Ashden Directory

ashdenizen: national theatre to stage documentary drama about climate change

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The latest National Theatre press release says:

GREENLAND, a new play about uncertainty, confusion and the future of everything, by Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner and Jack Thorne, will open in the Lyttelton Theatre on 1 February. NT associate directors Bijan Sheibani and Ben Power are the director and dramaturg respectively; the production will be designed by Bunny Christie, with lighting by Jon Clark, video design by Finn Ross, sound and music by Dan Jones, and movement by Aline David. The cast includes Michael Gould, Isabella Laughland, Amanda Lawrence, Tunji Lucas, Lyndsey Marshal, Peter McDonald and Rhys Rusbatch.

Seeking to understand a subject of great complexity, the National Theatre has asked four of the most distinct and exciting playwrights in British theatre to collaborate on a new piece of documentary theatre. The team has spent six months interviewing key individuals from the worlds of science, politics, business and philosophy in an effort to understand our changing relationship with the planet.

GREENLAND combines the factual and the theatrical as several separate but connected narratives collide to form a provocative response to the most urgent questions of our time.

(GREENLAND, Lyttelton Theatre, previews from 25 January, press night 1 February, booking until 2 April, further dates to be announced.)

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ashdenizen: is “junk” a celebration or a critique of waste?

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‘Junkitecture’ is a clever term, combining design and ‘waste’. But what if the materials used for buildings, for sets, for props, for puppets, for the vehicles and floats of parades, were thought of simply as ‘materials’? Of course, they would have a special value or feel if they had been used for something else. But to call them ‘junk’ is to share the attitude that separates the ‘new’ from what we think of as ‘waste’. What is happening with the use of materials in the arts that have a history can often be more of  a valorisation of consumerism and excess, a celebration of trash as ‘trash’ or salvage, than a critique of waste or an affirmation of recycling.

What if no special claims could be made for using reclaimed or recycled materials because it was commonplace? Then, what would be remarked on would be the design, the space or object itself, and the qualities that the materials brought to it.

The Jellyfish Theatre building was enchanting for its design and for its transiency, a theatre space in a symbolic shape, assembled from what was to hand, played in, and then dispersed, the theatre becoming again the material that it was, maybe to be used again, having acquired another layer of history.

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ashdenizen: flowers on stage: the lungwort

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In the fourth of our summer series of blogs about flowers on stage, the artist Sue Palmer, writes about the lungwort (Pulmonaria).

I have a Pulmonaria ‘Glacier’from Brantwood in my garden; it comes up perennially in early spring with a pale white-blue flower. When it flowers, I think of the large house and rambling garden beside Coniston Water, the former home of writer, thinker and art critic John Ruskin.

In 2001, I created a site-specific performance project there. Brantwood is a significant tourist attraction with its open house and gardens, and I wanted to make a something unusual for the visitors that unravelled some of Ruskin’s philosophies and ideas, and to both work with, and challenge, the tourist culture. So I created a ‘tour’ of Ruskin’s Dining Room.

Visitors coming to Brantwood were offered the chance (free of charge) to come to a ‘special guided tour’ of the Dining Room, overlooking the lake. I began as an ordinary tour guide would, speaking about the objects and features, but over the 20 minutes, I evoked some of the extraordinary events that had occurred in that room, using three ‘elements’: salt, money and flowers.

Ruskin had published a book in two volumes in the late 1800s about plants and flowers called Proserpina. It went largely unrecognised at the time due to its eccentric collection of intensely detailed observations of plants and their processes, woven with passionate prose.

‘The flower exists for its own sake. The production of the fruit is an added honour to it – is a granted consolation to us for its death. But the flower is the end of the seed – not the seed of the flower.’

Ruskin’s writing was rich with religious and moral beliefs, with flowers as the emblematic fulcrum of beauty and resonance.

‘You think that the use of cherry blossom is to produce cherries. Not at all. The use of cherries is to produce cherry blossom; just as the use of bulbs is to produce hyacinths.’

I scattered flowers – collected and dried from both Brantwood and my own garden – around the edge of the dining table. As I introduced Ruskin’s Proserpina, their perfume filled the room: roses, marigolds, camomile. Pinks, reds and yellows. Flowers normally contained and organised in vases now strewn over the table.

I invited the ‘audience’ to consider this: Charles Darwin had dined there in 1879. He was 70, Ruskin was 60. The discussion was probably rich, with Darwin speaking about the recurring struggle for existence, the mechanical process that had little or no reliance upon soul or will. And Ruskin passionate about his beliefs that nature did not exist by competition alone, that co-operation and ‘soul’ played crucial parts.

As the content of a conversation over 200 years old was evoked, next to the flower petals, I placed a circle of one pound coins: money laid down for Ruskin’s criticisms of capitalist ideology, of mechanisation and loss of craft. His highly influential writing on ‘value’ was laid out in his book Unto This Last. Gandhi had read this on a train journey in South Africa; it inspired him to direct action, to the Salt March and the collapse of colonial India. So into the centre of the table, I poured salt. Normally contained as a condiment, now salt was spilling over, the grains scattered on the money and in with the flowers.

At the end of my ‘tour’, I offered a ‘souvenir’ of the dining room to each member of the audience – a small bag containing either salt, a pound coin or some dried flowers. Not only did this reverse the usual order of purchasing a memento of the house, but it provoked a complex choice for each visitor: each one had value, significance, a use even, and each object was imbued with meaning. Most visitors I remember, chose the flowers.

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ashdenizen: flowers on stage: the lotus

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In the third of our summer series of blogs about flowers on stage, Satinder Chohan, writes about the lotus.

Lotus Beauty is the working title for a play I’m writing about the lives of different generations of Asian women in Britain. The play is set in a ladies beauty salon in suburban London.

Early in the play’s development, while grappling with notions of ‘beauty’, I took a walk around my neighbourhood in Southall, West London. In a small park, in a dilapidated, brown-edged pond, a beautiful white lotus stood elegant and poised, rising above half-submerged carrier bags, cigarette butts, beer cans and smack needles in the murky water. The suburban lotus inspired my ideas for the play.

Like the rose of the West, the lotus of the East is imbued with myriad cultural and spiritual meaning. The lotus is deeply rooted in Eastern mythology and religion, Buddhism and Hinduism in particular. Using the lotus symbol, I wanted to write about a spiritually bankrupt 21st century British-Asian suburbia, increasingly obsessed with external beauty and the physical self, consumed by ego, money and materialism.

I asked my mother about the lotus in rural India. As a child, she used to pop lotus seeds with her friends, eating them like popcorn. Lotuses used to spring up in flooded fields in her village. As frequent drought and new development swallowed up ponds and swamps, few remain. Her lotus-eating anecdote led me to Homer’s Odyssey and Tennyson’s 1832 poem The Lotos-Eaters. In both, the Lotophagi people eat a soporific plant that ‘so overpowered them with languor, they felt no inclination to leave, or anymore a desire to pursue the journey homewards’ (Odyssey). I imagined how people gorge on money, not lotuses, that have risen from the murky swamps of Britain, leading to apathetic lives, disconnected from nature and one’s environment.

For the women in my play, the lotus eventually blooms in trapped lives – the lotus reminding us that untainted beauty can indeed rise from earthly mud.

See also: flowers on stage: the poppy and flowers on stage: the daffodil

Satinder Chohan is a freelance writer and playwright whose first play Zameen (2008) focussed on Indian cotton farmers.

ashdenizen: flowers on stage: the daffodil

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In the second in our summer series of blogs, the artist Sue Palmerwrites about the daffodils and the desk fan in Mary Southcott’s ‘Let’s get some weather in here’

One moment – a movement – remains with me. I can remember none of the content now – it is about 8 years since I saw the theatre performance and the stories are blurred, fleeted. What I do remember is Mary performing her solo show, and one moment within it has fused itself onto my memory.

Just off centre in the performance space is a window box, a white plastic window box, and facing the audience are a row of daffodils, yellow and bright in the studio lighting. They are looking perky and buoyant as only daffodils can, and very yellow, the trumpet variety. At one point in the performance, Mary switches on a desk fan that stands behind the daffodils and a deeply satisfying event takes place.

As the fan turns its automated 120-degree span, so the daffodil heads respond – bobbing, nodding. The bobbing heads in the breeze are met by collective warmth and delight from the audience – our attention is absorbed by the responsive movement of the flowers that is so familiar, so recognisable.

Mary’s simple creation of a small ‘weather system’ in the studio is utterly captivating: the outside is suddenly on the inside. The relationship between the wind and the flower is placed at the centre of my attention, so I can see in absolute detail the architectural brilliance of the flower at being able to both receive and resist the wind. Due to the travel of the fan, the breeze interacts with the flowers over an arc of time so the daffodil heads respond to the beginning of the wind touching them, nodding vigorously as the full fan passes over them, returning to a small stillness before the process loops to a return.

The articulation of the flowers and their ability to work with the wind ‘speaks’; their ‘heads’ work with receptivity, capacity, intelligence. The daffodils have performed for us.

At ‘Presence’ Festival, Dartington College of Arts, Devon, June 2002

Photo: Ed O’Keefe

See also flowers on stage: the poppy. Next: flowers on stage: the lotus.

via ashdenizen: flowers on stage: the daffodil.

ashdenizen: flowers on stage: the poppy

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In the first of the summer series of blogs about flowers on stage,Frances Babbage writes about poppies.

The flowers were scarlet poppies and they burst through the wall. In 1997, the Lecoq-trained theatre company Bouge-de-là presented Under Glass.

Its young woman protagonist lives a closed existence in a cramped bedsit, selecting each day the same clothes, in the same order; her ritualized sequence of actions structures each day predictably, protecting any her from all outside influence. Yet on one wall of her attic room is a poster of an Alpine field, studded with flowers.

An unvoiced and largely repressed fantasy of Switzerland and what this appears to represent is stirred into life when a young Swiss man, a neighbour, meets and fleetingly befriends her before leaving again, to return to his native country or travel elsewhere.

The audience recognises, as he does not, the consequences of his actions for this vulnerable woman: better perhaps that he had never come at all.

In the performance’s final moments, she is left alone, again, in the small, drab room – even more alone, because abandoned. She leans against the wall, unspeaking: the damage done seems irreparable.

Then utterly without warning, flowers push their way through the wall. The dirty, fading wallpaper becomes an Alpine meadow, and pressed against it she appear to us to lie amongst poppies: maybe sleeping; maybe dying. She will never leave her little room; she will not travel to the places she dreams about. But in this moment she is transported there, and at the same time the pure fresh air and open fields burst in here. Living flowers, poppies, pushing in through peeling paper, connect two worlds: poetically, the image layers fresh against stale; movement against stasis; death against life.

This woman will not trust someone else another time. She will retreat still further. Perhaps she will die. But as she breathes in the scent of flowers, we can believe that something has changed for her in a way worth the anguish that comes with it.

Dr Frances Babbage is convenor of the MA in Theatre & Performance at Sheffield University. Her first book was Augusto Boal (Routledge, 2004).

photo: Aurelian Koch

The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts to Present Award for Sustainable Production at Hollywood and Edinburgh Fringe Festivals

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The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts (CSPA) announces the inaugural Fringe Festival Award for Sustainable Production, debuting at the Hollywood Fringe Festival June 17th – 27th. The CSPA Fringe Festival Award for Sustainable Production is designed to reward ecologically sustainable practice in the production of a fringe show. The winner will be announced at the Fringe Awards Ceremony on June 27th at 7:00pm, and will receive a plaque and a feature article in an upcoming edition of the CSPA Quarterly, the CSPA’s print publication highlighting the most exciting work being done in sustainability and the arts.

The award will be adjudicated by the CSPA Directors, Ian Garrett and Miranda Wright, along with a number of CSPA affiliates. It will be looking at public communication and education, resource use and transportation in support of presenting a fringe show based on methodology developed by the CSPA itself and San Diego’s Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company, who has created a comprehensive Green Theater Choices Toolkit with a generous grant from the Theater Communications Group.

While debuting at the Hollywood Fringe, the CSPA Fringe Festival Award for Sustainable Production will also be offered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this August, where the CSPA will be presenting a panel on sustainability in theater at Fringe Central in Edinburgh on Monday Morning, August the 16th.

“We’ve been working since we started the CSPA on how to provide resources and guidelines for sustainable production to the theatrical community. Both Miranda and myself come from theatrical backgrounds and it is important to us. The fringe festival model provides an ideal platform to introduce these ideas and the award due to the expectations and scale of the shows. It is easier to start the conversation at a fringe level of production than Broadway. By starting with the Hollywood Fringe, our local and the newest fringe festival, and immediately moving to the Edinburgh Fringe, the largest and oldest fringe in the world, we are looking to create the greatest visibility and excitement around the introduction of ideas of sustainability to the largest number of theater artists at home and away,” says Executive Director Ian Garrett.

To be considered for the award, a production fills out an online questionnaire. Questions range from an inventory of materials used to what public transportation lines run close to venues to how themes about sustainability are addressed in their shows. Because venues vary so greatly, various sections may not be included in a single evaluation to provide equal footing for the shows on a case by case basis. Shows are encouraged, but not required to provide a CSPA affiliate with tickets to their production to allow a trained eye to look at shows and projects as they exist in the real world.

As an independent producer and designer, outside of the CSPA, Garrett is also involved in bringing shows to both the Hollywood and Edinburgh festivals. He will be designing for the Rogue Artist Ensemble’s ‘Hyperbole: Origins’ workshop at Art\Works Theater on Santa Monica for the Hollywood Fringe (To be premiered in full production at Inside the Ford this Fall) and is the conceiver and producer for the devised physical theater piece on memory, aging and identity ‘At Sundown’, which will be at the Edinburgh Fringe at Venue 13. Garrett also serves as the Festival Producer for CalArts Festival Theater, a program of California Institute of the Arts’ School of Theater that enables students and alumni to bring work to the Edinburgh Fringe, now in it’s 7th year. In the interest of fairness, these shows will not be eligible for the CSPA’s award.

“Even more so than we want someone to score perfectly on the questionnaire we use to evaluate shows, we want theater artists to look at the questions and think about how it helps to guide their thinking about sustainability in the their art. There may be questions asked in ways they hadn’t thought, and we hope they ask these questions of their next project and the project after that.”

To apply, fringe show producers can head over to the CSPA’s website at http://www.sustainablepractice.com/fringe or email fringe@sustainablepractice.org. Applications for evaluation will be taken up until the end of the festival, though it is encouraged to apply while it is still possible for a CSPA affiliate to view the show. All questions regarding the award by also be be directed to fringe@sustainablepractice.org.

The CSPA was founded by Ian Garrett and Miranda Wright in early 2008 after individually working on each of the programs that now make up the multi-faceted approach to sustainability separately. It provides a network of resources to arts organizations, which enables them to be ecologically and economically sustainable while maintaining artistic excellence. We support the infrastructure of this network by supplying artists with the information, education and intellectual community they need to make the best choices for their sustainability. We do this through three independent programs: CSPA Online Resources, annual CSPA convergence and the CSPA Institute’s curriculum building. We extend these efforts with key partnerships with like minded organizations. Past and Present partnerships have included the University of Oregon, Ashden Directory, Arcola Theater, Diverseworks Artspace, Indy Convergence, York University, LA Stage Alliance and others. Under the umbrella of the CSPA, each program and partnership uses different tactics with their own mission to create a comprehensive and cooperative synthesis in artistic sustainability.

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ashdenizen: is climate change a zombie concept?

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Kellie Payne reports on the Tipping Point event, held earlier this month, where Mike Hulme suggested climate change was a zombie concept:

as a metaphor it has done its work. As a concept, it connects a large swathe of issues combined through the scientific narrative and perhaps there are other ways to make progress.

Much less the as-billed scientific update, the Tipping Point event held on Wednesday 13th April at Kings College, London was a philosophical exploration of the status of our current conceptualisation of climate change.

Hosted by Tipping Point, the arts organisation that seeks to build bridges between artists and climate scientists, the afternoon featured Mike Hulme, UEA climate scientist and author of Why We Disagree About Climate Change, climate change adaptation specialist Emma Tompkins and Greenpeace’s Senior Climate Advisor Charlie Kronick . In attendance were past Tipping Point conference attendees, a mix of artists, academics and a few scientists.

Hulme is a veteran climate scientist whose career has included serving as the founder-director of the Tyndall centre and contributing scientist to UK climate change scenarios and reports for the IPCC. However, writing his recent book led Hulme to take a more philosophical perspective: his interest being more in the positioning of our larger conceptualisations of climate change and interrogating different epistemological constructions of climate change. Moving beyond the merely scientific understanding of climate change, he investigates how climate change is understood in disciplines varying from economics, ethics, politics and humanities. In particular, he argues that climate change is a value laden concept that reflects our views of the world, nature, the economy and ethical frameworks.

Hulme’s presentation was largely an explanation of the four myths he explores in his book: lamenting Eden which draws on a sense of nostalgia, presaging apocalypse based on a sense of fear, constructing Babel (hubris) and celebrating jubilee which builds upon our sense of justice. In essence, what Hulme argues is that every individual brings their own agenda, applying the challenge of climate change to their own problems, that is, climate change is the raw material that is used to work on our individual projects. Hulme suggested we ask ourselves whether stabilising the climate was indeed our ultimate goal or whether stabilising climate was instead a means to an end, and we were using climate change to achieve our other goals.

Emma Tomkins on the other hand bases her work on a belief that climate change is happening and asserts that the government is leading the way on adaptation. Based at Leeds and the Government’s Department for International Development, Tomkins outlined types of adaptation currently being implemented including risk management policies and attempts to build resilience. When Tomkins asked the audience how many were currently taking adaptive measures, it became clear that the line between what constitutes mitigation activities and adaption is often blurred in the minds of many. The government makes a clear distinction between mitigation measures (limiting ones emissions) and adaption (preparing for the impacts of climate change). For instance when asked about what types of adaptation individuals were taking, some audience members mentioned the work of the Transition Town movements, but from the government perspective Transition Town activities would constitute mitigation measures as their main focus is reducing emissions.

Tomkins conducted an exercise to see how we as an audience would allocate adaptation funds, whether we would base our decisions on: equitable distribution of resources, reward mitigators, help those facing the most exposure, help the most vulnerable, or offer developmental assistance. At the moment, current government policy (Adaptation Policy Framework) is based on risk mapping and awareness and therefore has its focus on those who face the most exposure to risk. Tomkins stressed the need to be aware that in any adaptation policy there are a number of decisions to be made about the type of losses we are willing to take and warned that there is a potential to make serious mistakes unless we seriously consider the issues.

Charlie Kronick weighed in with the activist viewpoint, reminding the audience that in the past adaptation wasn’t even considered because to do so would be to accept defeat. Further, he didn’t see the need to separate out adaptation and mitigation as he sees them as one and the same. For Charlie, climate change isn’t about science, or art, but about power politics, ‘the deal makers and takers’ and inequality is a major driver.

Hulme agreed that it’s about politics and our ambitions about what type of society we want to inherit. Hulme suggested that perhaps climate change was indeed a zombie concept, and as a metaphor it has done its work. As a concept, it connects a large swathe of issues combined through the scientific narrative and perhaps there are other ways to make progress.

Kellie Payne is a PhD student in the Geography department at the Open University researching culture and climate change

A Greener National Theatre – Behind the Scenes – National Theatre

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by Robert Butler

As you walk south over Waterloo Bridge, looking across at the concrete levels of the National Theatre, the scrolling text which advertises the productions also carries the news that the National is working to reduce its energy consumption. This might seem an unlikely boast for a theatre to make. Audiences know that onstage the best theatre always matches energy with economy, but more and more, the precept holds good offstage too.

In this case, the medium is the message: in 2009 the teletext changed from the old Ceefax, which used 1248 lightbulbs – costing £6 each, and all imported from Mexico – to the Philips VidiWall, an 8m x 3m screen using LEDS, or light-emitting diodes. This has produced a 60% energy saving, or 30 tonnes of CO2 per year. At the same time, the external lights on the building, which elegantly alter the National’s facade from night to night and from season to season, have switched from discharge lamps to LEDS, which reduces the energy consumption by 70%.

Some of the new low-carbon measures are eye-catching, others are almost invisible. If you drive to the National, you’re probably unaware that the fans in the car park that extract the carbon monoxide have been switched off. These fans ran all the time the car park was open, which was 20 hours a day. They have now been replaced by 27 carbon monoxide detectors that only activate the fans when necessary. So far, these fans have hardly ever come on. They are needed, occasionally, when three shows end at the same time and there’s a queue to leave, but car exhausts are cleaner today, and the car park is better ventilated. The use of CO detectors has saved the National £30,000 a year.

You may not see the CO detectors either. There’s a trial going on in the National’s car park to reduce the amount of lighting. In a fifth of the car park, the lights only come on when there’s movement, but even when they’re down to 10%, visibility is still reasonable. When this trial is rolled out across the National’s car park, it will knock a further 3.5% from the NT’s electricity bill.

Inside the building, there have been further adjustments. If you head into one of the loos before the show, motion detectors bring the lights on. Sharp-eyed members of the audience may even notice minute particles of sand in the toilet pans. The ground water that surfaces in the basement and carpark has been filtered, treated and pumped through the National’s water system as grey water (not for drinking). There used to be even more of this supply, but Thames Water recently mended the pipes in SE1, which has cut down on this informal subsidy for the arts. As you leave the NT’s loos, you’ll also notice the Dyson airblade hand-dryers, which dry hands in 10 seconds with unheated air. What dries the hands is a sheet of air travelling at 400 miles an hour which uses a quarter of the energy that hot air does.

If you buy a programme on the way into the auditorium, you will see that you are reading this article on paper that is between 75% and 90% recycled. The National requires nearly 60 tonnes of paper a year for its programmes and repertory brochures. That works out at about 750 trees a year. When the National reaches its target of 100% recycled paper (which it hopes to achieve in the next two years) it will be diverting more than 75 tonnes of paper from landfill sites and will have saved nearly 80 tonnes of CO2 a year.

As you take your seat, glance at the lights at the end of the aisles – called “seat-enders” – and you’ll see they are all LEDs. When the show begins, most of the 40 or 50 ‘discharge’ lamps that light the show will have been tested by the crew at 5pm and then turned off. It used to be that once the lamps were tested at 5pm they were left on till the show began two and a half hours later. It’s estimated that if this change in theatre practice was adopted across the West End it would save a megawatt, or a million watts, every night. A megawatt is easy enough to picture: take a single 100-watt bulb and multiply it by ten thousand.

There are also measures that audiences don’t get to see. Within the building there are improved showers for cyclists, a loan scheme for members of staff to buy bicycles, a brightly-coloured row of large bins in the canteen for recycling, and the offer of a discount on your coffee at the canteen if you bring your own cup. For a while, pop-ups used to appear on computer screens when staff logged out saying ‘remember to switch off your computer and printer’. There are still night-time checks around the offices to make sure no lights or machines have been left on. You wouldn’t want to be the person who was told that they had kept the digital photo frame of their loved ones on all night.

What has driven these initiatives? If you like the bigger picture, you could argue that one answer was the Iranian missile tests. When the Islamic Revolutionary Guard announced it had tested nine missiles simultaneously on 9 July 2008, it sent oil prices – which had already quadrupled between 2003 and 2006 – to a record high. It was at exactly that moment that the National Theatre found itself coming out of a three-year contract with an energy supplier that had kept its fuel bills at an increasingly advantageous level. Overnight the building was faced with a very substantial hike in fuel costs. During that three-year contract, the public mood had also shifted: in 2006, Al Gore released his movie An Inconvenient Truth, James Lovelock published The Revenge of Gaia and the Conservatives produced the slogan ‘vote blue, go green’. Theatres were starting to think more carefully about their carbon footprints.

The two imperatives – economic and environmental – came together and the National’s response was to set itself a target. Over three years, it would reduce its consumption of gas and electricity by 20%. At the same time, it would continue to expand its activities. Since 2008 for example, the National has been open on Sundays. It has also substantially increased the amount of work it does in the summer. In 2005, the Watch This Space festival featured 177 shows and gigs over 11 weeks; by 2009, it featured 256 shows and gigs over 13 weeks. The brief, then, has been to increase activity and decrease energy consumption. It has called for some ingenuity. The lighting for the new venue, The Deck, where corporate functions are held, is so efficient that it runs off a single 13 amp socket.

Like other institutions, the National made quick progress with ‘low-hanging fruit’: the deal with Philips, who provided the Vidiwall and the LED lighting, almost single-handedly slashed the electricity consumption. But there’s a moment when the light bulbs have been changed and the staff are recycling when most of the ‘easy wins’ have been made. It’s hard then not to hit some barriers. For instance, the car park provides an important income stream. Also, some people don’t like using late-night public transport and simply wouldn’t buy tickets to the National if they couldn’t park. It’s also perfectly possible for audiences to find all the information about the season online, but the strong support for the mailing list shows many people prefer to receive repertory brochures in the post. The restaurant has had a great response for its seasonal food that is locally sourced. But the sales of bottled water are also important to the restaurant and bars. (So the task, there, is to ensure that all the bottles are fully recyclable. Indeed they are working to ensure that all the food packaging that comes into the building can be recycled.) The final barrier, of course, is that no-one would dare suggest at the moment that the production values themselves should be compromised for the sake of energy savings.

Theatre is an energy-hungry activity and the National employs 850 staff and 150 actors. In terms of its energy use, this five-acre site isn’t one place, it’s a number of places, each with its own micro-climate. During this past winter, when some members of staff who work in the east-facing offices (looking towards St Paul’s) were switching on extra heaters to combat the cold part of the winter, there were others, in the south-facing offices, enjoying the glow, or ‘solar gain’, from the winter sun.

Till now, a limited amount of capital has been sufficient to make the energy reductions. But certain aspects of the building are very energy-inefficient, notably the heat loss through the single-glazed windows, which are all over the building, and where the seals round the windows have deteriorated. This is a building that was conceived in the 1960s when attitudes to energy were very different. The next steps are going to require substantial investment – and a master-plan.

Or rather three master-plans: one for developing the building; one for upgrading the technical requirements of the stage areas; and one for improving the building’s environmental performance. For that last plan, everything has been considered, from introducing CHP, or Combined Heat and Power, to a proposal to insulate parts of the roof with grass and plants. The theatre would, quite literally, be going green.

© Robert Butler, 2010

Robert Butler has written four books in the series ‘The National Theatre at Work’. He also writes the ‘Going Green’ column for the Economist’s Intelligent Life magazine.

The National Theatre’s ‘Sense and Simplicity’ Lighting Partnership with Philips has won the Environment Award in this year’s Hollis Sponsorship Awards

First posted here:
A Greener National Theatre – Behind the Scenes – National Theatre.

ashdenizen: two views across the mersey

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In this guest post on the Ashden Directory’s Blog, Wallace Heim, co-editor of the Ashden Directory, spends a day in Liverpool – first with philosophers, then with artists.

Two weeks ago, in sight of the Mersey, and within a 100 yards of one another, you could find two very different ways of looking at human relations with nature. At Liverpool University's Philosophy Department, a dozen professors and lecturers exchanged ideas on alienation and the environment. Across the street, High Tide’s latest exhibition of work by 11 artists opened at the Art & Design Academy.

The philosophers talked in a plain room around a table. We dived into meticulous explorations of how the human relates to the natural, and whether our perceived loss of touch from the natural world is justifiably the grounds for our current situation, or whether there is something in that estrangement which is vital, productive, even necessary.

A grappling with how to describe the experience and feeling of alienation moved alongside the historical and analytical exploration of it, through the Romantics, Marx, environmental ethics and new views on the built environment as ‘natural’.

Seeing the gallery with those ideas still swimming in my mind made me look for a similar prodding of that sore zone between human and nature, wanting to see more than a rush to represent the effects of the estrangement, or to show a better or more ecological connection, as valuable as those are. I wanted to be taken, through art, into that suspension where not everything is known and already given, a place of sideways, even dangerous, questions.

This wasn’t the theme of Mersey Basin, which was an exploration of rising sea levels, flooding and the ebb and flow of that shoreline. Works were composed of driftwood, mud, string, plastic detritus and woven wool. Some were juxtapositions of waste and beauty (Robyn Woolston, Gordon MacLellan), some had provocational intent (Àgata Alcañiz). Many artworks represented past conversations or performances, or long periods of attending to an environment, or of collaborations with scientists (Scott Thurston & Elizabeth Willow, James Brady & Stuart Carter).

Maps represented not only the present, but the ancient fluctuations of changing shorelines melding into projections of an uncertain future (Tim Pugh), and the visual pleasure of proposals forward for the Mersey Basin as a forested refuge for migrating species (David Haley).

The walking, marking and storytelling of the exhibition brought the materiality of the changing edge between sea and land into view. But the littoral could also describe the continually changing gap between the ‘human’ and ‘nature’, and it was the philosophers who excited this most sharply, almost painfully, and pushed against the shortcomings of current knowledge as our environments change.

Pic: 'Trees of Grace: Draughting Change': David Haley shows our blogger a map of the Mersey Basin and Pennines that illustrates how it would look with a changed shoreline and re-forestation. (Yvonne Haley)

Reposted from: ashdenizen: two views across the mersey.