DAY 13: Let’s Make a Song and Dance About It (Please!)
What happens when what started on the “fringe” takes centrestage?
It becomes a global celebration of everything art. For 78 years, the cobblestones of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe have witnessed the move of the margin to the mainstream. …And this year, it will also give volume to the 50 curated climate narratives that refuse to stay silent.
Storyteller and Arts Enthusiast Himali Kothari reports from Edinburgh.
Day 13: A key milestone in our future will be when levels of greenhouse gases stop rising and then start declining. Sounds impossible? While many of us may scoff at the possibility of the human race achieving this milestone, there are organisations that have created roadmaps with strategies designed to accomplish this. Project Drawdown is one such initiative and the inspiration for two of the CCTA plays featured today: Jordan Hall’s The Donation and Jessica Huang’s Lifeday.
“Project Drawdown’s work is heroism of endurance, of everyday work. I was thinking this when I stumbled on an Atlantic article about climate anxiety and suicide,” says Hall.
This translated into a narrative in which the two characters represent two contradictory mindsets. Jen is a practical person focused on the tasks at hand. Tommy believes that the best thing he can do for the environment is to die and thus create a negative effect on the carbon footprint.
“Life’s not so bad if you squint at it just right,” Jen tells him, as she convinces him that the best he can do is turn up and do his bit.
Huang recollects a quote by Paul Hawken in the book Project Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming —
“…we believe that global warming is something that is happening to us — that we are victims of a fate that was determined by actions that precede us. If we change the preposition and consider that global warming is happening for us — an atmospheric transformation that inspires us to change and reimagine everything we make and do — we begin to live in a different world. We see global warming not as an inevitability but as an invitation to build, innovate, and effect change, a pathway that awakens creativity, compassion, and genius.”
Lifeday is set in a time after “drawdown,” when there is aquafarming, use of 100% renewable energy, and many other eco-friendly measures. The story has an elder sitting with a group of children and recollecting the days when people were careless about protecting the Earth — and how one woman inspired the community to take the steps towards sustainability.
Wren Brian’s Now is having a second showing in the programme, and this time the verse is played out in the form of an online conversation between two people. As the conversation progresses, more people join in, reiterating the play’s message that “when enough of us are dreaming, we can dare to begin.”
According to Brian, writing plays on the climate crisis has allowed her to express the thoughts, feelings, and information swirling through her head, in the hope others can relate to them.
“Theatre is one of the final places where we can share complexity and nuance together, so I believe it is important for our society to use it to discuss a range of issues — including, of course, the climate crisis,” she adds.
A chat, a song, and much to mull over
Missed the Mark Productions, Center Heart Theater, and Full Circle Theatre have come together to host today’s programme. The curation is an interesting mix of a satirical panel discussion, a song performance, a book reading, and the reading performances.
The panel discussion features Diego Arguedas Ortiz, Paul Behrens, and Julia Ott.
Ortiz is the Associate Director at the Oxford Climate Journalism Network of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford. He has been covering climate change as his main beat since 2013 and has, over the years, lent his voice to several climate crisis initiatives. Behrens, a professor in environmental change, works extensively on sustainability challenges in climate change, food, and energy. Julia Ott has written and directed the show The Sound of Water, which is part of the Fringe. In her show, Ott uses music and movement to highlight how the climate crisis affects everyday lives.
The discussion is conducted in the form of a mock panel, with tongue-in-cheek responses to the moderator’s typically pretentious questions. This ensures that the audience is engaged rather than lectured, yet it leaves us with enough fodder to take away and ponder over.
The programme ends with a performance by award-winning writer and performer Florencia Iriondo of her latest creation Song Society. The song is based on the idea that we are constantly filing away old memories and feelings to make way for new ones. But if a stubborn one refuses to be pushed into the archives, how do we deal with it? Perhaps we need to go back to the memories from the past and weave them into our present to feel whole.
