Julie’s Bicycle and Arts Council England have worked in partnership since 2012 to inspire environmental action across the arts and culture sector, with a focus on long-term funding partners, the National Portfolio Organisations.
Our latest report, Sustaining Great Art and Culture, details data, projections and initiatives from the opening year of a new four-year environmental sustainability programme.
“The success of this programme goes far beyond data collection and carbon reduction. Cultural organisations are embedding climate action into the core of their operations – developing creative solutions, forging new partnerships and sparking valuable conversations on sustainability with their audiences. The actions taken to address climate change over the next decade will be crucial and, as society faces up to this challenge, the imagination, ambition and commitment demonstrated in the Arts Council’s 2018/19 Environmental Report point the way forward.â€
– Nicholas Serota, Chair, Arts Council England
This is the first environmental report to cover the Arts Council’s 2018-22 National Portfolio, which has grown by 20% and includes 184 organisations new to environmental reporting. It reveals that the Portfolio’s total carbon footprint is 114,547 tonnes of CO2e – an amount which would take almost 115,000 trees 100 years to absorb – yet also highlights initiatives organisations are undertaking in response to this challenge: from Bristol’s ColstonHall pledge to achieve zero carbon emissions by 2030 to the LondonTheatreConsortium developing a roadmap for a 60% reduction in carbon emissions by 2025.
Key findings of the report include:
Organisations are making sustainable energy choices – 54% have installed energy efficient lighting and controls and 32% of purchased electricity is on a green tariff contract.
A new, creative ecology is emerging – 47% are trailing sustainable production or exhibition methods and 30% are with banks that invest in social and environmental projects.
Sustainability is powering creative expression – 50% developed new creative or artistic opportunities as a result of environmental initiatives and 49% have produced, programmed or curated work on environmental themes.
Business communication is changing – 70% actively promote virtual communications technology as an alternative to travelling.
In response to the growing commitment demonstrated by the sector, Arts Council England and Julie’s Bicycle will now shift focus towards accelerating impact and stretching ambition. This includes two new strands of work: The Accelerator Programme, which offers organisations resources and expertise to develop innovative ideas into deliverable projects for greater impact, and a targeted carbon reduction scheme for organisations with large infrastructures, The Spotlight Programme.
We encourage you to please share this report, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and use the hashtag #GreenCulture to join in the conversation. If you would like any social media or marketing assets, or have any questions, please contact the Julie’s Bicycle office: +44 (0) 208 746 0400.
Banner image: Steve Edwin, courtesy of Bournemouth Arts By The Sea
Trieste, Studio Tommaseo (Italy) DISMANTLING STRUCTURES a solo-show by ŽELJKO KIPKE opening on Saturday 22 February, at 18.00 p.m.
Newest paintings by the Croatian artist strike Zagreb icon-buildings which have been strongly characterized by political, economic and cultural history of the city (such as the Parliament, former seat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party).
The opening of Dismantling Structures exhibition will take place on 22 February 2020, at 18 pm, at Studio Tommaseo in Trieste: curator Branko Franceschi will introduce the audience to the artistic world of Croatian artist Željko Kipke and will converse with him.
Kipke uses to paint on canvas typical monochrome backgrounds. This time he distorts on them famous images of Zagreb architecture and depicts buildings like waste papers, crumpled and rolled into a ball, so they are almost unrecognizable. The artist also puts into an experimental animated short film, which contains a Zagreb map pointing those buildings out, his critical questions about the functioning of the institutional system in Croatia, a country that is in transition.
Dismantling Structures has been realised by Trieste Contemporanea in co-production with the Museum of Fine Arts in Split and Galerija KranjÄar in Zagreb, and under the patronage of the Consulate General of the Republic of Croatia in Trieste. Trieste is the first Italian venue for this new Kipke’s art project, that follows the exhibition curated in November 2019 by critic Vanja Babić at the Galerija KranjÄar in Zagreb.
Željko Kipke (ÄŒakovec 1953) is a painter and a video maker. He studied in the 1970s at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and was at the beginning a leading artist in the analytic line of contemporary art and then also a leading director in experimental film. In the first half of the 1980s he made short films mainly documenting his art performances. During his intense artistic career, among other things, he represented Croatia at the 1993 Venice Biennale and at the 1995 Cairo Biennale. In 2007, again in Venice, he was commissioner of his country’s pavilion. Also important is his activity as an art critic and curator, a theoretician and a writer.
a Trieste Contemporanea production a Museum of Fine Arts in Split co-production a Galerija KranjÄar Zagreb co-production under the patronage of the Consulate General of the Republic of Croatia in Trieste
Željko Kipke Dismantling Structures from 22 February to 16 April, 2020
curator Branko Franceschi
venue: Trieste, Studio Tommaseo (via del Monte 2/1) opening on Saturday 22 February, at 18.00 p.m. opening hours: Tuesday-Saturday 17-20 p.m. free entry
(Top photo: The artist in his studio while preparing the exhibition)
In the last year we have seen an explosion of action on the climate crisis; from sector-wide declarations of climate emergency, to young people leading global strikes, and the UK’s first ever party leader’s election debate on climate and nature.
This provocative, intergenerational and action-focused event will bring creative-cultural leaders and institutions together with funders, grassroots activists, policy-makers and the scientific community to explore what creativity, leadership and innovation means in the context of climate and ecological emergency, ahead of the crucial COP26 climate talks.
What to Expect
Taking place on Wednesday 26th February 2020 at the Royal Geographical Society London, we will bring together high-profile expert speakers and facilitators with an audience of over 300 from across the UK and beyond.
Together we will ask: What will the world be like in 2030, and what can the creative and cultural community do now to push us closer to the future we want?
This day-long event will look at the political, demographic, economic and social forces driving our changing climate and devastating loss of nature, and explore how the arts and cultural sector can be galvanised to move us towards net-zero, whilst laying foundations for a more connected, viable and just future society.
Expect interactive sessions, performances, high profile keynotes, and cross-disciplinary discussion. As a participant of this event, we would like you to bring your vision, experience and expertise to help shape and contribute towards the day.
We will be announcing more names and further details very soon. But for now, don’t miss out – book your tickets now!
Preliminary structure for the day
9.30 – 10 Registration 10 – 10.30 Welcome and introduction 10.30 – 11.30 Session 1 + Q&A 11.30 – 12.30 Group panel 12.30 – 12.45 Performance 12.45 – 1.45 Lunch, networking break, screening and activities 1.45 – 2.40 Group panel and workshop 2.50 – 3.45 Group panel and presentation 3.45 – 4.15 Refreshment and networking break 4.15 – 4.40 Voices from the creative climate movement 4.40 – 5.15 Presentation and performance 5.30 Daytime event close 5.30pm – 9.30pm Networking drinks and performances (tickets to be booked separately, free to all attending during the day)
FULL DAY TICKETS ARE SOLD OUT however a limited number of additional half-day and digital access tickets have now been created. Click below to find out more and book.
On Sunday 16 February 2020 starting at 5 PM Spatula&Barcode will host the first of four dinner conversations about Generosity in the Rowland Gallery of the Chazen Museum (University of Wisconsin campus in Madison). As part of our project Come to the Table, we will discuss the theme of Care with the following guests:
Wed, February 5, 2020 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM EST Add to Calendar
Location
Loisaida, Inc. 710 East 9th Street New York, NY 10009 United States View Map
Join Ecological City: A Cultural & Climate Solutions Project engaging the #LowerEastSide community through creative #collaborativearts strategies to bring together and celebrate #climatesolutions and ecological #sustainability initiatives throughout the #communitygardens, neighborhood and #EastRiverPark #waterfront on the #LowerEastSide of #NYC.
Share ideas, brainstorm and and collaborate co-creating the Ecological City: Procession for Climate Solutions at the ECOLOGICAL CITY – PLANNING MEETING
Find out how to participate in #EcologicalArtsWorkshops from February 29 – May 6 every Wednesday 6-9pm and Saturday 12-4pm creating spectacular giant puppets, costumes and performances exploring local sustainability sites and climate solution initiatives.
Groups and organizations are invited to create groups arts projects. Visual arts and performance projects created through the workshops are presented in the culminating Ecological City: Procession for Climate Solutions on Saturday May 9, 2020 with 20 sites performances celebrating climate solutions and ecological sustainability initiatives throughout community gardens, neighborhood and East River Park waterfront on the Lower East Side.
MORE INFORMATION: www.earthcelebrations.comFB Message: Earth Celebrations-Ecological and Social Change through the Arts Earth Celebrations’ Ecological City: Cultural & Climate Solutions Action Project in partnership with LUNGS (Loisaida Urban Neighborhood Gardens – representing 48 Lower East Side Gardens), Two Bridges Neighborhood Council, NYC Community Garden District, Green Map, East Village Community Coalition, Lower East Side Girls Club, University Settlement, Educational Alliance, Sixth Street Community Center, Loisaida Inc. Center, GOLES,, East River Park Coalition, East River Alliance, East River Park Action, Friends of Corlears Hook Park, Lower East Side Ecology, Solar One, Waterfront Alliance, Gaia Institute, FABnyc, Arts Loisaida, 4th Street Block Association, Times Up, Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, One Brick, PS364-Earth School, Childrens Workshop School, New School/Parsons, Hunter College-School of Community Organizing and NYU.
Earth Celebrations is a non-profit orgization founded in 1991 on the Lower East Side of New York City to apply the inspirational power of the arts to build community, collaboration and action on climate change, river restoration, waste management and the preservation of species, habitats, community gardens, parks and a healthy urban environment. Earth Celebrations has developed and utilizes collaborative art processes, civic engagement and environmental action to build broad-based coalitions and cross-sector partnerships with local organizations, academic institutions, government agencies, schools, and community residents to generate ecological, policy and social change.
Our pioneering environmental arts programs include the 15-year Save Our Gardens project (1991-2005), which utilized the transformative power of the arts, creating a theatrical Procession to Save Our Gardens to mobilize a coalition effort that led to the preservation of hundreds of community gardens in New York City. The Hudson River Pageant (2009-2012) applied this creative model to engage community in restoration efforts of the Hudson River estuary and waterfront.
Our current Ecological City: Cultural & Climate Solutions Action Project launched in 2018, engages community, through the cultural strategies of arts and collaborative action we have developed over the past 30 years, on climate solution initiatives to mitigate climate and environmental impacts flooding, carbon pollution, run-off, waste and sea-level rise throughout the gardens, neighborhood and waterfront on the LES.
Ecological City engages the community to co-create a public theatrical pageant through 5 months of environmental place-based learning workshops and visual art and performance creation engage participants to explore and celebrate local sustainability sites, connecting climate solution initiatives as a cohesive urban sustainable ecosystem and amplifying their importance to city and global climate challenges.
[This] year, May 21st to 31st 2020 we’re celebrating the 10th birthday of the International Uranium Film Festival (link is external) and we want to bring the best nuclear films and its filmmakers from the last ten years together with new productions to Rio de Janeiro. The venue will be like in the years before the Cinematheque of Rio de Janeiro’s prestigious Modern Art Museum (MAM Rio) (link is external). Already more than 25 awarded filmmakers and producers from 12 countries agreed to come to Rio in 2020.Â
NUCLEAR POWER & CLIMATE CHANGE
In addition to the screenings of dozens of nuclear films this in the world unique film festival about the atomic age is planning a powerful panel on one of the most important questions of our time: Climate Change and Nuclear Power. Are nuclear power plants a solution to global warming?
Join us and help the Uranium Film Festival to celebrate its tenth anniversary. Whether you are for or against the use of nuclear power or uranium: Everyone should be aware of the radioactive risks. Make a mark and contribute to the festival.
ATOMIC FILMS AND FESTIVAL SPONSORS WANTED
The Uranium Film Festival’s call for entries for 2020 is sill open. Filmmakers and producers can send their documentaries, animations, non-fiction or experimental movies until 1 January 2020. In addition the festival invites the media and social or environmentally conscious companies as festival sponsors and partners.
„We founded the International Uranium Film Festival in 2010 just a few months before Fukushima especially to ensure that atomic disasters such as Chernobyl or the horror of nuclear bomb attacks and nuclear bomb tests are not forgotten nor repeated,” recalls festival director Norbert G. Suchanek. „When we published our first call for entry, very surprisingly one of the first productions we received and awarded was the extraordinary short film Atomic Bombs On The Planet Earth(link is external) by Peter Greenaway. Since that we have shown more than 200 nuclear films from around the globe until today.”
Every penny collected during this campaign will be used to organize the film festival and to bring as many filmmakers as possible to Rio. The more support we get the more filmmakers we can invite and the better and the more impact will have the festival to achieve one of our major goals: nuclear awareness. Any additional funds beyond that goal will help us to organize the festival in other locations too. Like in the years before, further Uranium Film Festivals are also planned in other countries like USA, Germany (Berlin), Portugal, Spain and Greenland. Environmental conscious people and nuclear activists around the world are eager to have the Uranium Film Festival in their country to support their nuclear campaigns against (for example) planned uranium mines like in Spain and Greenland or for the clean-up of abandoned uranium mines in the USA or Portugal.
Claus Biegert, Filmmaker and Founder of the Nuclear-Free Future Award(link is external): “I have witnessed the emergence of the Uranium Film Festival. The festival makes a big contribution against forgetting. It is very important that the atomic age ends. We humans started it. That is why it is up to us all to finish it. The Uranium Film Festival helps us do that.”
Save the date: the Cultural Adaptations conference will take place in Glasgow, from 6-8 October 2020.
This unique event will combine keynote presentations and participatory workshops to share international learning on how culture can play a central role in climate change adaptation.Â
Across three days, the conference will present the learnings from workshops in four European nations (Sweden, Ireland, Belgium and Scotland) as well as expert speakers from case studies, successful initiatives and exemplary international leadership in adaptation and culture.Â
The programme will explore:
How cultural organisations can adapt to the projected impacts of climate change using new methods and digital tools
How adaptation by cultural SMEs can lead and support other city-region organisations to adapt
How creative methods and arts practice can shape how regions adapt to climate change
How cross-sector collaboration on climate issues can be a future role for the arts
Register your interest to be notified when ticket registration opens in April 2020.
Living in an era when the human impact on the climate and ecosystems is rapidly becoming catastrophic, cultural institutions need to be at the forefront of the effort to achieve environmental sustainability. Onassis STEGI is committed to embedding sustainability in its activities at all levels. This includes reducing our own environmental footprint, contributing to social awareness, developing good practices through EDUCATION and the arts and joining forces with environmentally active PEOPLE and organizations throughout the world.
Two years after the launch of our sustainability program here at Onassis STEGI, in collaboration with Julie’s Bicycle –a London based charity that supports the creative community to act on climate change and environmental change– we are inviting artists, scientists, activists and cultural practitioners to gather in ATHENS for an interdisciplinary symposium including various parallel events. This is an excellent opportunity to discuss in public the role of the cultural sector in this most urgent fight to preserve our earth. Environmental protection is a cultural issue.
CREDITS
ORGANIZED BY ONASSIS STEGI IN COLLABORATION WITH JULIE’S BICYCLE SUPPORTED BY THE BRITISH COUNCIL (GREECE)
Every day we witness new and dramatic consequences of the ongoing rise in temperatures. Scientists have been raising the alarm for quite some time—the causes of climate change are well-known and documented. Many people think the fires presently blazing through Australia are but a prelude to other destructive and deadly catastrophes.
Youth from around the world are taking to the streets to call for action. In 2019, Angus Reid revealed that 72% of Canadians approved of worldwide demands by youth for climate action.
The demands go beyond mere awareness—they are an outright call for climate justice.
Mobilization for climate justice
Climate justice includes moral, political, ethical, and cultural considerations. It also involves environmental, technical and physical approaches, and goes far beyond them as well. Climate justice examines social inequality, as well as fundamental and collective rights. It addresses the rights of future generations, as well as historic responsibilities. And climate-related inequalities are real. A compelling example of this can be found in Canada’s northern territories, which I visited in the summer of 2019.
In 2019, the rise in world temperatures since 1948 reached 1.7°C—an absolute record. But in Northern Canada, where Indigenous people make up more than 50% of the population, temperatures have actually risen 2.3°C.[i]Disastrous consequences are already being felt: permafrost deterioration is accelerating, certain plants have become extinct, the water is polluted, and Indigenous peoples’ traditional way of life has been tragically and directly impacted. Though Inuit and First Nations people are severely affected by climate change, they are rarely present at the decision-making tables where climate action is discussed.
The demand for climate justice is mobilizing more and more arts communities—notably Indigenous ones. With good reason: it is rooted in citizenry, and it emphasizes inclusion and equity.
The Canada Council for the Arts and climate change
We are currently developing our strategic plan for 2021–26, and we are looking to take a solid and consistent position on the issue of climate change. And our position will include an authentic Indigenous perspective, and an international and inclusive point of view.
In addition to focusing on environmentally innovative approaches to production and dissemination, the Council will continue to support creation that addresses climate issues in all dimensions artists choose to explore. The Council will also continue to demonstrate exemplary practices in the way it manages and reduces its own ecological footprint. As we continue our reduction, recovery, and greening initiatives, we will examine the ways we conduct our operations. Our employees and the community demand this kind of environmental leadership, and it will guarantee our public credibility so that we can have a voice on the most pressing issue of our time.
In the coming months, we will also be engaging in discussions with artists and organizations in order to define tangible measures that we can implement while proposing a vision of environmental justice that fully integrates the arts and culture.
[i]Bush, E. and Lemmen, D.S., editors (2019):“Section 8.4.1 : Changes in northern Canada†Canada’s Changing Climate Report; Government of Canada, Ottawa, ON. 444 p.
Lead Editor’s note: We will be publishing excerpts from Q18: dis/sustain/ability, guest edited by Bronwyn Preece, in order to make the content accessible to blind readers with audio screen readers. We’ll also be including audio descriptions of the Quarterly’s original layout designed by Stephanie Plenner, audio described. Please stay tuned for future posts and share widely. In thischapter, Stephanie Heit and Petra Kuppers embody a discussion of creative practice as self-care.
Reading and Audio Description of “Tendings” by Petra Kuppers and Stephanie Heit
Tendings: Creative Practice as Self-Care
by Stephanie Heit and Petra Kuppers
In this essay, we share our ongoing joint practices of tending, collaborating, and being in place. We initially developed these practices out of the curriculum of Body and Earth by Andrea Olsen, which combines experiential anatomy, eco-specific investigations, somatic exercises, and writing. We began these tending practices in May 2015 while at Playa Artist Residency in Oregon and have continued them in our homebase of Ann Arbor, Michigan and during 2016 in multiple residencies, from Vandaler Forening in Oslo, Norway to The Thicket Artist Residency on a Georgia barrier island. The work connects us to the environments we are in; tunes us into our own bodyminds and their shifting states; tends our individual selves, our relationship and our surroundings; and nurtures our personal creative projects and Olimpias work [1] within a laboratory of open attention. The practices’ sustainability relies on our own flexibility and creativity to meet the day’s needs: shifting a movement exercise from standing to lying down to accommodate pain, narrating prompts to support concentration and reading difficulties, and adapting an exercise that calls for swimming in a lake to a bathtub or pool when it is freezing outside. These ‘tendings’ cultivate ongoing creative self-care and create a framework that extends to stewardship of self, interdependence, community, and the environment.
Location/Dislocation
Stephanie: Our tendings reside within shifting locations as travel, performance engagements, and artist residencies change our locations. I live with bipolar disorder and my stability relies upon routine. Intensive travel and change, though exciting, can often be a challenge and disruptive to my equilibrium. Each new place I work to establish a nest and connect to the ground. I unpack my things (if we are in a place for a stretch) and familiarize myself with the layout of the space. Find where I feel comfortable, where I want to write. The tending practices help me transition from here to there, which may mean a new time zone, slant of light, ecosystem, temperature, as well as exhaustion from long travel days that deplete me and demand recovery time.
Lying on the ground and feeling grass blades on my ankles and neck as Petra traces my outline with her feet and cane, I tune into the specific breathing of the wind, allow my rhythms to tune into the rhythms of my surroundings. These tendings we create and adapt to hold each other in changeable states and to witness and hold the land in which we are visitors. The invitation to feel the cellular exchange – inside to outside, outside to inside – is permission to be however we are. I can be tired while Petra is charged after a productive morning, and the muskrat swims in sleek V’s across the pond. I’m able to lean into the care offered through connecting with Petra, perhaps in palpating each other’s feet bones giving way to a juicy foot massage, and heightening my awareness through engaging with the oak tree, shoreline, wood mossy floor. This multiple focus that includes and extends beyond, often gives way to shifts – tiredness may lessen after falling into a deep snooze while listening to red-winged blackbirds. There is tending in this creative gesture of interaction and witnessing, in paying attention to both strength and fragility.
Petra: In many ways, the availability of travel is still a miracle to me: as a disabled woman and wheelchair user, one of my fears (grounded in the reality of living in a non-accessible world) is being stuck, not being able to move, for pain, for wheelchair-inaccessible environments with stairs and thresholds. In ridiculous overcompensation, my life-path has been one of mobility, one that leaves me without a mortgage or permanent home, and one that means that I have a decade-long practice of taking occasional leave from my university to go gallivanting. But travel is not good news for stressed environments, and I know the ecological impacts of flights, and try to be mindful in my choices.
Disability access still sucks, everywhere. My embedment in the privilege of white and child-free academia allows me funds to overcome barriers. And love, of course. The love of my partner, my friends, my Olimpias artist collective collaborators, all the many people with whom we play and who open up their homes, their trucks, their knowledge of secret lakes to us. I am glad to travel these days mainly with my collaborator and romantic partner – Stephanie is the smallest connective web outside my own bodymindspirit, and we’re weaving our world together, two fragile women, queercrip travellers who help each other through challenges. A few years ago, I said no to the life of the gigging scholar/artist and the multitude of plastic hotel rooms I sat in after the last rehearsal or performance or dinner, lonely and disconnected. I am taking seriously the charge to build my performance career as a sustainable thing, through and with travel, and I can do so by leaning always toward and into connection.
After all the travel, the point of the exercise is to live a rich life everywhere, including at home. So after weeks of adjusting to the particulars of beds, paths, and dietary options, we get to play out our new sensoria in familiar surroundings, at home. Suddenly, it’s February, and we stretch and touch ice crystals on Michigan trees. We trace paths in the sand of a beach on Lake Michigan, careful not to slip on the snow. I remember how easy and free that movement felt when I had just climbed out of a hot tub in the Sierra Nevadas, my bodymind warm and my blood bathing my achy joints. The memory helps my swing in the cold crispness of our riverside park in Ann Arbor. And in turn, the delicacy of ice sculptures makes me see the abandon of the Floridian sea with new appreciation, makes me think about the fish out there, and their journeys, the pathways of so many creatures who circle around the earth.
Mover and Witness
Stephanie: We water dance in the Florida pool with its plunging deep end and Atlantic waves in ear distance pounding the shore. Sunday ‘snowbirds’ lounge in afternoon siesta. Petra and I enter the pool, one couple in the shallow end share the space. We employ a practice from Authentic Movement that has become a staple in our investigations; we witness each other for timed movement sessions, the mover with eyes closed. Petra submerges, her body fluid and grace as she buoys the depths, limbs waft and carve the surrounding water. There is ease and delight as she changes pace and twists her knees in alternating tightropes to the bottom, surfacing with arms reaching to sky, water droplets streaming. I witness aware of my own impulses, certain moves she makes that my body wants to try on, aware of the difference between watching underwater and above water. As witness, my job is also to keep Petra safe, to make sure she isn’t in danger of running into the cement side or into another swimmer (in this case a moot concern as we now have the pool to ourselves). After five minutes we change roles, and I explore water’s range, lean into the sensation of held breath, bubbles out my nose as I go down, and the sweetness of inhale only to go under again. I enjoy the slight disorientation with my eyes closed, the lessened gravity and ability to freely go upside down and flip in ways uncomfortable to me on land. We do a couple more rounds and both comment on how much fun this is and wonder why we didn’t start sooner.
Our water dances are not ‘performed’ with an audience in mind. In this case, we did have some onlookers from the pool: found audience members. But usually it is simply Petra and myself in nature with many non-human participants such as birds, gecko, unfurling fern. At times, we are witnessed by the occasional human, such as the odd straggler who walks by while we are in our local botanical garden dancing with a young sapling on a trail. We are not in rehearsal for a presentation. The focus is on awareness in the moment, not on product.
Nourishment and Manifestation
Petra: Our tendings provide nourishment for ourselves, for our relationship, for our engagement with our environment. And they also lead us toward manifestation. New audiencing procedures emerge from our tending practice. I am learning more and more about and through somatic writing, writing that accompanies bodily sensation. So after our daily five-minute dances in water, we trek home to the apartment, and take out notebook or computer. Freewrite time. Stephanie writes somatic vignettes which she later mines into poems. I am currently engaged in a fiction apprenticeship: I track my somatic states by pushing them into narrative scenarios. She writes about the raccoons swimming across the tidal channel in a straight line, making us laugh with their little white ears sticking up. In the same freewriting timeslot, I write about a group of women engaged in an aquafitness session in the long tidal zone of the beach — shallow waters with low breakers –marching together and finding each their own challenge and blessing in the sea. Both productions are nourished by the freedom of sensing, listening, smelling, tasting, touching in open form engagement with the elements of site.
Toward Performance
There are other manifestations of our practices. In December 2016, we sent out an invite for an Olimpias action on the beach at Jupiter, Florida. This was our call, put out on social media:
We’re going to have an Olimpias sound improvisation score on the beach, honoring the passing of experimental sound artist and queer elder Pauline Oliveros. Since Katy Peterson, Stephanie Heit and Petra Kuppers set this in motion, the tragedy in Oakland happened [2], so we’re also holding space to mourn the electronic musicians, dancers and lovers who died in the Ghost Ship. If you want to join us, with instruments, moving bodies, voices, or just your presence, just message. Action followed by an early dinner together. Free, dinner will be subsidized if you need it, let us know if you need particular access provisions as that will shape where we’ll meet exactly.
This was tending in a larger frame. We listened together, and then performed an open score improvisation in the rhythm of the waves crashing into the sand and rocks of Coral Cove State Park. In our ear was the chatter of a group of young students who visited the site with a warden, the susurration of wind on sand, the roiling of water lapping over itself in the hollows of the sandstone rocks, the (to us) non-audible sounds of conspicuous chiton mollusks who clung to rock niches, moving in non-human time. Out of these moments of deep listening, we created a song we sent outward, to help and honor the path of familiar creative spirits far away, into the hollows, toward the horizon.
Moment Awareness and Sustainability
These are some examples of public manifestations of our private, ongoing, everyday practices of tendings: writings, participatory actions, little calls to attention, shifts in bodyminds, through the sound practices of poetry, through the somatic engagement of performance workshops, through the narrative drives of fiction.
Our first impetus is the moment itself. Our tendings are moment awareness work that nourishes attention and tends our senses. We hold space for the Open. We also pay attention to our avenues toward manifestation outside our private sphere. Our collaborative practice is sustainable as a partnership through differentiation as much as through collaboration. Each of us creates our own responses to the communally held actions, and, individually and communally, we find our audiences. Being in these flows, open creation and focused manifestation, nourishment and production, are the vital energies of our personal thriving.
We live well when we swim, roll, dive and float. And we feel better when we find points of connection between our private play in the land and water and the wider world around us, a sociopolitical world that needs to see joy, embedment, disabled people finding their grace, and reaching out toward others to sit on the beach together, listening.
Biographies
Stephanie Heit is a poet, dancer, and teacher of somatic writing, Contemplative Dance Practice, and Kundalini Yoga. She lives with bipolar disorder and is a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. The Color She Gave Gravity (The Operating System 2017) is her debut poetry collection, and her work most recently appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Typo, Streetnotes, Nerve Lantern, Queer Disability Anthology, Spoon Knife Anthology, Theatre Topics, and Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance. She has been awarded residencies at Vandaler Forening in Oslo, Norway; The Thicket in Darien, Georgia; Tasmania College of the Arts and Parramatta Artists Studio in Australia. www.stephanieheitpoetry.wordpress.com
Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, and a Professor at the University of Michigan. She also teaches on the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College. She leads The Olimpias, a performance research collective (www.olimpias.org). Her Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape (2011) explores arts-based research methods. Her Studying Disability Arts and Culture: An Introduction (2014) is full of practical exercises for classrooms and studios. Her most recent poetry book is PearlStitch (2016). She has recently been awarded residencies at Vandaler Forening in Oslo, Norway; The Thicket in Darien, Georgia; Surel’s Place in Boise, Idaho; Tasmania College of the Arts and Parramatta Artists Studio in Australia.
The Olimpias has a long history of community art practice with disabled people in water, on land, in site-specific explorations. For more information about the Olimpias, see Kuppers, 2014, and, more recently, about the Salamander Project of underwater explorations, see Kuppers (2015 and forthcoming) and Karp and Block (forthcoming). See also Kafer about Olimpias minor outdoor actions in nature (2013: 143/44)
A house fire on Dec. 2, 2016 at the Ghost Ship warehouse in Oakland killed 36 people during an underground electronic music show. The resulting discussions highlighted the struggles of many people, including artists, in finding affordable and safe housing in gentrifying cities.
References:
Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.
Karp, P. & Block P. (in press) We Float Together: Immersing OT Students in the Salamander Project. In Occupation Based Social Inclusion. (Eds. Brueggen, H., Kantartzis, S., and Pollard, N. Whiting and Birch, London, UK.
Kuppers, Petra. “‘Swimming with the Salamander: A community eco-performance project’ Performing Ethos, 5, no. 1/2 (2015): 119-135.
Kuppers, Petra. “Writing with the Salamander: An Ecopoetic Community Performance Project.†Field Works: Essays on Ecopoetics. University of Iowa Press, forthcoming.
Kuppers, Petra. Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape. Harmondsworth: Palgrave, 2014.
Olsen, Andrea; Bill McKibben, fwd., Caryn McHose: Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide. Middlebury, 2002.
