking, so the idea of bringing other disciplines into our creative milieu is by no means revolutionary. However, many artists making theatre about climate change engage with scientists and other non-arts sector researchers to create a basis for the work, oftentimes wanting to make it more legitimate and fact-based so audiences will be “edified†and moved somehow by the hard data. This can be a trap as audiences report a feeling of fatigue, and don’t often process hard data emotionally. It’s simply too much for us to digest and act on if there is not an emotionally evocative story to wash it down with.
I have been unpacking these two considerations and using them as constant contextualization prompts for my work. They also allude to, and elucidate, useful concepts of inter-connectivity of systems, which reminds us that this issue cannot be conceived of within current political, social, ideological, or geographic borders, and that we are dependent on the health of the whole for survival—kind of like a theatre ensemble.
By articulating the complex philosophical reflections at the intersection of climate and culture, creating local-global artistic practices, and forming climate culture-action networks, theatremakers already attracted to this type of performance practice will be better able to express these radical and necessary poetics. I have initiated two projects: Climakaze Miami, which is a platform to create networks that expand my tribe of collaborators regionally and globally, and The Mermaid Tear Factory, a performance project which focuses on a specific local catastrophe that needs to be witnessed, unpacked, and processed by the community. It feels like a way to straddle this new territory.
A colleague of mine recently made a statement to me about one of the core operating principles of his organizing and artmaking. He called it outness. He said that he recognizes outness as a point of departure for every action he takes. He is involved with queer activism, primarily, so the semantics have a particular cultural and political reference: to be “out-of the-closet†fully so as to dilute the repression of silence, and our default conduct of remaining hidden in order to avoid confronting denial and/or being discriminated against.
The Mermaid Tear Factory, photo by Giovanni Luquini.
I wanted to adopt this term for my positioning in the work with culture and the climate. Outness in this kind of performance means really digging down and getting clear on what is at stake. We can pick a really late-breaking climate issue for its shock factor, or ride the wave of a certain hipness associated with the breaking politics of the climate movement, but unless we really bare our souls, and confess that these are some of the most heartbreaking and powerful love stories we will ever tell, we won’t be tapping our super powers in the best service of this artmaking. We need to be able to say that we are doing this for the love of our miraculous planet, and not feel dorky-hippy about it. We need to be fully out tree-hugging whale-saving theatremakers with the wit and wordsmithery of Beckett and the political savvy of Boal.
I am advocating for a relentless climate outness. Not that we should trump other important, sometimes cleverly labeled “special interests†in favor of the often perceived privileged environmental paradigm shift we are seeking. But we should gently, yet persistently, remind ourselves and others that correcting what has led us to this point of climate collapse will get to the root of economic and social injustices kept in place by the marginalization of oppressed factions and ecologies.
I am hereby an out, zero-waste wanting, po-po-mo treehugging vigilante mermaid theatremaker, and I’m not too cool to say it. I encourage artists and other citizens to mount creative demonstrations that examine this emergency in any way possible. Because we are dealing with the highest level of catastrophe I have been witness to in my lifetime, I’m not afraid to say that I believe it is art’s role to sound the siren call to action. Let’s do this.
This post originally appeared on Howlround, and is being posted under a under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License(CC BY 4.0). You can find the original post here: http://howlround.com/where-is-the-hope
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? Director Jeremy Pickard leads one of the few theatre companies in the US entirely dedicated to eco-theatre. His educational program, Big Green Theater, created in partnership with the Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn, New York, is featured in this month’s American Theatre Magazine. —Chantal Bilodeau
Yes, information is necessary; many people still do not know or accept the facts about climate change. Yes, empathy is necessary; through compelling characters and stories, we offer essential alternative perspectives.
But in the face of global catastrophe, hope is key to positive change—real, tangible hope that empowers people to come together rather than burden them with weariness. Locating, communicating, and celebrating this sort of hope while making art on a topic as daunting as climate change is incredibly difficult, but without it, we risk passively holding a mirror up to nature instead of using the mirror to start a fire.
My work focuses entirely on eco-theatre. With my company, Superhero Clubhouse, I take a holistic approach to theatremaking where content, process, and production are connected to complex environmental problems. Our long-term project is a series of nine Planet Plays that examine the world in the context of climate change. Independently, the plays probe specific topics such as waste, water, and food, but when put together they form a new mythology for our changing world. Like all of Superhero Clubhouse’s eco-theatre initiatives, we construct the Planet Plays using three essential tools: impossible questions, limitations, and hope.
Early in the process of making an eco-play, after a dose of research, my collaborators and I generate an “impossible questionâ€â€”one that is extremely difficult to answer, even for an environmental expert. For example, in EARTH(a play about people), our question is, “Should we have children?†This is a question that sparks a provocative conversation about overpopulation, but is impossible to definitively answer personally or communally. Allowing the question to be “impossible†steers my collaborators and me clear of didacticism and oversimplifications of science, and also leaves room for audiences to grapple with an environmental issue on their own terms.
EARTH (a play about people), with actors Dan Lawrence and Adam H. Weinert. Photo by Jill Steinberg.
After forming our impossible question, we place temporal, narrative, physical, and scenic limitations upon ourselves. For example, in our first-draft production of MARS(a play about mining), we told an epic story that spanned years and planets in a tight seventy-five minutes, in a LEED-certified performance space with nothing onstage but bodies and voices. These limitations were directly tied to the play’s content and question, which were inspired by the history of Appalachian coal mining. Creatively pushing up against boundaries is nothing new; it’s how most independent theatre artists make work, especially when confronting a small budget. But by re-appropriating the word “limitation” and using it in an environmental context, we are also experimenting with how people might use and respect precious resources in the world at large.
MARS (a play about mining). Photo by Brian Hashimoto.
It is the third tenet of eco-theatre— hope—that is perhaps the most challenging part of our process. In the early years of Superhero Clubhouse, I often fell prey to the feeling of outrage as I learned the extent of climate change; thus, many early drafts of Planet Plays spiraled into despair. Now that I have replaced outrage with a more comprehensive understanding of climate change, I am determined to find hope in every project, and to make the hope present, active, and universal.
We are currently in the midst of creating JUPITER(a play about power), a duet inspired by Frankenstein and energy policy. JUPITER‘s protagonist is a young tycoon who overhauls the entire energy system on Earth before retreating to the planet Jupiter. His enforced vision promises to halt climate change, but demands costly sacrifices from all citizens.
We have formed an impossible question: “Should we impose radical societal change for the greater good?” And we have instituted several limitations: sixty-minute run-time, only two performers, only acoustic instruments, and (eventually) an entirely self-sustaining lighting design.
But as we develop our script and story, it is proving difficult to pinpoint the hope. Our protagonist needs humanity to succeed by pulling itself up by its bootstraps; but as the artists, in order to honor our impossible question, we need audiences to be left wondering whether or not—and to what extent—imposed environmental action is effective and ethical. Therefore, we need the character to fail, offering both sides of the power coin: positive progress vs. playing god.
Having an environmental policy expert as a creative collaborator helps our process by way of devil’s advocating. Jonathan Camuzeaux, who works at Environmental Defense Fund by day and as a musician by night, is stalwart when it comes to our environmental dramaturgy. As ideas snowball, Jonathan keeps us tethered to the facts. Because he is an expert in examining systems of change, and understands cause and effect at an economic and political level, he is not satisfied with simple solutions. He holds a global perspective on humanity that is neither fatalistic nor naive.
In all of our work, collaborating with environmental experts is a priority, and I find it helps with identifying real hope. Where I am an idealist, scientists are pragmatic, and often objective enough to challenge my ideas on the basis of research. Though it’s probably far from a “peer review,†the feedback I receive from my environmental collaborators is both challenging and constructive. Their ideas focus on how a shift in story or staging might better allow our impossible question to highlight a real-world conundrum, rather than how we can better sentimentalize the situation. I know few climate scientists who spend their grant money wallowing in despair; their presence in our process reminds us that to be curious is to be hopeful, and that our job is just to keep asking questions.
One big hope lies in humanity embracing the fact that the future is going to be rough. Theatre, if we choose to let it, can offer a safe place for communities to confront this truth, and to talk about climate change not as a bleak apocalypse but as a catalyst for the construction of a better world.
This post originally appeared on Howlround, and is being posted under a under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License(CC BY 4.0). You can find the original post here: http://howlround.com/the-nature-of-positive
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 met Australian scenic designer Tanja Beer at the York University conference Staging Sustainability: People, Planet, Profit, Performance in 2014. I asked her to tell us about The Living Stage project. —Chantal Bilodeau
Climate change. Oil spills. Plastic islands. Deforestation. They await us every day in the information age. Images of violent storms and deadly droughts appear nightly on our news screens, and flicker past on our Facebook and Twitter feeds. Designed as a call to arms, a figurative stick to whip us into action, all too often this tsunami of information does the opposite. As the mental scar tissue grows over, we wonder what on earth we can do under the colossal weight of the problem. Perversely, we can easily find ourselves debilitated by the very thing that is intended to propel us forward.
Now, don’t get me wrong—with the scale of environmental concerns confronting us, we need the reality check. But we also need to be empowered. We need a vision of the future that acknowledges the challenges and constraints, but focuses on the opportunities for change and strives for positive legacies. We need a vision that reignites the passion and gives us hope.
As a stage designer investigating ecological design for performance, it is the very idea of contributing to the world that motivates and inspires me. I want to do more than recycle a set here or a costume there. Instead, my focus is on the potential of creativity as a resource for sustainable practice—on how the impacts on our environment might be seen as opportunities rather than constraints. Recycling and efficiency are at the core of sustainable design, but I want to explore a more hopeful paradigm. One that asks, “Can we create designs that not only enrich our audience, but our community and environment as well?â€
In 2012, I used this question as a starting point to test new ideas around sustainability for the performing arts, via the 2013 Castlemaine State Festival in Victoria, Australia. Under the title The Living Stage, our project combined stage design, permaculture, and community engagement to create a recyclable, biodegradable, and edible performance space. Part experiment, part theatre, part garden and part food growing demonstration, The Living Stage featured portable garden beds, each culturing edible plants. The structure was created by the rural community of Castlemaine, guided by local permaculturalists Hamish MacCallum and Sas Allardice, with me as stage designer and project leader. It acted as both a venue and inspiration for a number of local performance groups, whose task was to create experimental works that drew on the concept of regeneration and interact with the unique design that surrounded them.
Tanja Beer’s The Living Stage with performer Penny Baron climbing up the apple crate walls.
The aim of the collaborative and hands-on nature of The Living Stage was to encourage people to take action in building thriving and resilient communities, and to demonstrate to our audiences that a sustainable future is not only possible, but also an incredibly exciting prospect. We sought design processes that were capable of creating “positive legacies†for both the community and the environment. The Living Stage connected local people to living processes through permaculture, collective practice, celebration, and performance. At the end of the festival, the community consumed The Living Stage; its physical structures became their garden beds, its plants became their food, and its waste became their compost.
Almost two years after we planted the first seeds of The Living Stage, there is still an abundance of collective activities around food growing in Castlemaine. After the festival, the portable garden beds were donated to local community groups to facilitate food growing projects in otherwise underutilized spaces. The town’s edible gardens have continued to flourish, growing in size and productivity, helping to nurture local food systems, funding opportunities and connections—a testament to the local community who has continued to extend and surpass the legacy of The Living Stage far beyond the structure itself.
Mixed-ability group CreateAbility and physical theatre group Born in a Taxi interacting with the structure and greenery of the stage.
The Living Stage was a steep learning curve in designing with nature. As the project progressed, I became acutely aware of the need to work in synchronicity with nature’s processes. Integral to this understanding was the (sometimes harsh) realization that nature could not be negotiated with, hurried, or slowed down. Instead, I had to find ways to adapt my design to local conditions and unreliable sources, such as extreme climatic conditions or nutrient-poor soil. While this seemed tedious at first, it soon became one of the most exciting aspects of the project. Working in tune with living systems allowed me to become more in touch with the local ecology and climate; to experience the environment not as something to tame or control, but rather as an extension of myself. Plants have a way of bringing us—if you’ll pardon the pun—back down to earth. By growing things I learned to slow down, to test the moisture of the soil, welcome the presence of bees, and rejoice in the promise of rain.
Since making its debut at the 2013 Castlemaine State Festival, The Living Stageconcept has travelled to Cardiff (UK) as the Trans-Plantable Living Room, and continues to generate interest and inspire other projects around the world, like in Allegheny, PA, and in Glasgow, Scotland. New creative teams have emerged, taking local ecological ideas to engage communities and create positive legacies. Each project is unique, but they share clear commonalities: the celebration of multisensory elements, effective and multi-level engagement with audiences, and a legacy that exceeds the celebration of the project through performance.
The Trans-Plantable Living Room was grown, built, and performed in collaboration with the Riverside Community Garden Project with Sam Holt, Rosie leach, Lisa Woynarski, Bronwyn Preece, and Megan Moe Beitiks.
The Living Stage seeks to demonstrate the potential of reframing sustainability as a creative process, which is capable of generating positive and far-reaching rewards. The concept of positive legacies centers on the idea that we are not only responsible for the consequences of our actions, but also for the general health and well-being of the environment of which we are part of. Climate change has reminded us of the fragility of nature, and what we stand to lose if we disconnect from the environment that nurtures and supports us. It has also provided us with the opportunity to embark on a new course—to reimagine and cultivate stronger relationships with communities, ecosystems, and our future. Collectively, we can make it happen. And what an inspiring journey it will be.
Photos 1 and 2 by Gisela Beer.
Photo 3 by Valeria Pacchiani
Castlemaine video by Sam Hoffmann.
Cardiff video by Rabab Ghazoul.
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.
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.
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.