Tag: Workshop

Artists’ Climate Lab

Artists' Climate LabRoyal 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
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
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
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.

Lucy Davies
Lucy Davies
A Creative Climate Leader, and Executive Producer at London's Royal Court, Chair of London Theatre Consortium and Chair of Trustees for Clod Ensemble
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Generating Counter-Factual Worlds

Multi-disciplinary artist Deborah Mason outlines her collaboration with researchers, engaging people in counter-factual imagination. What if one historic event had been otherwise, giving us an alternative present to ours? What would be the possibilities in our altered ‘Now’?

1,140 words: estimated reading time 5 minutes

When Ann Light, professor of design at the University of Sussex, asked me to make her a Counter-Factual World Generator – an analogue Counter-Factual World Generator – I was immediately enthused and excited. I’d been watching The Man in the High Castle on TV and was also aware of other fictional counter-factual works (such as The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, or The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon) and my head immediately started buzzing with ideas. The generator would be used in a workshop that formed part of the University of Sussex and Wired Sussex ‘Philip K Dick season’. Ann had a clear idea of what she wanted to achieve from the workshop. It was intended to address the theme of Ways of Being in a Digital Age, taking as inspiration a quote from Dick’s novel, The Man in the High Castle:

“On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives.”  – Philip K Dick

How might innovation work differently if we thought about narratives of development that were made unfamiliar through counter-factuality? Ann’s introduction ran like this:

“Philip K Dick once said that, in good science fiction, the idea depicted sets ‘off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind’ unlocking the reader to create worlds alongside the author. Dick’s work (which includes the stories behind the Bladerunner and Total Recall films) often portrayed fantastical technologies, setting them in a 20th century future or counterfactual present, but the reason his ideas still haunt us is that he dwelt on the societal consequences of the technical developments he envisaged … We will use the Counter-Factual Worlds Generator to provide the stimulus for new perspectives and avenues of enquiry, asking what publics are, were and could be through a series of exercises that take us back to old worlds and forward to ones that we hope for or dread.” – Professor Ann Light

A fairground sideshow

Counter-Factual World Generator
Photograph: Deborah Mason © 2017
https://debdavemason.com

During our initial conversations, I sketched out some ideas – inspired by the character of Childan, who sells Americana artefacts to the Japanese. I created the Counter-Factual World Generator to look like a fairground sideshow (with slight Americana styling). At the turn of a bird-shaped lever, it would roll out papier mache ‘worlds’. Inside each world were art-silk squares, each with a different counter-factual world represented. They also contained a scroll of paper with a little more detail on the counter-factual context and some ‘speculations’ to help discussions along.

The counter-factual contexts we chose were:

  • Katherine of Aragon and Henry VIII’s children all survive to adulthood – no need for a divorce, no break from Rome;
  • the Brazillian rubber monopoly holds – rubber is a luxury;
  • the Russian Revolution fails — no communist bloc in Eastern Europe;
  • the San Andreas fault causes an earthquake that wipes out silicon valley (and Hollywood) at a critical moment;
  • and finally the classic – the Nazis win World War II.
CFWG Katherine of Aragon Silk
Photograph: Deborah Mason © 2017
https://debdavemason.com

Only the ‘rubber world’ was designed specifically to trigger thoughts about the environment and how we might think differently about resources. But everyone was given a little set of knobs labelled ‘Cultural’, ‘Economic’, ‘Social’ and ‘Environmental’ as ways of thinking about the impact of any innovations.

As I worked on each context, creating the silk squares and the scrolls, I had my own ideas how these might affect the world we live in now, and what we might or might not design for it. The results from the workshop were far more interesting!

Where possibilities become more possible

Through a process of Worlding, Chronicling, Creating and Analyzing, participants used the idea of a world different to our own in one major historical detail to explore values and choices. When each group presented their worlds and their ideas at the end of the workshop, it was interesting to see that the idea of being present in that world – rather than speculating on a future one — created first-person narratives or presentations that were in the ‘now’ rather than in imagined futures. The idea of embedding oneself in a speculative present made ideas more real, more visceral, both less dystopian and less utopian. The possibilities became more possible. It also freed the proposed innovations from the constraints of current innovations and current trends, so it was not just a rehash or iteration of existing design ideas, trends or apps. This freedom also allowed for exploration of inventions, trends, and ideas that we might want to guard ourselves against rather than exploit, but in a way that still gave space for future exploration of possible positive applications (for example DNA modification; or the use of digital to create ‘wonder’).

Some of the ideas coming out of the exercise might have environmental or climate change implications and it occurred to me that this exercise of imagining a different present (and how we might operate in that different present) was as valid as, and possibly more powerful than, asking people to imagine alternative futures. The future is a place we never reach and cannot inhabit. The present is where we always are. A different future is optimistic and helps to promote long-term planning, but a different present highlights the actions we can take now, ourselves, to make the changes we imagine and the world we would like to be.

CFWG Dials
Photograph: Deborah Mason © 2017
https://debdavemason.com

The Counter-Factual World Generator now lives at the University of Sussex, but other similar machines could be made, or other versions of this exercise trialled as a way of thinking about climate change and different presents leading to different futures. Ann and I are always interested in exploring the possible.

Find out more

The University of Sussex Creative Technology Research Group is concerned with the interfaces between humans and digital technology and how these are changing, and investigates interaction in the broadest sense, in relation to digital technologies, connected physical artefacts, and people’s experience and practices with mobile, immersive, ubiquitous and pervasive computing. You can see a selection of Professor Ann Light’s publications at her University of Sussex page.

There is an interesting New Statesman review by John Gray of Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (although if you are reading the novel or watching the TV series, needless to say: ‘Spoiler alerts”).

Deborah Mason
Deborah Mason
A multi-disciplinary artist and cultural activist interested in equality, diversity, inclusion, environment, climate-change and society.
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Counter-factual questions: Space for creative thinking?

"What historical event would you change, and what specific ways do you imagine this altering the present world that we know? Would the alternative 'Now' be unambiguously better, or might it bring new complications?" Share your thoughts and speculations in the Comments below or use the Contact Form.