Artistic director and performer Paul Michael Henry, who has devised successive UNFIX festivals, discusses his motivation and ambitions for these international gatherings and explorations, ahead of UNFIX 2019 next month. UNFIX: a command form, a verb, an activity.
1,120 words: estimated reading time 4.5 minutes
UNFIX is a multi-art form festival based in Glasgow, New York and Tokyo. It starts from the proposition that the Anthropocene is happening inside your body, RIGHT NOW. The 2019 Edition is scheduled for 29th-31st March at CCA Glasgow.
I started UNFIX in 2015, looking to ‘Climate Change’ like a lightning rod for the vague and specific discomforts about this society that have plagued me all my life. People keep mis-labelling it ‘Unfixed’ or ‘The Unfix’ but it’s UNFIX: a command form. A verb and activity.
A loosening, disburdening, freeing-up. Anti-fatalistic, with the assumption that it doesn’t have to be like this. I experience climate change as a terrible affirmation: we cannot treat each other, ourselves and our surroundings this way. We can’t walk around with these egos functioning the way they do, and live.
When the ‘Banking Crisis’ hit in 2008 it occurred to me (and others I’m sure) that it could just as well be called the Banking Opportunity. With the cracks briefly showing, it could be a moment of vulnerability for finance and late capitalism, a gap in the concrete where something new could spring up. The fact that it wasn’t speaks simply to the aggregate level of human consciousness at that time. We were not awake enough.
I’m a Glaswegian artist whose work tends to focus on the body — specifically, the body as an ecological reality traumatised by, and intimately connected to, wider currents of politics, patriarchy, capitalism and climate change. I’m also interested in the body’s ability to soften these by love, connection and embodied understanding. I’m uninterested in finger-pointing, and am probably some kind of mystic at heart.
Actually part of that is a lie. I’d love to finger point, and sometimes I do. Jump up and down and rail at the capitalists and the patriarchs and the selfish and the sleeping, righteously righteously. Weep publicly, perhaps on TV, cradling plastic smothered turtles in my too late saviour’s arms. But climate change really isn’t about me and a wiser part of me knows that. It swallows me and I need to reckon with it, I live inside it and it shames me and prompts me to act.
When I don’t live in alignment with my values (which is often), a rat gnaws my stomach. The rat is tamed when I take actions with my whole being, like starting a festival for misfit artists to say what’s burning in our gizzards and draw what attention we can to The Situation.
The first UNFIX happened because a wonderful venue (the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow) was foolish enough to give me the keys to the building for a weekend. I was living in a camper van at the time, completely skint and dreaming. We teamed up, dozens of artists and activists, nobody getting paid, and we staged performances and film screenings and debates and ate together at another great venue (the Project Cafe) who made us all food from ingredients foraged in Kelvingrove Park. It felt a bit explosive. People still tell me how it affected them, boosted their resilience. I dunno. I’d like to think so.
But I mean: it’s art. The Situation persists. I throw my tiny actions and those of the artists involved in UNFIX on the pile, to be added to the older generations who saw this coming (the Joanna Macys, the Alastair McIntoshes) and the younger just now exploding in beauty (the school-age climate strikers). Outcomes are unknowable so I align myself, not sure, opting — as Alastair is fond of saying — to “Dig where I stand.”
So what about the Climate Opportunity? I don’t think shouting at Trump is going to be enough, though it is surely a part of it. But when I project all my climate rage outwards I’m being dishonest. I think that all of us raising our levels of awareness, radically –individually, in small groups, in large groups, in continental blocks, in cross currents and collaborations, and in the owning of our own shadows — CHANGING OURSELVES from the inside out, might make a difference.
I don’t know what our chances of survival as something resembling the human species are, and I’m agnostic about whether we deserve it. I’m to blame and you’re to blame and everyone is confused and the most ignorant and ego-driven have the most power and will kill us all if we let them. OK OK. The Situation. Perhaps we should just get to work?
This year’s UNFIX Festival has some (a little) money behind it. For the first time I have a budget and producers and paperwork, and people to account to afterwards. And I can pay the artists taking part, more or less. All of which makes me nervous because it dilutes my standing as someone powerless and shouting on the sidelines (my strongest suit). It’s not much power, mind.
If I were king, I would outlaw the term Consumers. Swap in the word Organism, or System, or ConsumerDigesterExcreter. I would have mandatory shit cannons primed for every time someone says ‘Economic Growth’. All would bow down before my solutions. Righteously Righteously.
I am not king, thankfully, signing on instead each day as an average-extraordinary worker bee in the Anthropocene: of unique gifts and no special importance, grief-stricken and hopeful and sometimes sick and faltering and giving up and starting again.
Who looks out through your eyes when you think about climate change?
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Paul Michael Henry makes performances that, most of the time, end up on a stage, but he also makes recorded music and films and collaborates on other artists’ projects. He is artistic director of UNFIX Festival and teaches dance workshops called The Dreaming Body. His themes are political, social and spiritual, dealing with love, neglect of the body, destruction of the environment and atrophy of the soul in consumerist society.
UNFIX 2019 is scheduled for 29th-31st March at CCA Glasgow. It will feature contributions from local and international artists and organisations including Minako Seki, Alberta Whittle, Chistiana Bissett, The Workroom, Extinction Rebellion, Creative Carbon Scotland, Niya B, Ruaridh Law, Verónica Mota/Urban Arts Berlin, VID art|science, Yulia Kovanova, NIGHTPARADE, Katrine Turner, VIDIV, Adam Fish, Paul Michael Henry and The Dark Mountain Project. You can discover more at www.unfixfestival.com. Tickets are on a sliding scale and can be purchased from the CCA website.
A performance maker whose dance, music, ritual and writing deal with love, neglect of body, destruction of environment and atrophy of soul in consumerist society. Read More
Royal Court Executive Producer Lucy Davies — a participant in Creative Climate Leadership training in 2017 — explores Artists’ Climate Lab, a special week of creative activities she and others devised for artists working in London’s leading theatres.
1,230 words: estimated reading time 5 minutes
It is September 10th and I am sitting on a bench in the 40-acre bio-dynamic grounds of Hawkwood College in Stroud, looking out over the Severn valley. Ten remarkable theatre artists are sitting around me. We are here for a week-long Climate Lab on art and creative activism, which I have been part of setting up.
Artists Climate Lab participants at Hawkwood College, September 2018 Photographs: by group members
Last October I was a participant on the Julie’s Bicycle / PiNA Creative Climate Leadership training in Slovenia. A week of intense enquiry, coaching, educating and bonding with activists, policy-makers, artists and cultural leaders from across the globe, its impact was deep on all of us. The dissemination and outputs have been many. Climate Lab is one of them.
I am the Executive Producer at the Royal Court Theatre in London — a theatre with a solid commitment to artistic climate programming. Recent ecologically-tilted plays include Ten Billion, 2071, Escaped Alone, X, Human Animals, The Children.
I have also spent the past four years as Chair of London Theatre Consortium, where the Executive Directors or Producers of 14 London theatres gather quarterly to drive collaborative working and sectoral change. Our collective work, particularly around carbon and energy reduction (working with Julie’s Bicycle) and on workforce development (through apprenticeships and Executive Fellowships), has been significant and game-changing.
There were three of us from LTC theatres in Slovenia on the Creative Climate Leadership week — myself, an Artistic Director (Ellen McDougall from the Gate) and a Creative Learning Practitioner and artist (Dan de la Motte Harrison from the Young Vic). In a long lunchtime walk through the trees and seas and caravans, we committed to running a week-long climate lab for theatre artists when we got home.
We asked each LTC Artistic Director to nominate an artist to send — we were seeking a broad representative pool of emerging / establishing theatre artists — and we would invite extraordinary artists making work in this field to come and feed their brains and inspire their practice.
The steering group had a series of wonderful, rigorous, effortless, ambitious meetings from January 2018, made a (successful) Arts Council application, and with the incredible support of Hawkwood College (a Centre for Future Thinking) and their Artists Residency Programme, the Climate Lab was a real thing.
A break from the workshops Photographs: by members of the group
Climate Lab: not a conference
The spirit of this gathering — which we hope is a pilot and will be repeated in 2019 — is to feed the brains of artists with other artists’ practice. Not a conference. Not a scientific training session. A way of engaging and connecting artists across disciplines to be tooled up, fired and inspired in their climate art, activism and production processes. We want to empower independent artists to have confidence in their values when engaging with institutions, and to have an impact on those institutions and audiences. We also wanted to pay them, get them into the woods, feed them and listen.
The nominated artists were: writer and theatre-maker Deborah Pearson; playwright Isley Lynn; play-maker, director and artist Tassos Stevens; director Abigail Graham; visual artist and designer Moi Tran; director Holly Race Raughan; dancer and choreographer Ellie Sikorski; performer and choreographer Shane Shambhu; director Joshua Parr; and designer Ruth Sutcliffe.
The week was facilitated by director Anthony Simpson-Pike, and the visiting artists were: visual artist Gayle Chong Kwan; theatre maker Toby Peach; playwright and director Abhishek Majumdar; live artists Search Party, participatory theatre maker Zoe Svendsen; photographer Nii Obidai; director Simon McBurney — plus environmental practitioners Chiara Badiali and Polly Higgins.
Sessions explored how to create fair spaces; co-creating community-led rituals; the male capitalist hero and other ecological narratives; the intersectionality of climate justice and frontline nations, stories, power and artists; making work slowly; the ambition to make ecocide an international crime; making art in a capitalist context; formulating a manifesto or code that independent artists can sign up to and share with institutions; who has the right to tell what stories; and, of course, sex, because “sex is, beyond any argument, entirely carbon neutral”…. In between, the group formed smaller buddy groups to evaluate the days; they came up with future project ideas and activist interventions together, and they walked.
Together Photographs: by members of the group
A fair and rigorous space
A fortnight on, sitting and reflecting from an urban office, it was a potent and remarkable week; a week in which the notion of ‘intersectional climate justice’ was firmly embedded into their creative practice, and placed concretely within their wider activism — be it feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist. Gathering such open, creative thinkers in such a glorious, values-led environment was never going to be a barren encounter. In their words, it was: “enlightening, motivating, empowering, mind-expanding, revelatory, intense, urgent, necessary.”
Together, they created a fair and rigorous space; they formed a powerful cohort, and since we left, the artists have stayed in a daily, dynamic conversation. We are preparing a co-authored blog and a podcast which we will share here and across many platforms… They are organising a film screening, an action across the LTC theatres, and a major dissemination event.
And, in the steering group, we are already planning next year’s Climate Lab. This synthesis of LTC’s work on operational change and artistic change — systems-change both in the buildings and in the art — is a new adventure for us. It is widely agreed that culture — in cities and in rural communities — is a critical force in the climate justice movement. As cultural institutions in London, we are galvanising our commitment to this movement.
Find out more
Creative Climate Leadership is a new programme for artists and cultural professionals to explore the cultural dimensions of climate change, and take action with impact, creativity and resilience. Artists and the wider cultural community have a unique and critical role: they deal with the art of the possible and influence new ways of being, doing and thinking. Creative Climate Leadership supports cultural professionals to apply these qualities to the climate challenge. The programme is tailored for participants to reach their full potential and maximise action on climate change within the creative and cultural sector, with help and support to test and scale ideas through sharing best practice and discussion across countries and cultures. The programme is led by:
Julie’s Bicycle (UK) — a global charity working at the intersection between culture and environmental sustainability
PiNA (Slovenia) — an organisation focused on social development, advocating respect for basic human rights and democracy, respect for the environment with a focus on sustainable development
On The Move (Belgium and France) — a cultural mobility information network with more than 35 members in over 20 countries across Europe and beyond.
Hawkwood College in Stroud, Gloucestershire, is a residential adult education college serving the needs of a wide community and an educational charity. Their mission is to create a better world for now and for the future. They bring together people and organisations in support of creative endeavour, a flourishing society and a sustainable environment.
A Creative Climate Leader, and Executive Producer at London's Royal Court, Chair of London Theatre Consortium and Chair of Trustees for Clod Ensemble Read More
Researcher and writer Wallace Heim recently completed ‘the sea cannot be depleted’, her online project exploring the military exploitation of the Solway Firth. Wallace shares her reflections on the inspiration behind this powerful project and her creative process.
1,560 words: estimated reading time 6 minutes
Outrage is compelling. It moves you. It flares around an event, lining up adversaries as it draws temporary certainties from the flux of life.
The UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) fired at least 30 tonnes of artillery shells containing Depleted Uranium into the Solway Estuary to test those munitions on behalf of an unnamed ‘customer’. The firings began in the 1980s, from the Scottish side, with the last firings in 2011 or 2013. The MOD justified this illegal dumping of radioactive waste into the sea as being ‘placements’. Attempts to retrieve the shells have failed. Their locations are unknown.
Responses to this news slide easily into anger for the injustice of these firings and shock at their stupidity, alongside a desire for accountability or reparations by the military, which will not and cannot be met. But what happens when the clarity of outrage, and its certainties, get mixed up with everyday life? When they somehow bind with a place, when they merge and dissolve into it, like the radiating materials drifting in the Irish seas?
“No brink of the end of humanity was gazed over. It barely made the news … Thousands of years pissing in the sea with everything we can’t digest, all the rancid debris that we could throw in there, all of it, and now this … The military got it the wrong way around. They didn’t place the uranium. No. They placed this estuary. They made it into their place. They made it into their military nuclear sea,” the Man says.
Sensing the insensible
‘the sea cannot be depleted’ is an online project, composed of three parts: a spoken word and sound piece for three voices, accompanied by essays and by documentation about the firings and the effects of Depleted Uranium. The sound piece is fictive, based on interviews and research. In it, a Man speaks from the Scottish side of the estuary, the firth, an area of cliffs, bays, granite and farms. A Woman speaks from the English side, flat lands of ancient peat, grasses and farms, around the headland from the civil-military nuclear industries of West Cumbria. And a Diver speaks as she enters the night sea:
“On the edge here, soft sand, bird tracks and worm casts and the plish of water on my bed-bare feet. More salt than fresh. Read the surface for danger. Go in, between heartbeats, mine and the sea’s … Tentacles brush my legs. Wrapping me in the softness of their sucking, jelly skins. They are curious about me. Me. Am I food? … Drifts of something cloud my eyes. Plankton wandering in from far seas. I swim in sex and food and sea talk.”
The form of the piece was shaped by my need to ‘hear’ the radiation, to have it enter somehow directly into the human ear. And by the negotiations of outrage and conflict that were needed in order to understand and express something of the turbulence of unknowable consequences and the transfiguration of uranium let loose in the continual, mixing tidal forces of an estuary.
Radiation cannot be heard, smelled or touched, but is known through the rattled clicks of the technologies that measure it and make it perceptible to humans. Those sounds are too familiar. I wanted to hear it and to represent it through the human voice, through its vibrations and resonances as well as through the articulations about the effects of knowing what has been buried. The music by Pippa Murphy, too, does not use conventional ‘nuclear’ sounds, but creates a melodic line, that holds, falls apart, dissolves, and reforms.
Nuclear issues are stark and divisive. My certainties are reasoned, ethical and emotive: I find these military actions unjustifiable, expressive of hubris and embedded in a global economy of harm. I had to relate those certainties to the government position which supports the use of Depleted Uranium, and to the scientific reports available, both by independent researchers and the military. The latest find that ‘uncertainty’ characterises what is possible to definitively measure; no one ‘knows’.
I did not want to set out adversarial arguments between conflicting sides, as if that was a kind of balance or a reliable process towards truth. Nor did I want to hone the subject matter into something more solidly activist. Rather, for the Man and the Woman who reflect on their relation to the sea and the firings, I wanted to keep to the outrage, but as it is compromised and embedded in everyday life.
The action in theatre, by historical conventions, moves with the forces of adversarial human conflict; two sides, with variations. But theatre and performance have, for the past decades, developed other dramaturgical strategies, broadly categorised as the postdramatic, for creating flow, mood, character and vibrancy. The ‘two-sides’ device has seeped away from some performance practices as it doesn’t adequately allow for a genuine expression of a situation or condition. At the same time, in ecological thinking, the entwining of human conflicts with environments, waters, lands, other living beings, or perceptions of nature – are complicating the order offered by adversarial conflict and requiring other ways to comprehend and address what is a condition of life, one that is pervasive, intractable, characterised by uncertainty and a lack of lasting solutions.
The firings were a rehearsal for war and were hostile fire on a home sea. How can one understand the slow corrosion that endures? What does it mean for a place, a people, to cohere with the unseen objects of war? How do you make a life with, or disavow, the symptoms of the civil-military nuclear complex? How does the knowable coalesce with the not-knowable?
“How do you keep safe?
The Military devised tests to prove these firings were safe for humans. They measured seaweed and crabs and grit and urine. What they forgot was the sea. They forgot the turbulence, the planetary forces of gravity pulling oceans across a chiselled bed. They forgot the curiosity of the tender animal, too small for any net. They forgot that some humans are pregnant women.
It’s probably all right. It has to be. We have to live as if it was.
The swells of silences, they hold us tight … What adds up, what counts on this coast is what keeps the working public paying taxes. That’s what keeps things quiet … The sea will loosen and unravel all that we can’t talk about,” the Woman says.
Crossing the threshold
The Diver is a different kind of force, ambivalent between the imaginal and the real. She speaks of her sensed perceptions as she repeatedly dives below the sea surface. She sets out with promise and high delight but stays too long. She passes that threshold when coming back would be possible, making a loose association with the nuclear dream and the impossible scramble to return to a world without its waste.
“My body curls and tumbles. It joins the pock-marked hard things that roll along the bed. We’re a pulse of moving things. Another brush of something like dust. My skin starts to bleach with it. I’m burning, down here with no light, no air … I cool my body in a garden of soft-skinned creatures … Everything moves, the living with the dead. Lives within lives. Our cells are the lenses through which we see our futures. We are all transparent to the longer waters of the sea … ”
The uranium was pulled by brown hands from hot, dusty places, fabricated and made into rich pieces of tradeable merchandise. The military sent those high-priced shells out over the miles of waiting water. In the instant that they touched the sea surface they were waste. As they bedded into the soft sands, they began their dissolution into sea salts and the human imagination. ‘the sea cannot be depleted’ takes off from what seems like discrete events, but those events are only part of a long arc that has no end.
‘the sea cannot be depleted’ was written and produced by Wallace Heim, with music and sound composition by Pippa Murphy and the voices of Camille Marmié (Diver), Vincent Friell (Man) and Lisa Howard (Woman). The project was funded by Future’s Venture Foundation, Manchester.
You can hear the full dramatised audiopiece for ‘the sea cannot be depleted’, and view Wallace’s extensive research journal and other background documents about Depleted Uranium, the MOD’s firings into the Solway Firth and the area itself, at the sea cannot be depleted.
Wallace has also shared a number of references you might like to explore:
Heim, Wallace (2017). ‘Theatre, conflict and nature’ in Performance and Ecology. What Can Theatre Do? Ed. Carl Lavery. London: Routledge. also in: Green Letters. Studies in Ecocriticism. (2016) 20:3. The journal is behind an academic firewall, and the book is exorbitantly priced. Please email me if you would like a pdf of the article: home[at]wallaceheim[dot]com
A researcher and writer on performance and ecology, investigating how one ‘hears’ enmeshed dimensions of the human and other-than-human and the sonic languages of place. Read More
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe reviews Peter Shaffer’s 1973 play, Equus, which explores incomprehensible violence against animals as an indictment of society’s dulling of the feeling of true passion, our relationship with the natural world a distortion of nature.
2,820 words: estimated reading time 11.5 minutes
A copy of Equus goes to Ruth Garde for her contribution to our series, A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects.
***
“One great thing about being in the adjustment business: you’re never short of customers.” The world keeps sending psychiatrist Martin Dysart customers: the children he’s come to see as being damaged by that world, because it judges them as damaging to it. “One more dented little face. One more adolescent freak. The usual unusual.”
Introducing Equus, Peter Shaffer mentions the risks in reproducing a written text. Not simply that the play obviously consists of so much more than the words: the gestures, the lighting and the ‘look of the thing’; but that the printed book “can imprison a play in one particular stylisation … Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.” Dysart seems to feel the same way about his own work: rendering the living spirit back into inoffensive flesh and bones.
A play that says more than once that “extremity is the point” begins with crisis. Magistrate Hester Salomon pleads with Dysart to take personal charge of a 17 year old boy who has committed a crime her colleagues want to punish him severely for.
DYSART: Why? What’s he done? Dosed some little girl’s Pepsi with Spanish Fly? What could possible throw your bench into two-hour convulsions?
HESTHER: He blinded six horses with a metal spike.
[A long pause.]
DYSART: Blinded?
Shaffer said that he’d been driving past a stables one day when a friend told him about just such a crime, which he’d heard about at a dinner party. “He knew only one detail, and his complete mention of it could barely have lasted a minute – but it was enough to arouse in me an intense fascination.” That real crime became the trigger for a play portraying a world which has so destroyed people’s ability to feel passion that it leads to incomprehensible acts.
Alan’s distraught mother, Dora, resists any implication that the blinding was somehow the result of the boy’s upbringing, of society.
DORA: We loved Alan. We gave him the best love we could. All right, we quarrel sometimes – all parents quarrel – we always make it up. My husband is a good man … He cares for his home, for the world, and for his boy … No, doctor. Whatever’s happened has happened because of Alan. Alan is himself … If you added up everything we ever did to him, from his first day on earth to this, you wouldn’t find why he did this terrible thing – because that’s him; not just all our things added up.
Harry Dalton, the owner of the stables where Alan worked at weekends, insists the boy was a model employee – right up to the sudden, vicious attacks. “No, he was bloody good. He’d spend hours with the horses cleaning and grooming them, way over the call of duty. I thought he was a real find.” This in spite of Alan’s one oddity; apparently, he never rode the horses, although that perk was the reason most stablehands took the job. Asked why Alan should be so different, Dalton replies: “Are you asking me? He’s a loony, isn’t he?”
Hester wants Dysart to bring back the ‘normal’ boy within the tormented teenager. But the psychiatrist finds himself resisting more and more the call of the tame.
DYSART: The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes – all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills – like a God. It is the Ordinary made beautiful; it is also the Average made lethal. The Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health, and I am his Priest. My tools are very delicate. My compassion is honest. I have honestly assisted children in this room. I have talked away terrors and relieved many agonies. But also – beyond question – I have cut from them parts of individuality repugnant to this God.”
Dysart — middle-aged, working at a relentless conveyor belt rolling cases in through one door and out through another — is, of course, in the midst of his own existential crisis. Hester, horrified by his despairing self-awareness, tries constantly to coax him back into seeing the real benefits he delivers, every day, to the children he cares for. We begin to wonder who she thinks will be the saving of whom: Dysart of Alan Strang, troubled and troubling youth; or Alan of Martin Dysart, world-weary psychiatrist careering down into his own annihilation?
Dysart, however, is having none of it. He’s haunted by a dream that Alan’s arrival has triggered, and for which his own fascination with the ‘civilisation’ of Ancient Greece provides the setting.
DYSART: That night, I had this very explicit dream. In it I’m a chief priest in Homeric Greece. I’m wearing a wide gold mask, all noble and bearded, like the so-called Mask of Agamemnon found at Mycenae. I’m standing by a thick round stone and holding a sharp knife. In fact, I’m officiating at some immensely important ritual sacrifice, on which depends the fate of the crops or of a military expedition. The sacrifice is a herd of children: about 500 boys and girls. I can see them stretching away in a long queue, right across the plain of Argos … It’s obvious to me that I’m tops as chief priest. It’s this unique talent for carving that has got me where I am. The only thing is … I’ve started to feel distinctly nauseous. And with each victim, it’s getting worse … And then, of course, the damn mask begins to slip.
Alan, meanwhile, is running rings round him, deflecting all attempts to uncover the dark reason for blinding the horses he’d cared for. The psychiatrist interviews Alan’s parents, picking apart their differences – class, temperament, religion. He waits, impassive at first as Alan bombards him with constant singing of adverts he’s learned from the forbidden TV, then angrily as the boy makes deep incisions of his own, with barbed comments about the doctor’s childless and sterile home-life.
Religion would seem to be at centre and bottom of Equus: Dysart’s fascination with the primitive rites of ancient Greece, his revulsion at the Normal deity of modern living; Dora Strang’s Christian faith and tutoring of her son against the wishes of her equally devout atheist husband. Gods exert their powerful pull as mortals continually recreate them.
But it’s passion that’s the real heart — buried and beating in Alan, exposed and dying in Dysart. ‘Passion’ is ‘suffering’ — the Passion of Christ — but, derived originally from the Latin pati ‘to endure, undergo, experience’, it later came also to mean ‘strong emotion, desire.’ Experience, suffering, desire — and all the animist, conventional and secular religious forms that evoke, console, contain, inhibit and incite these in their different ways. Alan has imbibed and rejected something of his mother’s religious faith and his father’s ‘rigorously self-improving’ one. And society’s consumerist religion is proselytised through the TV he’s supposedly banned from watching and reinforced by the customers at the electrical shop where he works during the week; selling brand names to satisfy the already well-equipped citizens of techno(theo)logical society.
Alan’s father preaches on TV’s corrosive effects:
FRANK: You sit in front of that thing long enough, you’ll become stupid for life – like most of the population. The thing is, it’s a swiz. It seems to be offering you something, but actually it’s taking something away. Your intelligence and your concentration, every minute you watch it. … Mindless violence! Mindless jokes! Every five minutes some laughing idiot selling you something you don’t want, just to bolster up the economic system.
From all this, and from vivid if dreamlike childhood memories, Alan has created his own vital, ritualistic worship of his secret God, Equus: kneeling to the picture of a horse framed above his bed; slowly brushing the horses in the stables; secretly taking night-time rides on them. Riding is a worship to be offered raw and alone under the darkness of night, in unwatched fields of mists and nettles: human and animal both naked. Never in the genteel daytime rituals of ‘indulging in equitation’: animal harnessed, humiliated, un-natured; human civilised, ‘mastering’ nature.
At last, exhausted, he reveals his secret, miming for the psychiatrist how two beasts become one and ride out “against them all … My foes and His … The Hosts of Hoover. The Hosts of Philco. The Hosts of Pifco. The House of Remington and all its tribe! … The Hosts of Jodhpur. The Hosts of Bowler and Gymkhana. All those who show him off for their vanity!”
DYSART: Without worship you shrink, it’s as brutal as that… I shrank my own life. No one can do it for you. I settled for being pallid and provincial, out of my own eternal timidity … Some pagan! Such wild returns I make to the womb of civilisation. Three weeks a year in the Peloponnese, every bed booked in advance, every meal paid for by vouchers, cautious jaunts in hired Fiats … such a fantastic surrender to the primitive. And I use the word endlessly: ‘primitive.’ … I sit looking at pages of centaurs trampling the soil of Argos – and outside my window he is trying to become one, in a Hampshire field!
Although Alan has abstracted his passion into a mystical vision of Horse-become-God as enthralling as the God-become-Man and Man-become-God visions of Christian and Industrial religions, what Dysart sees at its core is a primal relationship between human and more-than-human. Far-removed from “the Normal world where animals are treated properly: made extinct, or put into servitude, or tethered all their lives in dim light, just to feed it!” He dissects the inhuman condition we’ve inherited, become (de)naturalised into, and recreate with every Normal thought and action and speech. Dysart knows he cannot keep Alan free from it. It’s what Dysart also wishes to free himself from — and feels insanely jealous of the boy for succeeding, if only temporarily and at a terrible cost to human and animal. More terrible, though, than the ‘proper’ relationship of humans and animals?
DYSART: I’ll give him the good Normal world where we’re tethered beside them — blinking our nights away in a non-stop drench of cathode-ray over our shrivelling heads! I’ll take away his Field … and give him Normal places for his ecstasy — multi-lane highways driven through the guts of cities, extinguishing Place altogether, even the idea of Place! He’ll trot on his metal pony tamely through the concrete evening – and one thing I promise you: he’ll never touch hide again!
Alan has confronted the world of fake reality and discovered his own sexual being at exactly the same time he realises the sexless world on offer in the desolating Normal of his parents’ lives, Dysart’s life and the lives of everyone he sees around him. The young woman he works with at the stables takes him on his first date, to “a skin flick over in Winchester! I’ve never seen one, have you? … All those heavy Swedes, panting at each other! What do you say?”
ALAN: The whole place was full of men. Jill was the only girl … All round me they were all looking. All the men — staring like they were in church. Like they were all a congregation.
Equus is a jealous God. Alan and Jill are discovered in the cinema by his father — revealed as a hypocritical consumer of what he’s brought his son up to beware. When Jill leads him away from the horrifying confrontation and takes him, inevitably, to the place they both know and can be alone together, she’s unaware that the stables are not just her secret place for sex but also his Holy of Holies. Naked with her, Alan sees his God watching through the eyes of the six horses. Equus sees all and punishes transgression, leaving Alan humiliated and, unable to act on his desire for Jill. Forcing her away, when Alan’s alone again with Equus, in despair he takes revenge on His all-seeing God’s earthly forms.
Shaffer’s intense fascination on hearing the brief, almost completely decontextualised account of the real-life horse-blinding was with a crime that “lacked, finally, any coherent explanation.” Meaning that we must all look for our own, incoherent, ones. But remember the one small detail that Shaffer did have: a crime his friend “had heard about recently at a dinner party in London.” More than likely a very ‘Normal’ dinner party, at which conversation, with the odd bit of spine-chilling news and thrilling gossip, took place over plates of animal flesh of one kind or another — although certainly not horse.
A thousand local gods
The Stanwick Horse Mask from north Yorkshire Photograph: British Museum, Creative Commons licence http://www.britishmuseum.org/collectionimages
Returned to the Normal world — where “animals are treated properly” in that way rather than blinded with their own hoof picks — once Dysart has delivered on his promise to “heal the rash on his body … erase the welts cut into his mind by flying manes,” Alan “may even come to find sex funny. Bit of grunt funny. Trampled and furtive and entirely in control. Hopefully, he’ll feel nothing at his fork but Approved Flesh. I doubt, however, with much passion! … Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.”
But, he tells the sleeping boy, “He won’t really go that easily. Just clop away from you like a nice old nag … When Equus leaves — if he leaves at all — it will be with your intestines in his teeth. And I don’t stock replacements.”
Dysart has confessed to Alan his own secret desire: to escape his work, his home.
ALAN: Where would you go?
DYSART: Somewhere.
ALAN: Secret?
DYSART: Yes. There’s a sea – a great sea – I love … It’s where the Gods used to bathe.
ALAN: What Gods?
DYSART: The old ones. Before they died.
ALAN: Gods don’t die.
DYSART: Yes, they do.
And earlier, when he told Hesther of his true passion for the world, his own form of worship, Dysart was offering it to us too. Knowing he’d never find it himself but warning us: try — find every way through, out of the Normal and into something more real.
DYSART: I wish there was one person in my life I could show. One instinctive, absolutely unbrisk person I could … stand in front of certain shrines and sacred streams and say ‘Look! Life is only comprehensible through a thousand local Gods. And not just the old dead ones like Zeus — no, but living Geniuses of Place and Person! And not just Greece but modern England! Spirits of certain trees, certain curves of brick wall, certain chip shops, if you like, and slate roofs — just as of certain frowns and slouches … I’d say to them — ‘Worship as many as you can see — and more will appear!’
It’s a passion not for the abstract but the particular vision — of place, of person and of the more-than-human world: a renewed and habitual relationship with habitat.
DYSART: And of all the nonsensical things — I keep thinking of the horse! Not the boy: the horse, and what it may be trying to do. I keep seeing that huge head kissing him with its chained mouth. Nudging through the metal some desire absolutely irrelevant to filling its belly or propagating its own kind. What desire could that be? Not to be a horse any longer? Is it possible, at certain moments we cannot imagine, a horse can add its sufferings together — the non-stop jerks and jabs that are its daily life – and turn them into grief? What use is grief to a horse? … I shove in my dim little torch, and there he stands — waiting for me. He raises his matted head. He opens his great square teeth, and says [Mocking] ”Why? … Why Me? Why — ultimately — Me? … Do you really imagine you can account for Me? … Poor Doctor Dysart!”
Find out more
I first discovered Equus through Sidney Lumet’s 1977 film adaptation, with Richard Burton as Martin Dysart and Peter Firth as Alan Strang. The screenplay was adapted by Peter Shaffer himself.
An independent researcher, project and events manager, and writer on environmental and climate change issues - investigating, supporting and delivering cultural and creative responses. Read More
Questioning extremity? Space for creative thinking...
"Extremity is the point," suggests Martin Dysart - in the world of Normal, where passion is flattened out, made safe, and industrialsed violence against animals (human and non-human) is hidden from sight. Freed from a need for any 'final, coherent explanation', what extremity might your creative practice bring to light?"
Share your thoughts - use the Contact Form, visit the ClimateCultures Facebook page or write a response on your own blog and send a link!
Artistic Director Adam Ledger discusses the process of devising The Bone Ensemble’s Where’s My Igloo Gone? and the challenges of making participatory theatre about home and community that presents climate change as something that we can collectively address.
2,650 words: estimated reading time 10.5 minutes
Oolik is an ordinary girl who goes on an extraordinary journey to save her igloo home. On her way she meets some exciting friends to help her – including YOU!
So says the back of the flyer advertising The Bone Ensemble’s family performance Where’s My Igloo Gone?, which is soon to be re-rehearsed before a national tour. What this strapline tries carefully to invite is involvement in a participatory performance about home, community and climate change. It is for children 5+, but clearly wants to draw their parents/carers into, as the marketing blurb continues, an ‘Arctic world of soaring snow geese, pet husky dogs and starry nights… and the kind of cold that makes your skin tingle!’. And this has been the key.
Climate change art (if we accept there is such a category) is, of course, an emergent practice. Some work, especially visual art and installation, reflects the materiality of the environment, inviting us to encounter the natural world. There is some dance work, some music, some theatre (and, as the bit I know most about, bear with me while I dwell on that).
There has been a crop of interesting ‘climate change’ plays, and performances that are more like performance lectures. The latter includes director Katie Mitchell and Stephen Emmott’s Ten Billion (2012), about the a/effects of population growth (now there’s a film of the subsequent book), and her later (2014) collaboration with writer Duncan Macmillan and scientist Chris Rapley, 2071. These performances are stuffed full of unequivocal scientific fact in an attempt to ‘prove’ climate change; Emmott’s Cambridge office was even minutely reconstructed on the Royal Court’s stage; and Rapley sat in front of wondrous video graphics.
Even more visually impressive is Motionhouse’s Broken (2013), in which astonishing feats of acrobatics-dance happen in front of a sophisticated videographic backdrop. Physically astonishing too is As the World Tipped (2011, Wired Aerial Theatre), incorporating, again, video with feats of aerialist performance and, as the name implies, a big, up-ending stage. At its conclusion, the crowd were visibly and audibly inspired by its projected call to arms, ‘Demand change now’, clearly a huge step forward from the dismaying conclusion of the earlier Ten Billion, which ends (I’m paraphrasing a bit, but the swearing isn’t mine) “we’re all fucked…”
…well, we might be, but let’s hope not; let’s ‘demand change’, and seek, as artists, to keep shifting work on from the apocalyptic; looking at even my short list of work above, there is quite a visual narrative of the negatively spectacular going on. Of course, work is still developing, and there is already a noticeable arc, but what are we meant to do – physically, actively, emotionally – with just a negative reflection of the increasingly obvious issues around us? Can we also find ways to go beyond ‘demand change’?
Where’s My Igloo Gone? didn’t start with the idea of making a participatory performance for a limited audience of only forty – which we are expanding now for its national tour to sixty. A few years ago, capitalising on The Bone Ensemble’s foray into the outdoor arts and festival scene, we decided to try to build an igloo in the middle of the summer countryside. It had to be big enough to hold a reasonable audience (as many will know, making work that is in any way ‘intimate’ brings immediate commercial problems), couldn’t get too hot, and had to be made of sustainable material. Oh, and it had to have a blackout so that we could have lights. Which meant that we had to find sustainable and, crucially, silent power. This was getting complicated…
We got a bit of funding to explore ideas and to incorporate homespun electronics into the mix. Even though we found ways to link our ongoing interest in voice and music to big LEDs, making them light up with our burgeoning, and often unreliable, artisan knowledge of raspberry pis and Makey Makeys, building what was effectively a portable theatre was becoming way too expensive, time consuming, and far too difficult. Trips to scientific labs to look at the latest eco materials and mega-batteries were interesting but taking us away from the very people we wanted to think about and, eventually, connect with: our audiences. What had emerged through all this experiment, play (and downright headache) were, though, the beginnings of two characters, who later became Oolik and Ooman in Where’s My Igloo Gone?, and an interest in Inuit culture; a demographic of indigenous peoples which, like so many around the world, is affected by the changing environment, of which they are so intuitively aware. Rather than a sort of outdoor installation, what seemed urgent was the need squarely to address climate change and find new ways that theatre, and in our case theatre for young people, could do this.
We started again: there would be a human story, there would be characters and situations with which audiences could empathise and, above all, there would be a positive, empowering message. Funding was cobbled together from Arts Council England’s ‘Grants for the Arts’ scheme (GfA) and the University of Birmingham and, in September 2015, we undertook a short ‘RnD’ phase. This could also foreground how we might develop our earlier participatory work on Caravania!, a twenty-minute performance for only six people at a time in a 1980s caravan (yes, really) into a politics of participation, of a shift from mirroring the environmental problems around us to a positive experience. Rather than (as can happen) guilt, blame or feeling stuck as to what to do, we would try to offer a feeling of empowerment. And we would stage the show in the round so that everyone could see and take part.
At this first stage, an important decision was taken: the characters would not speak English, but a made up language we call ‘Iglooish’. On a practical level, this was about the show being accessible to everyone (and, of course, we were going to go on a world tour! That remains an ambition, but a 40+ date national tour is pretty satisfying in the meantime), but also obliges the effort of communication with characters a little bit ‘other’ and, importantly for the climate change issue, are not necessarily English-speaking, familiar figures, but ones who globalise the debate.
Where’s My Igloo Gone? was subsequently commissioned by mac birmingham and the Arena Theatre, Wolverhampton and, with the support of a second GfA award and funding from several Trusts and the University of Birmingham, was created in November 2016, when it was shown regionally, at Pontio, Wales, and in a special school. Concerns of accessibility have been expanded: our work has been made accessible to d/Deaf audiences too, with the help of the wonderful Caroline Parker MBE, sign-signing diva and all round good egg.
Story-making
Where’s My Igloo Gone? is at heart a pretty straight story, a quest triggered by a crisis, that of Oolik’s melting igloo (itself clearly an exaggeration of climate change effects). But our starting point is, then, quite consciously the state that some of the aforementioned work often ends with. Oolik’s subsequent adventure sees her meet a set of animals, including — something of a hit – the Walrus (who is a bit flatulent), get caught up in a storm, confront an oil company boss and deal with becoming displaced — she, too, is a climate refugee, a very real consequence of contemporary environmental change. So Oolik exemplifies someone who experiences peril, gains insight, experiences failure, yet takes action.
How to explain climate change became one of the greatest challenges in devising. The science is complicated; data has to be brought together from a number of sources to demonstrate cause, effect, possible scenarios (basically, what 2071 does). Young audiences are often eco-minded, but our early visits to our partner schools to test ideas confirmed that not many know the terminology ‘climate change’ and certainly not the causal processes.
Caught in a storm, Oolik meets a scientist, Ting Tang Zood, quirky, charming and a bit silly, who doesn’t speak Iglooish of course, nor English, but a fizz-pop sort of language of ‘science’. Stuck in linguistic incomprehensibility, Ting Tang Zood’s solution to explain environment change is to draw the basics of global warming (an apparently simple solution but one of those devising obstacles that seem to take forever to sort out…). This offers, too, a layering of the aural aesthetic as Oolik taps along on a tin cup and joins in a few rude noises to demonstrate how plane emissions are just like those of an altogether different sort…
This slightly silly, interactive scene puts Oolik, crucially, in the same place as her young audience friends; she learns about environmental cycles alongside everyone else in a situation where everyone becomes a kind of Oolik. Optimally, the sequence informs and empowers in playfully providing not only fundamental environmental knowledge but suggesting that, if the root cause is actually simple, if highly damaging, human activity, then a root solution might be to want do something different. Since she realises climate change has affected her personally, our empathetic relationship with Oolik extends also to an investment in Oolik’s next step, the decision to confront the oil boss to find out why drilling is taking place around her and make that stop. Oolik becomes a kind of vicarious climate change activist.
You can’t, I think, just throw people inside a show; immersive theatre work (and some other artworks) can do this much better in that this type of practice also typically comes with some sort of place/space that spectators are inside — immersed in. In our case, we move from simply clapping along to a song, or adding a sound effect with a simple musical instrument, to a few — then all — spectators involved in a sequence. Nevertheless, for us, the audience is always there and is often referred to, included, or made complicit in a scene. A key to inviting participation is just that — it is never a requirement, but always a respectful, if direct, invitation. We have had no real issues here, discovering with pleasure that our audiences want to get involved. But it needs to be taken step by step.
Near the beginning of the piece, our characters ask spectators to draw a picture of where they live — in the Inuit languages, ‘igloo’ doesn’t just mean an ice house, but a home, a shelter. The point is we all need an igloo. This is an example of a relatively straightforward mode of participation, at once communal and individual, yet connects spectators to the characters in terms of the themes of the work yet to unfold. Later, everyone participates in the encounter with the politician. It is here that the drawings of spectators’ various ‘igloos’ return when everyone brandishes them when participating in a protest! Of course, this is meant to be fun, but it also models what could happen outside the theatre, where audiences might be encouraged to give voice. The work is not, then, about ourselves as individuals, but ourselves as a community wanting and doing something different.
“The climate is changing, but people are not.”
At the 2015 ‘2 Degrees’ festival at ArtsAdmin, the book There is Nothing that is Beyond Our Imagination was launched. In it, Henrietta Moore writes
“The climate is changing, but people are not. Politics is about story-making. A new politics would require new stories. Now, in contemporary political life, apocalyptic imaginaries infuse the whole climate change debate. What are the alternative stories?”
As well as, in our case, how climate can be made central to theatre for young audiences, ‘alternative’ stories might encourage feeling, thought, conversation and potential behaviour change. Moore is right: few media items about climate change seem to be more imaginative than offering a stock illustration of a polar bear stuck on a piece of ice. Yes, it happens but, again, what are we meant to do with such an image? It risks being a visual trope and the iconography of stasis.
Climate change can seem a distant, abstract and difficult to understand phenomenon. Although the world has dangerous clowns who claim that the whole thing is a conspiracy (do some people really believe that or is it a convenient (post)truth?), what can art and artists do? We can continue to make climate change real, around and about us now, not letting it seem an overwhelming, distant issue. We can work together towards awareness and change by first offering and sharing in particular, human ‘alternative stories’. As a citizen of the world, it is hard to know what to do, but, where we can, if we make artworks that place situations into dialogue through skill, artistic craft and objects and events of beauty, we can offer a different normalcy.
As Anthony Gormley asks in ‘Art in the time of global warming’
“Is it possible to re-think art and take it from this finished-object status and make it into a verb, a participatory, open space, a place of transformation and the exchange of ideas and reflection on our state and status?”
Our work is not some sort of perfect example. Before re-rehearsal in a few weeks and the launch of the national tour (supported by a third GfA), I want to look closely at the participatory parts because, whilst we have to make frameworks, an audience’s agency can be compromised; and, although we have made ourselves very informed and especially careful, I want to think more about how we handle the diverse cultural aspects. Still, we are making a particular and new form in the context of a certain type of theatre audience. We also offer an example of how theatre can approach climate issues not by staging a negative, inevitable problem — as if we were inside some sort of disaster movie — but something that we can collectively address.
So a performance of Where’s My Igloo Gone? simply cannot end unless everyone works together. Audience members participate in changing the set and build a structure that becomes a new home for Oolik and Oomam. Everyone is welcomed inside this newly created igloo.
Find out more
You can find a trailer and the tour dates for Where’s My Igloo Gone? and more at The Bone Ensemble.
Adam mentions some of the other plays that have addressed climate change issues over the past few years:
Katie Mitchell and Stephen Emmott’s Ten Billion (2012) was reviewed by Official London Theatre
Katie Mitchell’s 2014 collaboration with writer Duncan Macmillan and scientist Chris Rapley, for 2071 was reviewed by the Guardian and Telegraph.
Wired Aerial Theatre‘s information on As the World Tipped (2011) also includes a video about their R&D for the production.
The essays that Adam mentioned appear in the following books:
Henrietta L. Moore and Renata Salec’s essay (2015) ‘How to create climate for change’ was published in There is Nothing That is Beyond our Imagination, ed. Claudia Galhós. Torres Vedras: ArtinSite, p. 56.
Anthony Gormley’s essay ‘Art in the time of global warming’ (2010) was published in Long Horizons: an Exploration of Art and Climate Change by Julie’s Bicycle and the British Council). The full guide can be downloaded as a free pdf from Julie’s Bicycle.
An artistic director interested in how art practices can bring empowering messages about climate, and a senior lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts (University of Birmingham). Read More
Questioning an end? Space for creative thinking...
"Adam says of Where’s My Igloo Gone? that the 'performance simply cannot end unless everyone works together." In our changing climate, where is the end of participation - and therefore of performance in your own creative work?"
Share your thoughts - use the Contact Form, visit the ClimateCultures Facebook page or write a response on your own blog and send a link!
Artistic director and performer Paul Michael Henry, who has devised successive UNFIX festivals, discusses his motivation and ambitions for these international gatherings and explorations, ahead of UNFIX 2019 next month. UNFIX: a command form, a verb, an activity.
UNFIX 2019
Shrimp Dance, Paul Michael Henry. Platform, Glasgow October 2017. 
Minako Seki
Artists Climate Lab participants at Hawkwood College, September 2018
A break from the workshops
Together
DUFERC Meeting 36, 17 June 2004
From a public road on the Kirkcudbright Training Area
Sandyhills
ClimateCultures editor 
Cover of Equus
Still from the film adaptation, Equus
The Stanwick Horse Mask from north Yorkshire
Artistic Director 
Where’s My Igloo Gone?
Where’s My Igloo Gone?
Where’s My Igloo Gone?