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CSPA September 09 Newsletter

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We invite you to view our second newsletter. As you read this, we’re hard at work on compiling our first issue of the CSPA Quarterly, which we will be releasing at the end of the month. We’re also working on bulstering our Wiki, which hasa lot of great information, but there is so much more to get in there. If you’re interested in helping, we welcome volunteers to contribute as well. It is free to join and post. If that wasn’t enough exciting news, the cat is out of the bag that we’ve been working with LA Stage Alliance on developing a plan for physical materials reuse infrastructure in Los Angeles AND we’re gearing up to start our certification initiative in the new year! There is just so much going on, and we thank you all for your continued support of the CSPA!

Ian Garrett & Miranda Wright

CSPA Directors

Check it out here: CSPA September 09 Newsletter.

Green LDI & Aquila’s “Enemy”

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LDI

Got a nice email from Annie Jacobs over at Showman Fabricators yesterday about their effort to add some green to this year’s LDI. “Showman Fabricators has teamed up with LDI to try to bring the issues of sustainability in our industry to the forefront,” Jacob wrote.

You can check out info on this year’s greener LDI here.

Aquila Theatre presents a Green Tour

I’ve been working on a piece for Jacob Coakley over at Stage Directions about Aquila Theatre’s upcoming touring production of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. I’ve spoken with both Peter Meineck, the company’s AD, as well as their Production Manager Nate Terracio. I’ve been very impressed with both of them and their honest, holistic approach to the idea of greening a touring production to the best of their ability. Look for the piece in SD soon, and keep an eye on Aquila’s tour — they might be bringing Enemy to your town. If they do, I’d check it out. 

Go to EcoTheater

10:10 campaign launch: the video

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Another hastily filmed Flipcam video. I am clearly no Franny Armstrong:

10:10 campaign launch, Tate Modern, London from RSA Arts & Ecology on Vimeo.

The strategy is to create enough of a mass movement to make people feel it’s OK to make changes in their life, and to give Ed M. the kick in the pants he requires to move forward. I’m not sure how successful the event was in achieving that. It was great to get the front page ofThe Guardian and a page in The Sun but because news of the event was sprung on most people yesterday, the event seemed a little thinly attended. It didn’t feel like the mass movement we need – not yet anway. It felt mostly like people a bit like me.

It’ll be interesting to see how many people have signed the pledge online…

[Takes a look]

6,472 so far. Less than one in ten thousand.

It may be early days, but given how well it was publicised, and the readership of media partners, The Sun and The Guardian, I would say that’s a little disappointing but I’ll leave the last word to the hardcore transitionist at the end who said, “When you see lots of other people getting involved it gives you confidence that you’re not a freak, you’re not out on your own.”

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Art rationing: the culture of less

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There is talk of rationing in the air. Hilary Benn, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural affairs has done the maths and warns that population growth and climate change will affect our future food security. Amongst the green left, there’s a nostalgic enthusiasm for this kind of wartime frugality. A rush of books is digging up techniques of how the wartime generation coped with shortage.

After decades of plenty, we are coming to believe we are overburdened by consumption. I’m sure a lot of the world would find this more than a little ironic, but let’s not knock it. A culture of less would be a good thing.

But I started wondering whether it’s not just food and goods we should be thinking about having less of. What if the culture of less were to mean less culture as well? I remember listening to a talk by director Mike Figgis a couple of years ago in which he likened cultural over-production to global warming. The inventions of photography, then magnetic tape and now digitisation means that all culture is now permanent. Nothing is thrown away. New culture constantly pours into the lake at an ever increasing rate, but the lake is now dammed. “Is there too much culture?” asked Figgis. It was an idea that created a few ripples at the time.

If artists are suggesting we could live with less, should we also be living with less art? What if we had cultural rationing books. You might only be allowed five CDs a year, five books, two exhibitions, four films, one orchestral concert and two gigs. Would that make you choose what you consumed more carefully? What would you cut out? And (though the numbers of artists thrown on the dole queue would be huge) would the experience you took away from each encounter stamp itself a little deeper on your mind?

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Whiteread, Lambie, Blake et al rethink the WWF collecting box

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Pandamonium: the simple panda-shaped collecting unit rewrought.

Charity Bears for WWF by Rachel Whiteread 2009


Sweet Bamboo by Jim Lambie 2009


You can’t hate nature by Mark Titchner 2009


World Wrestling Federation by Peter Blake 2009

www.wwf.org.uk/pandamonium

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How social media will change the way the arts present themselves

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I have an article in this fortnight’s Arts Professional arguing that the arts need to get to grips with the idea that a mother of a change is a’coming, and about how the arts have a chance to build a strong, resilient network in the face of coming cuts by adopting a new, generous approach:

… we have reached a tipping point. The gap between what new and old media deliver us yawning. This changes how opinions are formed and how audiences are reached. It also raises interesting questions about where high quality criticism is going to come from in the future.

On the surface there’s a simple conclusion to be reached from the arrival of the Twitterati. Arts organisations need to think more about social media. The Barbican website already has a social media networks button on its front page. Fine idea. Twitter can fill empty seats within a couple of  hours of a performace. But at the moment that’s where most people’s thinking stops. This is a mistake because the change is fundamental. Arts organisations, if big enough, used to hire press officers on the strength of their contacts book, but what does that mean now? It’s not just the dipping circulations – accelerated by the recession, newspaper advertising revenues are expected to fall by as much as 21% across the board this year. This means cuts. Emails to old contacts suddenly bounce; they’ve gone freelance. Talent is leaching away from old media. The money spent trying to get column inches is increasingly money less well spent[…] but that’s just the half of it.

Conventional arts websites have become good at doing two things. They list events coming up and sell you tickets to them. If you’re lucky there’s a blog, but it’s often pretty thin fare. These sites exist within a fast-changing internet filled with people sharing news, wit, opinion, photographs, films and music. In comparison arts websites often look staid and monumental […] The key word is “sharing”. If arts websites want to move from the vertical model – telling people what’s good for them – to the horizontal model of using the energy of social networks, then it’s about giving stuff away. As any sociologist will tell you, the basis of any social network, real or virtual, is reciprocity.

Read the whole article HERE.

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Bill McKibben on the “torrent of art” about climate change

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Bill McKibben wrote recently on Grist.org about how, over the last few years, art has been shouting increasingly stridently about climate:

That torrent of art has been, often, deeply disturbing—it should be deeply disturbing, given what we’re doing to the earth. (And none of it has quite matched the performance work that nature itself is providing. Check out, for instance, James Balog’s time-lapse photography of glaciers crashing into the sea—if we could somehow crowd that thrashing sheet of ice into the Guggenheim for a week, people would truly get it.) But for me, it’s been more comforting than disturbing, because it means that the immune system of the planet is finally kicking in.

Artists, in a sense, are the antibodies of the cultural bloodstream. They sense trouble early, and rally to isolate and expose and defeat it, to bring to bear the human power for love and beauty and meaning against the worst results of carelessness and greed and stupidity. So when art both of great worth, and in great quantities, begins to cluster around an issue, it means that civilization has identified it finally as a threat. Artists and scientists perform this function most reliably; politicians are a lagging indicator.

I wonder, how true is this? Is identifying artists as the “antibodies of the cultural bloodstream” a hopelessly romantic idea, part of McKibben’s relentless optimism, an optimism that has sustained him for twenty years and more as a campaigner? Or will the next few years prove him right in his faith that, not only are artists making work of “great worth, and in great quantities” about the issue , but that art still has a privileged role in how society concieves of itself.

It’s certainly a role that many established artists would feel extremely uncomfortable with; but maybe this isn’t the time for such niceities.

Read Bill McKibben’s article in Grist.org

Bill McKibben’s 350.org campaign

Bill McKibben talks to RSA Arts & Ecology about his call for artists to lead on 350.org

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Celebrating insects in art, and the art of being an insect

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PESTIVAL: Celebrating insects in art, and the art of being an insect, opens tonight at the South Bank Center in London.Glasswing Butterflys

The events for Pestival weekend look extraordinary and include a large Termite Pavilion, Praying Manitis Kung Fu andForensic Entomology (insect experts who are often called on to assist the police in cases of suspicious death). Needless to say there will be  lots of lots of insects.  And some excellent RSA Fellows who have recently worked with RSA’s Arts and Ecology: neuroscientist Beau Lotto is creating a large bee hive in the Queen ‘Bee’ Hall and Architect Michael Pawlyn will present his biomimcry work.

Pestival is a rare creature: an international, inter-disciplinary, community-led festival. Events include insect-inspired comedy, music, ID walks, talks, workshops, experiments, fashion and a termite inspired architectural structure at the centre of Pestival 2009. 80% of creatures on earth are insects, the ‘pests’ without whom humans wouldn’t survive. Pestival celebrates the 100s of millions of years of evolution, which places insects at the heart of human existence. Pestival 2009 celebrates how insects shape our world, and how humans shape the world of insects, in both science and the arts.

Check out the programme for 4 – 6 September: Pestival programme
The events will be broadcast by London’s favourite (and only) art radio station Resonance 104.4 FM and Tweeted on The Guardian’s Environment Blog.

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Opera Grand Rapids Goes Green

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Reprinted from DeVos Performance Hall

Opera Grand Rapids is rooting itself into a culture of green. The long awaited Betty Van Andel Opera Center will be a Silver LEED certified facility. The center, which will house a rehearsal hall, costume shop and offices, will be built on the West corner of Fulton and Carlton.

Currently a brown field, the parcel of land had been the home of Michigan Litho. After a fire in 2002 destroyed the printing company, the lot has set empty for years, an eyesore for a budding neighborhood on the edge of the City’s downtown.

The Opera’s future building is not the first to go green in Grand Rapids’ growing skyline, recent projects by the Grand Rapids Art Museum and the Grand Rapids Ballet are also LEED certified. Planners from the Opera Grand Rapids facilities committee note that going green was always in the plan for the project. At question was the level of certification.

As a Silver level facility, the project will meet standards that include: sustainability, pollution prevention, water efficient landscaping, water efficient utilities, optimized energy performance, construction waste management and the use of regional materials to limit transportation pollution.

Fundraising efforts continue on the long awaited project, which was jump started by a $1 Million grant from the Jay and Betty Van Andel Foundation more than seven years ago. Construction and material bids for The Betty Van Andel Opera Center have come in higher than initially expected, driving the estimated cost of the project up from $1.95 Million to approximately $2.3 Million. A groundbreaking ceremony, originally expected for this fall, will be held when 100% of the funds needed to complete the project have been raised. Currently the Company has raised approximately 80% of the new campaign goal. A public fundraising campaign will be launched later this month.

Once open, in 2009, the facility will consolidate the Company’s resources in one location. Currently the Company stages its operas and fits costumes at a variety of donated spaces throughout Grand Rapids. This means for each of its three shows time, energy and money are spent to set up temporary rehearsal spaces. With the facility, the Company’s costume shop, property and set storage as well as vocal warm up rooms and rehearsal room will all be located in one permanent facility.

The Company will begin rehearsals for the first show of its season, “Tosca” in mid-October. The show will take place Nov. 7 and 8 at 7:30pm at DeVos Hall. Tickets are currently on sale through Ticketmaster.

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