Earth Matters

Direct Action Artists

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“Remember, if someone you don’t know very well is trying to get you to build a bomb, just say no!”

So speak the puppets of the Earth First! Roadshow.

At the recent Earth Matters On Stage EcoDrama symposium, PhD candidate Sarah Standing read a paper analyzing  Earth First! and Greenpeace activities as performance. Both groups are famous for direct actions meant to draw attention to ecological plight, but differ in their extremes: Greenpeace appeals to those who prefer non-violent tactics, and Earth First! is known for spawning a few “domestic terrorist organizations.”

While not actually committing acts of terrorism, Earth First! activists are famous for tree-sits and other extreme measures. Some of its founders are credited with fake-cracking the Glen Canyon Dam in 1981. Recently its members have turned to more traditional theatrics in an attempt to educate and energize the movement.

Performers of the Earth First! Roadshow travel the country in a Chevy van with a timeline of “green scare” arrests, a slideshow of Earth First! actions, a map of ecological disasters and actions in America, and a security culture puppet show with a cast of woodland creatures. The pig puppet plays the cop, the owl is the narrator, and everyone scolds a fox named Danny for bragging about his radical graffiti. You can listen to a reading of the puppet show here.

The website ups the drama by comparing the roadshow to The Fellowship of the Ring:

. . . the roadshow is a great tool for cultivating resistance. There are countless examples to draw from in the story of radical movements before us: militant labor organizing tours, anti-fascist resistance recruitment and international speaking tours to build cross-border solidarity. The origin of Earth First! is credited to a few roadshows that kicked it all off in the early 1980s. We are building on this tradition; akin to a fellowship crossing Middle Earth to amass insurgents to face Mordor head-on.

Enemies of the Earth beware . . .

Go to the Green Museum

Earth Matters On Stage: Wrap-Up

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It’s been more than a week since the final days of this year’s Earth Matters On Stage EcoDrama Symposium. I returned from Oregon to be immediately eaten alive by my other life: just coming up for air now and able to digest some of the great happenings and events. Hence this giant post.

The picture above is from day nine : that’s Ian Garrett and Naseem Mazloom of the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts chillin’  on the lawn of the University of Oregon. After nine very full days of lectures, workshops, panels and a staged reading of Theresa May’s intense play Salmon is Everything, we  needed a break.

The very full final weekend  started off with an early-morning video conference with a UK contingent hosted by the  Ashden Directory. The overseas contributors overcame the fuzzy video and iffy sound quality of our current technology by preparing  a short film.

In it, several leading environmental artists, administrators and thinkers passed the philosophical baton by asking questions like: “How far is art worth the damage?” and “How can we reunite culture and agriculture through performance?” The room was brimming with ideas after that, and it was all we could do to get a few notions exchanged across the Atlantic before time ran out. Watch the video: do it now.

The stimulating conversation continued the next day with a panel called Theater’s Double Helix: Green Building and Sustainable Community Engagement.  Tim DuRoche and Creon Thorne of Portland Center Stage discussed their mecca of a green theatre: the folks from CSPA discussed their future mecca of sustainable practice.

Easily one of the most fascinating panels of the week, however, was the Northwest Theater Town Hall Meeting on Place/Community/Theatre. In it, Artistic Directors and administrators from a wide swath of Pacific Northwest Theaters (Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Teatro Milagro, and the Lord Leebrick Theatre, to name a few), discussed how they strive to best serve their communities.

Issues of race surfaced, and not timidly (quote from Valerie Curtis-Newton of the Lorraine Hansberry Project: “Why does the marketing sound like an anthropological expedition? White people! Stop trying to sell me to other white people!”). The idea of non-local community also came under discussion (45% of OSF’s audience is from the SF Bay Area: the internet creates seas of non-geographic communities: PCS had Scrooge “twittering” during A Christmas Carol). All in all, great perspective from a group of seasoned professionals.

Somewhere within these ten days I led a panel and a workshop: there were also many, many other worthwhile performances and presentations (including a short play starring a Cedar Tree). Over the next few months I’ll do retrospectives of works I’ve missed: stay posted.

Garrett and I had to miss the last day to get back into California for work. We left exhausted, but excited about the future. The Earth Matters On Stage EcoDrama symposium was a kind of turning-of-the-soil, great groundwork for things to come. Thanks to the University of Oregon, Damond Morris, and Theresa May for making it happen.

Some greenmuseum.org ecology and performance links:

~enterchange

~Platform London

~Hester Reeve

~Simon Whitehead

Go to the Green Museum

‘Connecting the Frontal Cortext to the Solar Plexus’: The Ashden Directory’s Contribution to EMOS

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The folks over at The Ashden Directory participated in this year’s Earth Matters on Stage at the University of Oregon from afar — an act borne of the desire to contribute to the conference/symposium without flying across the globe to do so.

Here is a DVD they produced in order to introduce their session. It’s a stand-alone piece of work, with fantastic insight. I think my favorite moment is when Mojisola Adebayo says that many theater artists believe that theater is “inherently good for you, therefore theater makers inherently do good.” She goes on: “I don’t think any of us think our work could be harmful in anyway.” When will we, as theater artists, admit that our work can be, and often is, harmful?

more about “The Ashden Directory’s Brilliant Cont…“, posted with vodpod

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Earth Matters on Stage: Ashden Directory Session

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Friday morning at Earth Matters on Stage a small group of us piled into the video conferencing room in the Knight Library at University of Oregon to have a conversation with our interested counterparts in the UK. Our second, but certainly more ambitious, video conference of the day, it harkens back to the discussion surrounding travel, the arts and conferences that has been come up at the RSA here (also to be seen in our archives as part of our feed syndication).

From the Ashden Directory Blog:

Our DVD contribution to Earth Matters On Stage is now online. The interviewees address the question: ‘What Can Be Asked? What Can Be Shown? British Theatre in the Time of Climate Instability.’ (The interviews can also be watched individually.)

Quoting Rilke, Dan Gretton considers the value of quickening the pace of artistic response and cautions against the narcissism of frenzy.

On her allotment, Clare Patey explains how a year-long project changed the quality of the conversation amongst its participants.

In Brazil, João André da Rocha draws attention to the movement and shapes of rural life, especially popular dance, as a way of getting closer to Brazilian culture. (Transcript here.) 

From his office in the East End, Paul Heritage raises the question ofthose who are talked about rather than those who are talking.

With the Lake District as her backdrop, Wallace Heim asks how climate change differs from other political situations and how this might alter the ways in which theatre can be made.

Finally, Mojisola Adebayo performs the first moments of her play Moj of the Antarctic and wonders if some people in theatre think they’re above climate change.

You also can watch each person’s contribution as a separate sequence:
 

dan gretton
Dan Gretton

Dan Gretton, co-founder of PLATFORM 
responds to Mojisola Adebayo’s question, 
‘How far is art worth the damage?’ 
watch here
 

clare patey
Clare Patey

Clare Patey, artist and curator 
responds to Dan Gretton’s question, 
‘Can you talk about the role that slowing down and reflectivity plays, both in your creative process and your interaction with your audiences?’ 
watch here 

João André da Rocha
João André da Rocha

João André da Rocha, performer, producer, People’s Palace Projects and Nós do Morro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
responds to Clare Patey’s question, 
‘How can we reunite culture and agriculture through performance?’ 
A transcript is here 
watch here 

paul heritage
Paul Heritage

Paul Heritage, producer, director People’s Palace Projects and Queen Mary’s University 
responds to João André da Rocha’s question, 
‘What steps are you taking to descrease the impact of your life in the world?’
watch here 

wallace heim
Wallace Heim

Wallace Heim, co-editor Ashden Directory, academic 
responds to Paul Heritage’s question, 
‘How can we listen to, see, feel and learn from those who are talked about rather than those who are talking in the great climate change debate?’
watch here 
 

mojisola
Mojisola Adebayo

Mojisola Adebayo, artist, theatre-maker 
responds to Wallace Heim’s question, 
‘What would you keep from theatre and performance practice and what needs to change in response to climate instability?’ 
watch here 

The film is edited by Adam Clarke and directed by Wallace Heim.

‘What can be asked? What can be shown? British theatre and performance in the age of climate instabilit

Earth Matters on Stage: Sustainable Practice

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Many of the lectures here at EMOS are held at the very-new Hope Theater at the University of Oregon’s Miller Theatre Complex. Boom: there’s a big square fact to start the post off for you. But I’m going somewhere with it.

Right now, where the Hope would be a big black box is all full up with Set. The floor is painted in a curling desert-river pattern. Upstage is a forest of recycled wooden planks and juttings, a kind of grandpa’s-attic bamboo. In one corner is a platform with puzzle-piece innards: old bedposts, chairs and plywood fold over each other in a hefty collage.

It’s all for the stagings of the Festival’s top two prize-winning plays:  Song of Extinction and Atomic Farmgirl. But what was intended to represent a Bolivian forest and an American farm has come to represent the EMOS festival itself, both literally and figuratively: the set was  constructed with recycled materials.

Today’s sessions were sponsored by the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts. Led by Ian Garrett, they included presentations by Steve Mital, University of Oregon’s Director of Sustainability, PhD candidate (and EMOS Production Manager) Damond Morris, several eco-conscious designers, and several pioneers of a Sustainable Dramaturgy program at CalArts.

At this point: it’s day seven. Everyone in the room knows each other, at least by sight. We’re calling each other out in the audience: could you talk about your experience with . . . what’s your perspective on . . . and what begins as a formal presentation becomes a group conversation quickly and easily.

Inspired by Mike Lawler, here are a few questions asked in the course of the day (some got answered, some did not):

What is a “sustainable university”?

What is the impact of a theatrical lighting system?

Where in this stream can we reduce our waste?

What are the next steps in expanding/refining sustainable pedagogy?

How do we reframe our relationship to resources?

How can we implement what we believe in the art we create?

If your curiosity is piqued, I’d encourage you to visit the CSPA’s wiki for tools and nuggets of information. As to the rest, I leave you with Morris’ Five D’s of Design for Environment:

Design for Dissasembly. Design for Recyclability. Design for Disposability. Design for Reusability. Design for Remanufacture.

See you on the other side of  a recycled-wooden forest.

Go to the Green Museum

Earth Matters On Stage: Process

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It’s easy to get all cranial on the whole planet/culture relationship. It is, in fact, kind of scary not to.  Start learning with your body and not your brain, and well, that’s a one-way ticket to . . . this conference. Hem. Earth Matters On Stage. On the stage, bucko, not just in your brain. You better get moving.

For the first weekend here I was a part of the Art Culture Nature Working Group. Ten fellows were selected to lead half-hour workshops exploring the relationship between our craft and our planet. We were essentially encouraged to use the group as a brain trust– but more often than not, we relied on our bodies.

As a group, we moved. We formed sculptures about place, we followed impulses and rolled around on the grass. We took pictures of our surroundings, we worked with soil. All of this wildness took place under the guidance of the workshop leader (and the extreme limitations of time). We looked very silly sometimes, but learned a lot about process and structure.

Later in the week came a workshop about labyrinths, led by Paul Bindel and Justin Simms. I learned that labyrinths are used most commonly not in pursuit of bullheaded monsters, or for escaping Jack Nicholson, but as meditative tools.

There are labyrinths everywhere: 60 listed in Massachusetts alone. Their curling series of lines gives visitors a form in which to get lost, to walk through while their minds drift.  It’s a way to pay penance, to build serenity. It’s a task for your body that lets your brain go. Just follow the lines.

As a group we went out to a grove nearby the University of Oregon and built a labyrinth with wood gathered nearby. When it was done– spiraling sticky-sticks winding paths through the tiny trees– we each walked it. You could hear branches cracking and flutes playing and folks chatting as you wove your way around and around and around.  A great task for the body, a great chance to digest all the conference info and just go, go, go.

Go to the Green Museum

Rachel Rosenthal, Keynote Address at Earth Matters on Stage

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leib2-1Rachel Rosenthal, Artistic Director and performer with The Rachel Rosenthal Company, is an interdisciplinary performer who has developed a revolutionary performance technique that integrates text, movement, voice, choreography, improvisation, inventive costuming, dramatic lighting and wildly imaginative sets into an unforgettable theater experience. Over the past thirty years, she has presented over 35 full-scale pieces internationally. Critics have called her “a monument and a marvel” and Rosenthal has been critically ranked with Robert Wilson, Ping Chong, Richard Foreman, Meredith Monk and Laurie Anderson by Richard Schechner, editor of The Drama Review (TDR).

She is an N.E.A., J. Paul Getty Foundation and California Arts Council Fellow, and recipient of numerous awards, including an Obie for Rachel’s Brain, the College Art Association Art Award, and the Women’s Caucus for the Arts Honor Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts.  In 1994, she was chosen by Robert Rauschenberg to represent Theatre in his suite of prints, Tribute 21, and in 1995 received the Genesis Award for spotlighting animal rights issues in her work.  Rosenthal formed the Rachel Rosenthal Company in 1989 in Los Angeles.  The thematic emphasis of the Company’s work encompasses artistic, social, environmental, technological and spiritual issues presented in a visually, viscerally compelling form.

Born in Paris of Russian parents, Rosenthal’s family fled Europe during WWII to New York where she graduated from the High School of Music and Art and became a U.S. citizen. She studied art, theatre and dance in Paris and N.Y. after the war with such teachers as Hans Hoffmann, Merce Cunningham, Erwin Piscator and Jean-Louis Barrault.

She moved to California in 1955 where she created the experimental Instant Theatre, performing in and directing it for ten years. She was a leading figure in the L.A. Women’s Art Movement in the 1970’s, co-founding Womanspace, among other projects. Since 1975, Rosenthal has focused primarily on creating new works, writing, performing and teaching.

Rosenthal has performed at: documenta 8 / Kassel-West Germany; The Festival de Theatre des Ameriques / Montreal-Canada; the Kaaitheater / Brussels; Festival Internacional de Teatro / Granada-Spain; the Theatre Festival / Zagreb-Yugoslavia; U.S Time Festival / Ghent-Belgium; The Helsinki Festival/Helsinki-Finland; The Internationals Sommer Theater Festival / Hamburg-Germany; I.C.A. / London; The Performance Space / Sydney-Australia; The Kitchen, Dance Theatre Workshop and Serious Fun! (Lincoln Center) in New York City; the L.A. Festival (1987, 1990) Japan America Theatre, and Museum Of Contempor-  porary Art in Los Angeles; Jacob’s Pillow Splash Festival / Lee, MA and the Kala Institute / Berkeley, CA.

In 1990, Ms. Rosenthal premiered Pangaean Dreams at The Santa Monica Museum Of Art for The L.A. Festival.  In 1992 filename: FUTURFAX was commissioned by the Whitney Museum in New York. In 1994 she premiered her 56-performer piece Zone at the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts Wadsworth Theatre.  Between 1994 – 97, with her newly formed Company, she revived her acclaimed Instant Theatre of the 50’s & 60’s asTOHUBOHU! and went on to collaboratively createDBDBDB-d: An Evening (1994), TOHUBOHU! (1995-97),Meditation on the Life and Death of Ken Saro-Wiwa andTimepiece (1996), The Swans and The Unexpurgated Virgin (1997).  Both Timepiece and The Unexpurgated Virgin premiered at the Fall Ahead Festival at Cal State LA.  She has toured extensively in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Australia.

Rosenthal has taught classes and workshops in performance since 1979, in her LA studio as well as around North America and Europe.  Rosenthal has lectured at Carnegie-Mellon University’s Robert Lepper Distinguished Lecture in Creative Inquiry series, as a lecturer/presenter at the first Performance, Culture and Pedagogy Conference at Penn. State (1996).  In addition to personal appearances as performer, panelist and lecturer, Rosenthal teaches performance in her private studio in Los Angeles and has been a visiting artist at such institutions as The Art Institute of Chicago, Otis/Parsons, New York University, University of California (UC) Los Angeles, UC Irvine, University of Redlands, UC Santa Barbara, California (Cal) Institute of the Arts, Cal. State University Long Beach, Cal. State Los Angeles and at the Naropa, Esalen and Omega Institutes.

Grants received include: NEA Solo Performer Fellow (1983, 1990, 1993, 1994), J.Paul Getty Fellow (1990), five USIA travel grants (1987-1993), Art Matters (1988-1990), NEA Interarts (1992), Foundation for Contemporary Performing Arts, Inc. (1988-1990), The Rockefeller Foundation MAP (1993), The J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts (1995), The Tides Foundation (1988-91), California Arts Council Fellow (1988), City of L.A. Cultural Affairs Department (1989-1998), National State County Partnership (1989,1991,1993-97), and most recently The ESRR Vision Trust (1996-1997).

Awards include: the Vesta Award (1983), the Obie Award (1989), the Artcore Art Award (1991), the College Art Association of America Artist Award (1991), the Women’s Caucus for Art Honor Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts (1994) and The Fresno Art Museum’s Distinguished Artist Award (1994). Artist Robert Rauschenberg has honored her in a new suite of prints entitled Tribute 21 (1994) as the representative for Theatre in a list including Art, Music, Civil Rights, Space & Ecology.  Recipients include Mikhail Gorbachov, R. Buckminster Fuller, Toni Morrison, Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama.  In 1995, she received The Ark Trust’s Genesis Award for spotlighting animal rights issues with “courage, creativity and integrity”.  In 1996, she received a Certificate of Commendation as well as a Certificate of Appreciation both from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.  In 1997, she received the L.A. WEEKLY Theater Career Achievement Award.

Rosenthal’s book Tatti Wattles: A Love Story which features her original, full color illustrations, published by Smart Art Press, Santa Monica, CA; a monograph of her life’s work, entitled Rachel Rosenthal, published by the John Hopkins University Press; Rachel’s Brain and Other Storms, an anthology of 13 of her performance texts published by Continuum and Nihon Journal an artists book of Japanese Sumi Ink paintings on Arches paper are all currently available.  Rosenthal’s work centers around the issue of humanity’s place on the planet.  She is an animal rights activist, a vegetarian, and companion to 3 dogs.

Earth Matters On Stage: Rachel Rosenthal

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“One of the first things people ask me, is, did I know Arteaud?”

This is how Rachel Rosenthal begins her keynote.  Here at EMOS, it’s perfect. Artistic Director Theresa May has just given her a fantastic introduction. She is in a room full of full-out EcoDrama nerds, folks who don’t need an explanation of the guttaral relationship between earth and body, who know her and her work, or who at the very least don’t need a speech about earth-saving. They know Arteaud wrote “The Theatre and its Double,” and chuckle. She knows her audience.

Rosenthal junkies at EMOS got a major fix: a presentation which included her first performance in almost 10 years, an opportunity to buy Moira Roth’s Rosenthal anthology and have it signed by the artist, and the next morning, an analysis of her work by a panel of her former students and devoted independent scholars. Heady.

Rosenthal did not, in fact, know Arteaud, but he did “save her life:” his writing gave her a logical basis to begin creating her own unique brand of performance: eco-feminist, deeply personal, and dramatically sharp. Clips shown over the weekend included L.O.W. in Gaia, in which she writes her age on her bald head in lipstick and drags bags of trash behind her on the stage, and The Others, which included 42 “non-human animal” performers.

In a presentation days later given by Deke Weaver, an interesting conversation arose. What is the line between sharpened meduim and effective message? How do you articulate an important issue without pandering, how do you push the form without driving away your audience? Rosenthal is famous for creating a body of work that is made of her own body, stories and trembling articulations. Whether or not watching Gaia rise from a pile of garbage is your idea of an endurance test, it is deeply rooted in a sobbing, grappling love for the earth. Rosenthal was saddend to learn that Arteaud never saw his idea of theater realized onstage. But of her own methods, she decries: “I will not die without having seen it, because it’s MINE.”

Go to the Green Museum

San Francisco from Eugene

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Our little blog has recently recovered from a little death and a little upgrade. Right now I’m in the middle of the Earth Matters on Stage EcoDrama Symposium (and working on plans to build an eco-art-blogger treehouse with my buddies Ian Garrett and Mike Lawler. You’re invited,  Matt Merkel-Hess!). There’s a lot to cover, including a greenmuseum-sponsored panel about Bioremediatve Performance, but for tonight I’d like to repost this overview of a Bay Area eco-art shout-out.

First off: the inaugural exhibit for Art at the Cheese Factory, Terrior: A sense of place. Guest Curated by Patricia Watts (and Guest Juried by gm’s Sam Bower), the exhibit includes photos, paintings, installations and performances by a breathtaking array of environmental artists. Yes. The exhibit continues until June 21st for those of you in the Marin area. Check out the website for a nice cranial buzz.

In San Francisco, New Langton Arts just opened an exhibition from Pae White called In Between the Outside-In. The central piece is a trapezoidal greenhouse/room framing a video screen. The projected image is a series of curling lines and unfolding patterns based on three-dimensional scans of an oak tree, a wild raspberry bush, and a manzanita grove. Those guys were all outside of Nevada City in California. White’s all about blurring the lines between site and non-site, I hear. The exhibit is up until the 18th of July.

Lastly: the Brower Center just opened. It’s a new center for environmental action with its own exhibition space in Berkeley, CA. Currently they’re running a series of photos by Sebastiao Salgado entitled Then and Now. They are big and black and white and stunning. They are people in environments. Upstairs in the space is an exhibit about activist David Brower, the building’s namesake: it’s what greenmuseum.org’s Sam Bower has been spending most of his time on these days.

Go to the Green Museum