“Time to Act” — Failure & Success at COP26

Composer Lola Perrin and curator Rob La Frenais invited three artists and organisers to talk about their creative work for COP26 and their feelings about the global conference’s failure to match the warm rhetoric of its first day.


2,570 words: estimated reading time = 10 minutes


For many, in the days and weeks after COP26, along came a new wave of grief. Friends privately confessed to fits of uncontrollable sobbing from pure rage at international politicians still ignoring the science, otherwise they’d be in full emergency mode. The conference began with pretty speeches with presenters including David Attenborough and the Prince of Wales repeating each other’s words; “the time has come to act”. But just over two weeks later when COP26 ended, scores of new fossil fuel licences were signed, sanctioning production well into at least the 2040s.

Compare those pretty speeches to the dignitaries and the world’s media with the actions by global citizens who do indeed act — in any way they can to put a stop to the killing machine, but who are increasingly criminalised and imprisoned for doing just that. Also what of other acts, for example, birth strikes among women and some men who withhold reproduction as protest in the face of extinction, and hunger strikes that regularly appear across the world in which people decide to act by withholding food in protest at genocidal government policies? These acts rarely make mainstream news but they are there. So turning back to those pretty words on the first day of COP26 when all and sundry appealed for action, what kind of action were they talking about when it’s so hugely controversial to even mention ending fossil fuels in any final COP agreement? No wonder we cry and rage in frustration.

For this ClimateCultures post we wanted to see what three artists/organisers who took part in COP26 with creative work felt about the failure of the COP and where they will go next.

Miranda Whall is a performance artist based in Wales who crawled through the pouring rain as delegates met indoors, eventually to no avail. She expresses her frustrations powerfully in her performance and here.

Warren Senders is a musician, member of the New England Conservatory faculty and activist, and part of Music for Climate Justice which organised music events during COP26, both live in Glasgow and virtually in nine online concerts featuring 350 global musicians. Warren and Music for Climate Justice were focused on using culture to bring an indigenous voice to COP26. The concerts repeatedly broadcast this message; “Planetary Climate Change threatens our civilisation and therefore, all human art and music, there is No Time to Waste”.

Mike Stubbs is the former Director of FACT, Liverpool and has now returned to his artistic practice as well as directing ArtBomb Festival in Doncaster. His early work was based on young people’s fascination with car culture. His latest work questions this early fascination, in ‘Climate Emergency Services’ a van spray-painted in hot rod style with images from the Australian bush fires which he took to Glasgow for COP26.

We asked each artist/organiser four questions.

What did you do at COP26?

Miranda Whall

Heading to COP26 - showing artist Miranda Whall's crawling performance for Be-Coming Tree: global online performance on Aberystwyth seafront.
Miranda Whall’s crawling performance for Be-Coming Tree: global online performance on Aberystwyth seafront.
Photographer: Ashley Calvert © 2021

“On Saturday 6th November I crawled with a six-year-old potted Scots Pine on my back through the centre of Glasgow, from the Glasgow Sculpture Studios on Dawson Road to the COP26 Green Zone in the Science Centre on the Clyde Waterfront Regeneration area. Passers-by ignored, laughed, stared, cheered and filmed as the tree and I silently and determinedly made our way through heavy rain and high winds to reach our destination. The intention of my heroic/tragic/comic slow and gentle art activism was an expression of my grief, my despair and my outrage with a world dominated by corporate and personal greed, and an insistence that non–human nature, and in this case trees, be put at the centre of discussions on how to mitigate the climate emergency and ecological crisis. Animals, plants, trees, air, earth and oceans should be, metaphorically, sitting at the discussion table with heads of government and delegates.

“My hope was that crawling to the COP26 United Nations climate change conference carrying a tree that was equal in size to my body might inspire human beings to re-think and re-align their relationship to trees, seeing them not only as a resource to use and abuse but as an ally and a vital source of knowledge. We all literally need to get down from our human-centric, two-legged, dominant and hierarchical position and start recognising our non-human vegetal others as equals, and as sentient beings with a voice that we crucially need to listen to if we are to find a way out of our human-made catastrophe.”

Warren Senders

Music4ClimateJustice performance, November 6th 2021: ‘Rhythms, Words, and … Ice!’ Terje Isungset composer and musicians performing on instruments carved from ice.

“To be clear, I was not ‘at’ COP26. I stayed in my small house in Medford, MA. Other people from the M4CJ (Music for Climate Justice) organisation were in Glasgow. I organised and produced eight days of streamed video content: music, profiles, and interviews addressing the intersectionalities of climate activism and the performing arts. This worked out to 4.5 – 5 hours of music a day, from the 5th to the 12th of November (with a live opening event in Glasgow that I did not work on). The artists and activists we presented came from all over the world; the M4CJ ‘Festival’ was almost certainly the most diverse musical event in human history.

“Participating artists contributed a video performance and added a short spoken statement about climate change. Some of the performances were created for this event; others were archival. In several cases, the estate or trust for a major artist who was no longer alive agreed to contribute material. Interviews and panel discussions included profiles of artists, activists, musicians/composers working with climate data, ethnomusicologists & eco-musicologists, and artists & thinkers in related fields.”

Mike Stubbs

Climate Emergency Services at COP26, Glasgow November 2021. Showing Climate Emergency Services engaging with young people
Climate Emergency Services engaging with young people.
Photograph: Lou Johnson © 2021

“I presented Climate Emergency Services (CES) outside the Glasgow Transport Museum on the opening weekend of COP26 and then spent four days in Glasgow at the end. The artwork was hosted by the Coventry Biennale and Govan Project Space. Activities included the artwork appearing as a confounding, confused hot-rod/emergency vehicle to stimulate conversations on cars and climate emergency. I drove around Glasgow and managed to become part of a strange parade with other (police) emergency vehicles tagging along on the back of an organised pedestrian protest march. I was the only vehicle other than three cop cars.”

How has the failure of COP26 directed your intentions towards future actions?

Miranda Whall

“The failures of COP26 have enraged me and so empowered my determination and commitment to take this performative work much further. Up until the crawl in Glasgow I had crawled in isolated and rural locations, so my audience was mostly an infrequent passer-by. Crawling in a busy urban centre took the performance directly to a bigger and wider engaged and non-engaged public. Both on the streets of Glasgow and on the politically polarised and de-humanised highways of social media I felt simultaneously empowered and vulnerable. Down there on my hands and knees, I began to more fully realise the performance’s potential to aggravate and alleviate, to provoke and heal. And I more fully realised that this human/animal/vegetal/technological hybrid that I have created is a new ‘thing’; an alliance, a symbiotic union, a co-creating community, an interconnected future.”

Showing Miranda Whall crawling through a rainy Glasgow on the way to COP 26.
Miranda Whall crawling through a rainy Glasgow on the way to COP 26.
Photographer: Ashley Calvert © 2021

Warren Senders

“I don’t think terms like ‘success’ or ‘failure’ are applicable to COP26, or any such conference. Lacking the ability to set policy, the conference is not describable in those terms. It succeeded in conveying the current state of climate-change research to policy-makers. It succeeded in forcing climate change into the forefront of worldwide media coverage for a few days. It gave activists something to do, a way to connect … and gave the climate movement a lot to think about going forward (issues of intersectionality, of indigenous representation, of systemic discrimination, economic models, etc). It failed to generate hard policy outcomes … but to expect COP26 to result in systemic transformation was to expect that (in a hopefully soon-to-be-obsolete metaphor) the airport bus would grow wings and take off down the runway.

“Such expectations represent a popular (and entirely understandable) need for a deus ex machina which would magically solve our problems. I was not immune to that feeling; none of us were.

Showing Music4ClimateJustice performance at COP26: 'Rhythms, Words, and ... Ice!' with Aparna Sindhoor Dance Company
Music4ClimateJustice performance on 6th November: ‘Rhythms, Words, and … Ice!’ with Aparna Sindhoor’s Encounter, dance theatre Inspired by indigenous people’s fight for their forest.

Mike Stubbs

“It makes me want to want to continue to mingle and discuss these issues with members of the unconverted members of society, i.e. car nuts, pissed people, street dwellers, middle-class shoppers, kids and anyone not into COP26 or the environment. Climate Emergency Services is a hot rod with a gun on the roof playing extra loud birdsong, flashing lights and a sci-fi plant glowing/growing inside. It’s not a bad way of sparking up a conversation.”

What ideas do you have for your next climate-engaged work?

Miranda Whall

“I am now planning further solo urban tree crawls and collective urban tree crawls. I am also preparing to crawl in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt with a palm tree on my back for COP27 from the 7th – 18th November 2022. I will crawl for longer and further and hopefully up to, if not into, the conference and negotiation centre. In Glasgow, I reached the entrance of the Green Zone. This was ineffectual, next time I need to crawl to the entrance of the Blue Zone or its equivalent in Sharm El- Sheikh.”

Warren Senders

“I’ll go on doing what I’ve been doing all along. Daily vigils, a daily quota of political activity, intermittent public activism (marches, sit-ins, possible NVCD), and intermittent benefit concerts as part of an ongoing collaboration with M4CJ. I hope to present the first such event in May or June 2022 (I’ve organised 21 previous benefit concerts since 2009).”

Mike Stubbs

“I am trying to find a sustainable model with Creative Folkestone on how to continue the work of Climate Emergency Services and am planning to tour to festivals, motor shows and schools, integrating practical workshops on air quality monitoring and growing. Additionally, in Doncaster I am going to be announcing an open call for a new artists residency scheme on sustainability and water and a lab which will develop new critical work on climate for ArtBomb Festival 22 in August next year.”

COP26: Showing Climate Emergency Services on the way to Glasgow.
Climate Emergency Services on the way to Glasgow.
Photograph: Lou Johnson © 2021

Many people feel dismayed at business since COP26. What must happen so we’re happy in 2025?

Miranda Whall

“The wind is gusting its terrifying gusts outside my window as I write this. The wind terrified me as a child because it blew down walls and trees and shook my window, I would crawl into my parents’ bed and stick my fingers into my ears until it blew itself out. I remember loving the peace and quiet that followed. But now the wind terrifies me more than ever, because I know what it means and I know there is no peace and quiet to follow. What we must do could not be more clear — leaders must lead and businesses, corporations and citizens must follow. Simple. I am on my hands and knees pleading. I cannot articulate this better or differently.”

Warren Senders

“What would make us happy would be the governments of the world taking climate change seriously and engaging in concerted and robust collective action. Is there a mechanism to make this happen? No. The systemic inability of our governance to cope with climate change is a diagnostic indicator pointing to a structural problem in our governing mechanisms themselves. In geopolitics, hasty actions between nations are likely to be harbingers of war. The UN was developed specifically to reduce both the likelihood and the severity of such hasty actions — providing a place where disputes between nations can be discussed instead of leading to armed hostilities. That is to say: the UN was created in order to make international relations slower, more measured, more reflective. Which is a structural problem in light of the fact that what the climate crisis demands is that we all act very quickly. The UN isn’t equipped to direct concerted and robust collective international action any more than that airport bus is equipped to be an airplane.

“At this stage in the crisis, our happiness must come in the successful resolution of short-term problems. We live in ‘interesting times’, and our responsibility is to the future.”

Showing Music4ClimateJustice performance at COP26, 6th November 2021: 'Rhythms, Words, and ... Ice!' “Bhuka Tiende”, Dzapasi Mbira Group
Music4ClimateJustice performance 6/11/21: ‘Rhythms, Words, and … Ice!’ “Bhuka Tiende”, Dzapasi Mbira Group. Most musicians in Zimbabwe are subsistence farmers. They are already suffering from extreme climate change.

Mike Stubbs

“We will never be happy. Continue to engage the disenchanted, talk to your family, collaborate with like minds, write to MPs, become councillors, be artists, make art and protest when you can.”


Find out more

Lola Perrin adds: I was interviewed by Warren as part of M4CJ at COP26 and appeared in the concert on November 11th. I found I became gradually more and more addicted to the concerts once they started streaming on November 5th — they’re quite deeply emotional and the breadth of work gathered together from 350 engaged musicians across the world is really powerful. Here are links to the M4CJ COP26 streamed concerts on YouTube:

5th November 2021 Journey Around the World in Space and Time  
6th November Rhythms, Words, and … Ice! 
7th November Strings and Threads That Tie Us Together 
8th November Music Beyond Boundaries 
8th November M4CJ Global Launch Show 
9th November Our Island Home 
10th November Turning Art Into Activism Part I 
11th November Turning Art Into Activism Part II 
12th November From the Ancient to the Future 

Warren Senders is a musician, member of the New England Conservatory faculty and activist, and part of Music for Climate Justice. You can read about him in this 2018 piece at the Climate Disobedience Center, in a 2011 Arts Fuse feature Playing For the Planet, and a 2019 piece for The Indian Express, This Hindustani singer does his riyaz on streets and warns people about climate change. You can hear Warren in this Radio Boston interview and performance from 2010: Boston-Area Percussionists Drum For The Planet. “When Medford resident Warren Senders first learned about the effects of climate change, he felt helpless. ‘I’m no scientist,’ Senders thought. ‘What can I possibly do to help?'”

Miranda Whall is an interdisciplinary and performance artist based in Wales. She says of her crawling works, “My crawling projects are titled Crossed Paths. So far for Crossed Paths – Animals I have crawled as a sheep, badger, almost otter and I have carried out extensive research for mountain hare. For Crossed Paths – Trees I have crawled with an Oak tree, Birch tree and May tree. Other crawling projects are in development. Crossed Paths is a project about going deeply into the living landscape, ecosystems and interspecies dynamics to explore animal, plant, land and human narratives.” On Miranda’s Vimeo channel, you can watch her Showreel for COP26 Glasgow.

Mike Stubbs is an artist, curator and consultant, Director of ArtBomb Festival in Doncaster and former Director of FACT Liverpool. You can read more about Climate Emergency Services, which was commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021.

Lola Perrin 
Lola Perrin 
A composer, pianist and collaborator on keyboard conversations about climate change with economists, lawyers, scientists, artists and other thinkers across the world.

Rob La Frenais
Rob La Frenais
An independent contemporary art curator, working internationally and creatively with artists entirely on original commissions, directly engaged with the artist’s working process as far as possible.

The Art of Reimagining Managed Retreat

Artist Yky shares ideas and artworks he presented to an international conference addressing scientific, social, and governance issues around ‘managed retreat’ — and how artists need to engage with pedagogy to contextualize and reimagine responses to climate change.


2,440 words: estimated reading time = 10 minutes


In June 2021, Columbia University’s Earth Institute in New York City organised a four-day conference addressing scientific, social, and governance issues around the theme of ‘managed retreat’. This conference covered a broad spectrum of topics, but all of them were meant to discuss resilience, relocation, and climate justice when facing the consequences of flooding. I was invited to discuss how art could address the challenges of climate-caused relocation.

At what point managed retreat? Columbia Climate School conference 2021

It was no surprise to me that, amongst key issues, it was recognised that most practitioners facing climate change and resilience challenges had no adequate professional preparation in terms of communication. Scientists are often blamed for not being able to see the value of unconventional narratives. But artists also have their share of responsibility. During this conference, it appeared that the meaning we give to the words ‘managed retreat’ and how to bring pedagogy into the process were two essential issues. To give more insights on the way art should address the question of communication improvement, I presented five of my works that question how vulnerabilities may turn natural hazards in disasters.

‘Managed retreat’ — advancing in a different direction?

Art provides powerful narratives, enabling us to bridge the gap between scientists and non-expert citizens. It gives a better understanding of the world. Its vision of reality enriches the collective debate, enabling a significant change by shifting the perspective to more open-minded views. It gives the opportunity to understand reality differently, either using our sense of understanding or our sense of emotions, or both. Facing disasters, be it due to climate change or others hazards, artists will use their skills to convey the message they find appropriate. Most often, the vulnerabilities that shape such disasters translate into a scope of artistic representations which are direct, realistic, emotional, strong, and visually meaningful.

But, seen from the artistic point of view, translating into a piece of art the meaning of ‘managed retreat’, though terribly actual, is much more challenging. During my presentation, one of the questions sent through the Q & A session asked “is the word ‘retreat’ appropriate to discuss the topics of the conference?” I think this was one of the most interesting questions, as indeed, the word ‘retreat’ can have a negative perception. It is linked to this idea that you have been defeated and that there is no other alternative than withdrawing and leaving the field to the ‘enemy’. Flooding-caused displacement cannot ignore our attachments to a community or a place. It needs to address social and environmental justice issues as integral parts of the retreat management. But at the same time, it is ambiguous. What do fairness or justice mean when dealing with the unavoidable tradeoffs linked to forced evictions, when prioritising access to retreat resources, when ignoring the fact that indigenous communities have tribal rights that are too often ignored by our post-colonialist behaviours?

But what about understanding retreat as ‘advancing in a different direction’? Could we think of retreat as being a way to reimagine, reinvent, redefine processes to give the environment its full place, promoting visions radically different from massive human movements? Undoubtedly, the creativity and imagination required to propose new scenarios, even ones seen as utopian, are the privilege of artists. But how can we describe the complexity of urban space from the artistic perspective? How could artists translate into their works the unpredictability of our future as described by Carl Folke of the Stockholm Resilience Centre?

There is a need for all artists to better understand some concepts. ‘Resilience’, ‘sustainability’ and ‘risk management’ are not interchangeable words. When sustainability calls for more efficiency, resilience is more focused on redundancy. Both need to be linked, and the conditions providing a synergistic effect between the two concepts are key when looking for the path to reimagine ‘managed retreat’. Artists don’t need to be experts, but they need to know how to address through their skills the issues related to climate disasters. Empathy is not enough; there is a need to better engage with scientists, to better contextualize the concepts so that such concepts, through an artistic expression, help non-expert citizens to understand how and why retreating from flooding-prone areas and moving to safer ground can also meet their needs.

Bringing pedagogy into the process

The scientific community may understand complex concepts but without appropriate storytelling it will fail to engage people, for a simple reason: facts are not enough. We also need the right narrative and, in this respect, art can help.

There are many examples of associations, like Art of Change in France, Artseverywhere in Canada, or Julie’s Bicycle in the UK, with talented artists who are committed towards climate change. And some of them bring artists and experts together to imagine and propose answers and ideas for adaptation and transformation. But few are engaged together in a pedagogical process. However, artists need to recognise their social responsibility and be involved in an artistic approach consistent with the objectives we are trying to reach. Some of them may find it difficult to leave their comfort zone: going beyond a natural sensitivity finding its expression in a painting, in a sculpture or in a poem is not easy, and sometimes not feasible. But artists can also engage in improving our well-being and well-living, using their skills to increase our collective awareness, through a designed pedagogical approach together with scientists in a co-working exercise.

Ultimately, the threats and challenges we all face are so high that being committed towards non-expert citizens becomes a duty. A pedagogical approach is not needed simply to make non-expert citizens aware of the challenges they face; but it is definitely a requirement if artists want to play a role in explaining the systemic nature of socio-ecological threats shaping our vulnerabilities.

Pedagogy cannot be decreed; it needs to be learned. And in the specific case of hazards and related disasters, teaching is cognitively challenging. When both experts and artists decide to join their skills, Paulo Freire can be very helpful. Freire was a Brazilian educator and sociologist who dedicated most of his work to vulnerable communities. His work — most of it can be found online — was about how knowledge should be transferred from teacher to learner, and the core was based on the idea that unequal social relations build the path to a “culture of silence” which is created to oppress. To this extent, it leads to questioning the systemic nature of inequalities in our society, shaping the vulnerabilities that lead to disasters. ‘Teachers’ following Freire’s principles, will need to develop the critical consciousness of ‘learners’, aiming to build a “cultural action for freedom”.

Managed retreat: the art of critical thinking

Redefining ‘managed retreat’ in such a way that the focus moves from disruption in human occupancy to promoting new visions incorporating issues of gender, race and equity questions the nature of artistic approaches. How can they be consistent with the duty to (re)educate communities about conceptual processes which themselves had their share of responsibility in creating inequalities? In line with Freire’s approach to giving more importance to questions than to answers, artworks should prioritise such issues. By doing so, art will engage in this ‘critical thinking’, seen as the cornerstone that enables us to reconsider what has been taken for granted when this is needed.

In the five works I showed during the conference, and seen below, the property of argentic paper to darken when exposed to light should be seen as an allegory of ephemerality, questioning the value of what lasts in time. Each is a diptych of two photographs illustrating a given urban space impacted by a natural hazard. While the first one is stable in time, the second image darkens — with some parts disappearing as the argentic emulsion turns black. It is the comparison between the two photographs that will lead the viewer to question the resilience level of the urban space. Being ephemeral, this work can be seen as having no value, unless its value lies in the questions it raises.

“Only the ephemeral is of lasting value.”
Eugène Ionesco (playwright, 1909-1994)

Shakes 

‘Shakes’ questions how resilience can be implemented in the case of widespread destruction by earthquakes, which are devastating at different levels. They impact the cities, the organisations and the persons. But they also talk about an irrational fear, which is the destruction of our matrix. In this diptych, the second picture darkens in time in such a way that only the broken glass path remains, referring to our fears and vulnerability, while two attributes of our cultural heritage — a Le Corbusier building and the Golden Gate Bridge — are endangered even when not destroyed

Yrban resilience: Showing Shakes, a diptych by artist Yky
Shakes, a diptych: D0 and D+
Artist: Yky © 2018

The Japanese paradox

The Japanese paradox’ is all about the difference between risk management and urban resilience. It is well-known that the Japanese culture of risk management is almost second nature. But do we really speak of urban resilience, the way we understand it, when philosophical and/or religious principles refrain from addressing the norms that sometimes need to be reconsidered? In that work, darkness in time is detrimental to the city and its inhabitants, confronting the great wave of Hokusaï, symbolising the almighty nature that no one can stop.

Managed retreat: showing 'A Japanese paradox at D0 and D+', a diptych by artist Yky
‘A Japanese paradox at D0 and D+’, a diptych
Artist: Yky © 2018

La Seine

La Seine’ was taken during the substantial flood in Paris three years ago. And this work is about the adaptation of historical cities’ urban environment. How far are we ready to go in losing our cultural heritage, and what does this mean in terms of resilience?

Managed retreat: Showing 'La Seine, a diptych at D0 and D+' by Yky
‘La Seine, a diptych at D0 and D+’
Artist Yky © 2018

NB: ‘Shakes’, ‘The Japanese paradox’, and ‘La Seine’ were showcased just before the pandemic during the Art of Resilience exhibition organised by the World Bank in Washington DC.

Do cities learn from getting burned?

This work was inspired by the Australian tragedy that we all remember but is also related to the ongoing and never-stopping fires in California. And it speaks of the moment where cities will be impacted, and not only the wild-urban interface. It also questions our inability or difficulty to learn from aboriginal traditions in terms of fire risk management.

Do cities learn from getting burned, a diptych at D0 and D+' by artist Yky
‘Do cities learn from getting burned, a diptych at D0 and D+’
Artist: Yky © 2019

Is NYC retreat inevitable?

This work refers to the different issues discussed during the conference. It was inspired by an article published last year in the online journal NewCities in which the CEO of the Star City group explained why he decided to leave the Hudson River area where he was living and why he did not believe any longer in urban resilience. This work concluded my presentation, not only because it refers directly to the conference topic, but also because not being able to explain to non-expert citizens the meaning of urban resilience should be seen as a collective failure.

'Managed retreat: Showing 'Is NYC retreat inevitable? a diptych at D0 and D+' by artist Yky
‘Is NYC retreat inevitable? a diptych at D0 and D+’
Artist: Yky © 2020

Find out more

You can explore the programme for the At What Point Managed Retreat? conference and watch videos of all the sessions. Yky explores many aspects of urban resilience in a changing climate in his Resi-city blog about his work picturing urban resilience seen from the citizen point of view: for example, Exploring spirituality in the urban frame. Some of the artworks featured in this post — including Shakes — were exhibited at Art of Resilience, organised by the World Bank in Washington, DC. In Urban Resilience? Art, the Missing Link, his earlier post for ClimateCultures, Yky offers further thoughts on art as a pedagogic tool and imagines a conversation between citizens, a scientist and the artist himself as they consider Shakes.

You can read about the language we associate with coastal change and particular responses such as managed retreat in You can’t resist the sea: Evolving attitudes and responses to coastal erosion at Slapton, South Devon, a 2009 paper by geographer Stephen Trudgill.

Yky mentions the work of Carl Folke and the Stockholm Resilience Centre. You can download and read Resilience: Now more than ever, an article co-authored by Folke for Ambio: A journal of the Human Environment in 2002 and shared as part of the journal’s 50 years celebration in 2021: “As proffered in the Ambio article, resilience is about learning from and developing with change, rather than managing against change. Resilience is about having the capacities to live with complexity, uncertainty, and change, abrupt or incremental, and continue to develop with ever changing environments. This includes both adaptation and transformation.”

Among the organisations bringing together artists’ responses to environmental and climate change, Yky mentions: Art of Change in France, which was created in Paris in 2014 ahead of COP21 and “highlights the role of artists and creativity as accelerators of the ecological transition and acts on an international scale”; Artseverywhere in Canada, “a platform for artistic experimentation and exploration of the fault lines of modern society”; and Julie’s Bicycle in the UK, “mobilising the arts and culture to take action on the climate and ecological crisis.”

The work of Brazilian educator and sociologist Paulo Freire is celebrated by the Freire Institute, an organisation for transformative community-based learning, and many other organisations around the world (which you can find listed at the Freire Institute). “Freire developed an approach to education that links the identification of issues to positive action for change and development. While Freire’s original work was in adult literacy, his approach leads us to think about how we can ‘read’ the society around us. For Freire, the educational process is never neutral. People can be passive recipients of knowledge — whatever the content — or they can engage in a ‘problem-posing’ approach in which they become active participants. As part of this approach, it is essential that people link knowledge to action so that they actively work to change their societies at a local level and beyond.” Freire wrote The Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1968, translated into English in 1970.

Yky mentions Anthony Townsend, the CEO of the Star City group, who decided to leave the Hudson River area over climate resilience concerns when the river flooded Hoboken, New Jersey: Our Inevitable Retreat is the article Townsend wrote for NewCities. “The plan I came up with was simple — move inland and uphill. To my disbelief, the housing market hadn’t skipped a beat. Once I finally pulled the trigger, my condo sold in less than a week, at a profit.” 

Yky
Yky
A citizen artist exploring urban resilience whose photographic works use argentic paper's response to light to highlight the challenges raised by climate hazards in urban spaces.

Climate Emergency – a New Culture of Conversation

Photograph showing Lola Perrin at the piano for ClimateKeys at Sheffield Festival of Debate in 2019Independent curator and writer Rob La Frenais interviews fellow ClimateCultures member and ClimateKeys founder Lola Perrin about her ground-breaking global initiative to ‘help groups of people tell the truth to each other’ about the ecological and climate emergency.


2,300 words: estimated reading time 9 minutes


Before you founded ClimateKeys you had a long career as a contemporary classical composer and musician. Could you tell me something about the kind of music that you compose and play?

I compose almost exclusively for solo and multiple piano and my sound relates to Debussy and Ravel, but it touches on jazz harmony and also has some kind of processing within it that you get in minimalist composers like Steve Reich. When I was launching myself as a composer I was asked to categorise my sound so I described it as ‘Rave Music for Butterflies’ — that to me was a good description in that it’s imaginative music. I usually seek specific triggers for my works, paintings for example, or correspondence. For example, my sixth suite was composed from emails with a neuroscientist about the speed of thought in the brain — this to me was so interesting, how thought travels at around 200 miles an hour and jumps across spaces between the nerve cells as electrical charges.

So, slowly in the last decade, mentions of references to the coming climate emergency and global heating started to emerge in your titles and content of your work. Can you tell me something about how this took place?

My children were very young and I was becoming aware of something called climate change but I was really too scared of it to look into it much. As they got older I became braver and I started to read a little bit and understand that we were in a very, very serious problem. This was in 2005. I began to wake up to the problem. So gradually, from that point on, I found I was unable to just carry on writing music as if all this great threat wasn’t just all going on around us. Increasingly I was unable to detach my compositional life from the emergency, as we now call it.

Nowhere to talk about Climate Emergency

Climate emergency - underwater signing: Maldives Minister of Fisheries and Agriculture Dr Ibrahim Didi signs the declaration of an underwater cabinet meeting, 2009. Photograph by Mohamed Seeneen
Underwater signing: Maldives Minister of Fisheries and Agriculture Dr Ibrahim Didi signs the declaration of an underwater cabinet meeting, 2009. Photographer Mohamed Seeneen (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Can you give me some examples of some of the titles of the work that started being affected by the climate emergency?

One title is quite long, it goes like this. We are playing with fire, a reckless mode of behaviour we are likely to come to regret unless we get a grip on ourselves. This is a quote from Chris Rapley, a senior scientist in the climate world. I’ve used other Rapley quotes — We are the crew of a large spaceship for 9 billion. If we were on a smaller spacecraft it would be unthinkable to interfere with the systems that provide us with air, water, food and climate. Another title is Imagine better, create — which relates to that well-known saying in climate activism, ‘If we don’t imagine a better world, we won’t create it.’ The title Collective Compulsion was drawn from writing by Paul Allen — it’s about our over-consumption causing our problem. If you look at a map of where the emissions are coming from, they come from the areas of massive consumption, i.e. the rich economies of the world.

And then your feelings about the climate emergency started to actually affect the methodology of your concerts and out of this came this thing called ClimateKeys. Can you tell me about how that happened and how the shift between your titles and content then moved on to actually performing in a format that reflected your activism?

Actually my activism grew out of that shift, it’s not that shift came from activism. It was simply that there was such a silence everywhere. I was picking up what seemed to be just snippets about this terrible thing called climate change but there weren’t major warnings being announced or places to talk — we were all just walking around as if in a dream. I would be doing my daily life, I would be taking my kids to school, I would be going to the bank, going to the shopping centre, walking down the street, going to work, coming back, doing normal day-to-day things and there was nowhere to talk about this existential threat.

This troubled me so, so much, I couldn’t figure out where I could have the conversations I felt we all needed urgently to be having as part of our daily lives. So I thought, OK, I will put this conversation into my own concerts. I will create a piece of music and there will be a space within the music for a climate change expert to give a talk so we could all learn more, and then for the audience to have a conversation. At least I can put the conversation there. So what happened was I started doing these concerts, inviting amazing speakers to join me — economists, futurists, scientists — and then I started to tell other musicians what I was doing.

Several other musicians put their hands up and said they wanted to do the same thing, so I created a format for helping other musicians around the world who also wanted to engage their own audiences in dialogue about action: what we can actually do about our heating world. I realised this was becoming an initiative so I gave it a name — ClimateKeys — and made a website.

An intimate space for deep discussion

Showing Tessa Gordziekjo, ClimateKeys guest speaker on climate emergency, Heptonstall 2019. Photograph by Lola Perrin
Tessa Gordziekjo, ClimateKeys guest speaker, Heptonstall 2019
Photograph: Rob La Frenais © 2019

The climate emergency is a really serious topic but are ClimateKeys concerts enjoyable?

Yes, it’s serious and a very, very scary subject and it’s really still quite a taboo subject. The majority of the population may now be aware of it and concerned about it, but the majority is still not engaged. Day-to-day life as usual continues. I believe if you use the arts you can draw people into engaging in this emergency through appealing to their emotions. But if you just hold a public meeting or a political meeting no one’s going to come; it’s going to be boring and it’s also going to be quite alienating and quite scary.

But if you have a concert that’s been carefully thought through it eases people into this sort of sense of being together, listening deeply to music that’s been specially chosen by the musician because of how it connects with climate issues. That sense of intimate sharing that the musician has set up extends into the way the audience has its conversation. People talk on an intimate level, it feels non-threatening despite the threatening subject matter. So you make a particular atmosphere that makes facing our threats head-on a little easier and you have a deep discussion — all together. The concerts end with final music as well, symbolic, to show that discussion and action on the emergency need to be at the centre of whatever we do. So, to answer your question, the concerts are emotional, yes — some of that emotion is enjoyment!

Photograph showing Lola Perrin at the piano for ClimateKeys at Sheffield Festival of Debate in 2019
Lola Perrin: ClimateKeys at Sheffield Festival of Debate, 2019
Photograph: Rob La Frenais © 2019

So we’ve heard a lot about popular music getting involved in the climate emergency and people like Radiohead or other groups such as Fatboy Slim mixing the lyrics from Greta Thunberg’s speeches, but it’s a bit unusual to find classical musicians getting involved in this. Are you the only one?

I’m definitely not the only one but we are few and far between. We’re not joined up as one movement. I don’t know of any other global initiatives like the one that I’ve established which has triggered literally thousands of new conversations about action. I know of musicians who are definitely as worried as everybody else but I don’t know how many are actually drawing their audiences into these conversations about action and about the climate emergency.

Transformation emerging

Showing audience discussing climate emergency at a ClimateKeys concert in Heptonstall in 2019. Photograph by Lola Perrin
Audience discussing climate emergency at ClimateKeys in Heptonstall, 2019
Photograph: Lola Perrin © 2019

It’s now not just about people protesting is it? It’s people like Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, and Christine Lagarde, the CEO of the International Monetary Fund, who are all making these statements, because the economy is going to be profoundly affected by extreme global heating and climate change. So can you comment a little bit about how ClimateKeys can help those in industry who are concerned about this?

I just find it incredible that 11,000 scientists can make a statement like the one that was made in November 2019 saying that we are in a global emergency and we need widespread change to happen to help protect ourselves from the worst threats and then everybody carries on going to work the next day as if this statement hasn’t been made. There have to be devices in place so that we can tell the truth about what’s happening. 

What ClimateKeys can do is help groups of people tell the truth to each other, whether it’s a random concert audience or an entire business — help tell the truth about these very disturbing issues. Because yes, the economy, is definitely going to suffer; surely it already is with the massive fires, droughts, floods and wars related to heating. The form of economy we have now has brought us to this place; we have an extractive economy and this has led us to this place of danger. To me, evidently what we need to do, all of us, is to remove the divisions between activism and business and just see us as the same level playing field. And all of us, whatever we do, need to work out how to live within the planetary boundaries.

How can businesses change so that their operations are living within planetary boundaries? How can you persuade these businesses whose bottom line is essentially to make money for their investors that indeed some of the activities that those industries are participating in are actually causing global heating? For example the fossil fuel companies? How can you persuade them that they’re not going to be shooting themselves in the foot if they take on these issues?

We need massive change. Intrinsic within that is the ending of the fossil fuel economy, Urgently. Either we self-elect to enact these changes as a matter of life or death, or collapse will force this change upon us. And collapse means exactly that — collapse of all we know, including the economy. How is that going to happen without a culture of getting people together much, much more regularly — I would say daily — to face all of this head-on?

Because it’s very clear from the science that the changes that elected policymakers think they’re going to bring in are going to be way too late to avoid catastrophic warming. It’s now down to people to gather together, from small community groups right up to major businesses to have these in-house discussions right across the country. The whole world needs to be fully informed and engaged. In ClimateKeys concerts we’ve recently started splitting audiences into small groups after the guest speaker’s talk — and then pulling the strongest ideas from each group together for a group discussion later on. It’s proving to be an immensely powerful sequence of conversation, because agreements and actions are produced and decided upon. A transformation occurs; a couple hours earlier people were less engaged and by the end, they’ve become armed with information and increased agency. What we’re doing is helping to normalise a long-overdue culture of engagement with the emergency that, quite frankly, we just need to get on with dealing with.


Find out more

You can find more of Rob’s writing on cultural and climate change issues at the Makery website: She can see land! Cross the Atlantic Like Greta; COP24: how artists commit to the climate; In London, scientists, artists and activists surge to save the Humans ; and Traincamp, or why go by train to Green Culture festival in Montenegro

Lola Perrin is a ClimateCultures member, and in her first post for us, A Razor-sharp Fragility, she discussed a tension between isolation and creative responses to climate change: to create, we need to be alone (physically or mentally) and this can be an unpleasant process, and yet we carry on creating because suppressing that creativity is even more unpleasant.

You can follow the new programme of activities from ClimateKeys — which exists to “help normalise telling the truth about the planetary emergency” — and access its archive of synopses of talks from a great range of guest speakers at previous concerts. Poet and climate activist Tessa Gordziejko (pictured above) spoke at a 2019 ClimateKeys concert and has published the text on her own site: Why on Earth make art about climate change? You can also find out more about Lola’s work as composer, performer and climate activist at lolaperrin.com.

You can find the full statement signed by 11,000 scientists — World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency — published in the journal BioScience on 5th November 2019. It begins: “Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to ‘tell it like it is.’ On the basis of this obligation and the graphical indicators presented below, we declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.”

Culture Declares Emergency, Music Declares Emergency and Business Declares Emergency are among the new wave of initiatives bringing people and organisations together around declaration as a means to bring about transformation.

Rob La Frenais
Rob La Frenais
An independent contemporary art curator, working internationally and creatively with artists entirely on original commissions, directly engaged with the artist’s working process as far as possible.

Keyboard Conversations Across the World

Dramatist Julia Marques previews ClimateKeys, a visionary global initiative from fellow ClimateCultures Member Lola Perrin. Julia considers the space it offers for more relaxed, but still urgent, sharing of thought and dialogue on the predicament of our times.


1,790 words: estimated reading time 7 minutes  


ClimateKeys, as with climate change, has spread and become a world event. This can only be seen as a reflection of how connected we all are as humans on this beautiful planet. COP is coming, and so is ClimateKeys. In these keyboard conversations around the world people will be afforded the space to think about climate change, and the opportunity to talk about it with others. Thus is the combination of music and speech; using music as an introduction to the topic gives people the chance to think about this all-encompassing phenomenon as well as settling us down into a state of relaxed (rather than frantic) thought in order to have a more positive dialogue about climate change.

“I’m in ClimateKeys because the power of this format lies in the unique capability to attract both music lovers and environment enthusiasts, and then engage in a language that is less jargon ridden and more public.”

– Shruti Shiva (ClimateCultures Member), speaker in India

“Two years ago, my country was hit by catastrophic floods . . .”

– Biljana Jasic Radovanovic, pianist in Bosnia 

The London Gala performance of ClimateKeys, October 2017 Photo within piano "Children play in Central Java"
The London Gala performance of ClimateKeys, October 2017
Photo within piano “Children play in Central Java” © Kemal Jufri/Greenpeace; Artwork: Eleonore Pironneau © 2017 eleonore.pironneau@gmail.com

The London launch of ClimateKeys — next Wednesday evening, 25th October — is a gala of music and speech. Ten pianists will perform, interspersed with three sections of the spoken word. Hannah van den Brul, who has herself written academically about music and climate change, will discuss ClimateKeys’ collaborative efforts with experts to spark conversations about climate change, as well as the “glocal” aim of local keyboard conversations happening across the globe. ClimateKeys is also honoured to have Kye Gbangbola and Nicole Lawler, the parents of Zane Gbangbola, as its special guests for the launch, who will speak about their campaign for the truth about the death of their son as the result of landfill poisons coming into their  home during the 2014 floods in the UK (with suggested links to climate change). Guest Speaker Sir Jonathon Porritt will refer to the diversity of speeches, ranging from re-orienting communities and behaviour modification to inter-disciplinary solutions and climate change art – a real reflection of how climate change touches all aspects of society and human life. Porritt will also draw a connection between the London launch and a ClimateKeys concert taking place simultaneously in Bosnia where Professor of Climatology and COP delegate Goran Trbic will emphasise the importance of international common aims in order to build on the Paris Agreement. This not only highlights the significance of the event and the topic to that country, but also demonstrates the interconnectivity that climate change brings with it; our actions will affect others, including ourselves.

“I’m part of ClimateKeys because I know the arts and creativity are tools for positive global change.”

– Becca Farnum, speaker in the UK 

“I tried to find pieces to perform that will stimulate the imagination of the audience and get them more aware of the UN climate change conference, COP23. Music has the power to enter mind, creating windows into the soul and the spirit.”

– Alex Lenarduzzi, pianist in France

Poster for Bosnia ClimateKeys concert
Poster for Bosnia ClimateKeys concert
Artwork: Credit: Stefan Mijic © 2017

The fact that pianists have come forward to take part in ClimateKeys is, in itself, no small achievement. Concert pianist training can necessarily go hand in hand with a self-focussed approach which favours a concert being purely about a pianist’s mastery of the instrument. However, the power of climate change to bring people together and push them out of their comfort zones and normal routines is such that here we are with over 60 concert pianists to date ready and willing to give up the spotlight and share the stage with speakers and even audience members. This is to be applauded. But this also means that the road to ClimateKeys has not always been a smooth one. On average, only one in every fifty pianists contacted responds. As such, ClimateKeys is still missing a world-renowned concert pianist. An international piano star joining ClimateKeys would make the initiative more visible on the world stage (visibility itself being a barrier to awareness on climate change as it is arguably tricky for anyone to actually “see” the climate). If there are any climate change activist-musicians out there who know of such a pianist, then kindly connect them to Lola Perrin (lola@climatekeys.com).

“Part of the reason I am interested in this project is to be able to bring an informed discussion to the fore: it seems to me that many people form an opinion without exploring the topic and I welcome the opportunity to inform, myself first, on what I feel is an issue that affects every single person who shares this planet.”

– Eriko Crino, pianist in Canada

“I hope that together we can make the change, to leave our children a planet of hope and joy of life!”

– Marija Ligeti Balint, pianist composer in Serbia

In contrast to the pianists, speakers have been coming in thick and fast. It seems as though there are climate change experts across the disciplines who sense the potential of this forum for positive conversations about climate change and they embrace the invitation to give a talk without the use of projection or PowerPoint: a ClimateKeys principle, in order to avoid academic presentations. In the words of George Marshall, “The single most powerful thing an individual can do about climate change is to talk about it,” and this is what ClimateKeys proposes to instigate. Some of the best thinkers in the world are on board with the concept, and are keen not only to give talks in a cultural context, but also to facilitate genuine conversations (not Q&As) with the audience. This only serves to strengthen the resolve of all involved and heighten the excitement of this particular artistic response to COP23 and climate change.

“ClimateKeys brings together two of the interests closest to my heart: communication through music and care for the environment.”

– Sachit Ajmani, pianist in India

“Musicians have been given the gift of a platform and we can choose whether or not to use it.”

Mikael Petterson, pianist in the UK

Lola performing ClimateKeys in Oxford, with speakers Tim Jackson and Kate Raworth
Lola performing ClimateKeys in Oxford, with speakers Tim Jackson and Kate Raworth
Photo: Kellie C. Payne © 2017

When I spoke with Lola about her project she said “It’s always brilliant when pianists come forward, they all say the same thing, they’re really concerned about the environment and it’s great to know they can do something about it through their piano work. Then the long road starts. Finding a venue, looking for a speaker (I do this for them in the majority of cases), sorting out the publicity.

“What I’m really, really concerned about is the distillation of the ClimateKeys format which is carefully designed to feature the audience participation. I worry I will alienate pianists if I’m too dogmatic about the concert format, but I’ve now decided that the dogma is really important. They must know that it’s only a ClimateKeys concert if it follows the core principles. So I’ve recently created a document to physically post (yes – using the postal system!) to each pianist to draw their attention once again to my principles. I’ve also included a specially written overview of how we get to zero carbon by around 2040 – principally guided by the work of Zero Carbon Britain and Sir David King. This is because I’ve had to put a lot of my music activities on hold in order to find the time to get my head around climate change solutions, and I can’t possibly expect the pianists to find time to do this. So I hope my document will be useful to them.

“I’m collecting a range of memorabilia from each concert and this includes summaries from the pianists to describe how the concerts went, I hope all this will go towards a future post which will be full of the different experiences the performers had.”

“I’m in ClimateKeys because I love nature and animals and it is great to express my concerns about nature issues through the language of music. For me the occupation with nature is essential. It is a bridge between music and spirituality.”

– Anna Sutyagina – pianist in Germany

“The tides are much higher in Florida than they used to be, especially in Miami. Even conservatives are talking about climate change . . .”

– Bezerra Gastesi – piano duo in the USA

With over thirty concerts in nine countries throughout October and November 2017, and over one hundred concert musicians and guest speakers in twenty countries currently signed up, ClimateKeys is a truly “glocal” affair. The appeal and the need for alternative ways of considering climate change are apparent from this response. We are all creative beings, and we all create in different ways. This is why scientific data appeals to some and art appeals to others, why numbers attract some and music attracts others. ClimateKeys is part of the new artistic collaboration with science that opens an alternative way to action on climate change, and the launch is the first step on our journey to increasing our environmental awareness and positive response to climate change.


Find out more

The Gala performance of ClimateKeys in London on 25th October 2017 and Lola will perform ClimateKeys concerts in Reading on Nov 8th with Jennifer Leach/Festival of the Dark and Cardiff on November 10th with Dr Stuart Capstick and Dr Adam Corner. Julia Marques is ClimateKeys guest speaker in London on Nov 11th and the performance on London on Nov 14th will involve various collaborators.

You can find more information at the ClimateKeys website along with the worldwide calendar of performances.

You can read about the story of Zane Gbangbola at Truth About Zane.  

For a UK perspective on the 2014 floods mentioned in the post, you can see a Met Office piece and report. And you can find out about the work of Zero Carbon Britain at their website.

Julia Marques
Julia Marques
A climate change dramatist, activist and communicator specialising in social and cultural aspects of climate change who has worked in the nonprofit and media sector.

Questioning our conversations? Space for creative thinking... 

Julia quotes George Marshall: "The single most powerful thing an individual can do about climate change is to talk about it," and this is the response that ClimateKeys inspires (and ClimateCultures invites). What was the most recent positive conversation you had about climate change, and the most negative? What made the difference? And what can you create with one other person - a story, an image, a sound or song or a setting -  to make (both) your conversations more positive?" 

Share your thoughts - use the Contact Form, visit the ClimateCultures Facebook page or write a response on your own blog and send a link!

Action, Participation, Feeling: Where’s My Igloo Gone?

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? Photograph by Pamela Raith 
Where’s My Igloo Gone?
Photograph: Pamela Raith Photography © 2017
http://pamelaraith.com

Thinking (too) big

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.

Where's My Igloo Gone? Photograph by Pamela Raith
Where’s My Igloo Gone?
Photograph: Pamela Raith Photography © 2017
http://pamelaraith.com

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.

Where's My Igloo Gone? Photograph by Pontio, Wales
Where’s My Igloo Gone?
Photograph: Pontio, Wales © 2017
https://www.pontio.co.uk

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.
  • Motionhouse’s Broken (2013) was also reviewed by the Guardian.
  • 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.

Adam Ledger
Adam Ledger
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).

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?" 

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