1-7 June, 2015.

ART.
CLIMATE.
ACTION.

2 Degrees Festival asks:

What can we do together to create a sustainable future?

International artists present cutting-edge responses to climate change, urging you to act now to build a more positive future.

A programme of performance, debate and public installations will take place in tree-tops, office blocks and theatres in and around Toynbee Studios, at the crossroads of the East End and The City.

2 Degrees Festival is Artsadmin’s biennial celebration of art, environment and activism. It aims to inspire, connect, and empower people to create solutions for a sustainable future.

Join in – bring your friends.

For more information visit the 2 Degrees Tumblr site, follow #2DegreesFestivalon Twitter and/or sign-up to our mailing list to receive updates.

2 Degrees Festival is delivered by Artsadmin and supported by Arts Council England, the Ashden Trust, the European Commission Culture Programme as part of Imagine 2020.

Water’s Edge

Photograph by Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas Images Chinstrap penguins, Zavodovski and Visokoi Islands, South Sandwich Islands, November and December, 2009

Water’s Edge is a Pam Am commissioned large-scale photographic exhibition exploring the often tenuous balance where human civilization, land, and water meet. This exhibition will bring to light recent concerns regarding the sustainability of our global fresh water supply and the impact that human development is having on this precious life-sustaining resource.

Curated by Andrew Davies, Water’s Edge will feature works by six exemplary Pan American photographers: Edward Burtynsky, James Balog, Sebastiao Salgado, Cristina Mittermeier, Jorge Uzon and Gustavo Jononovich.

The Exhibition will take place at Union Station and Pearson International Airport with an opening launch on July 9th to coincide with the Pan Am Games. There will also be a symposium on fresh water issues at Evergreen Brick Works featuring the Artists and their work on July 10th. More information on the opening of Water’s Edge and tickets for the symposium will be announced at a later date.

No.9 Eco-Art-Fest @ Todmorden Mills

No.9 is excited to announce the return of the Eco-Art-Fest at Todmorden Mills this summer! The festival will run from June 20 to September 13 on Fridays (12PM – 10PM), Saturdays (12PM – 10PM) and Sundays (12PM – 5PM). No.9 will feature four new artists, two returning artists, art tours, educational workshops, and delicious food and beer! There will be live music every Saturday from 7PM – 9PM. Register for Handscapes, Poetics of Architecture, and music workshops by contacting Emily Foster (e.foster@no9.ca). Drop-in for Clay Making workshops (Noon – 7pm), and Public Art Tours (Noon, 2, 4, and 6pm) daily. More information will be available soon!

Imagining My Sustainable City Hamilton

No.9, in partnership with the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board and Evergreen CityWorks, officially launched IMSC Hamilton in January, with a total of 14 schools across Hamilton scheduled for 2015. The call to action aligns with No.9’s and Evergreen’s mission to educate the next generation about the development of sustainable communities.

No.9 continues to engage members of the OAA as volunteers during IMSC, and practicing professionals in the Hamilton area are encouraged to contact No.9 to learn more about volunteer opportunities.

Following the completion of the first nine schools in June, there will be a culminating exhibit to showcase the students’ work at the Lime Ridge Mall. The exhibit will highlight the ideas and innovations to invited dignitaries, press, and school board representatives, as well as the public. Stay tuned for more information!<

Zone 10 Pan Am Path Art Relay

In preparation for the 2015 Pan Am/Parapan Am Games, No.9, in partnership with Friends of the Pan Am Path, Centennial College, and in Consultation with Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts, has commissioned Toronto artist Sean Martindale to develop and realize a wall art installation across the north facing walls of the Centennial College Ashtonbee campus. Sean will mentor four Centennial College students to develop an installation that highlights the potential of the hydro corridor’s sprawling grasslands as a local attraction.

In March, No.9 and Sean engaged 25 students from the Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts in a half-day design workshop, and their visions for the wall art installation will be considered, and potentially implemented, in the final design. The official mural unveiling is scheduled for Friday, July 17 from 3PM – 5PM.

Growing out of the performance and ecology seminar at ASTR 2005/Toronto, and continuing as a research group atASTR’s 2010/Seattle, 2012/Nashville, and 2014/Baltimore conferences, this research group has been at the fore of the emergent field of performance and ecology. In 2015, in response to ASTR’s theme “Debating the Stakes in Theatre and Performance Scholarship,” we turn our attention to the ecological stakes in performance, with particular focus on recent developments in postcolonial eco-theatre, environmental justice, eco-materialisms, and the anthropocene/climate change. Drawing together research and performance from the Global South and the Global North, and building on the anthologies (such as Readings in Performance and Ecology, edited by Theresa May and Wendy Arons, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), publications, and research-engaged performance spawned by this working group over the past decade, this session will forward the conversation by calling for inquiries into how theatre and artistic performances, in an age of intense climate change, engage/critique/reveal ecological discourses embedded in postcolonialism, eco-materialisms, and activism. 

Pursuing what May calls “ecodramaturgy” (2011), this year’s session will focus on how theatre and artistic performance engages four emerging threads (in anticipation of a second volume of essays on performance and ecology): 1) urgency and eco-theater and performance in the age of the anthropocene; 2) eco-materialisms, including the agency of/in material formation; 3) postcolonial eco-theater; and 4) environmental justice and activism. These threads have an uneasy relationship with one another: scholarship on the anthropocene has often fallen prey to an apocalypticism that erases postcolonial and class-based concerns, while much eco-activism has been accused of being so local in scope that it disregards trans-global environmental issues and effects. However, by putting these four recent trends in environmental scholarship in dialogue with one another, we propose to debate their interrelatedness and efficacy for and within theatre and performance. 

Specifically, papers might pursue the following questions: 

• How does performance practice reveal, engage, and/or negotiate the urgent call to recognize human ecological influence in the age of the anthropocene? 
• How do interpretations of climate change and other international ecological issues in performance contribute to a global understanding of human influence? Do these performance practices make geographical boundaries more or less permeable and/or political? 
• How do ideas of eco-materiality inform ecological readings of performance and/or ecological meaning-making in performance? How might eco-materialist engagements in performance productively bring awareness of life, nature, and matter? How do these engagements deliberate related future possibilities in ways that also push ecology and performance scholarship in fresh directions? 
• How might postcolonial and indigenous ecologies critique neoliberal approaches (such as resourcism and extractivism) to current ecological conditions? 
• How does artistic performance intersect the concerns of social, political and ecological oppressions and/or exclusions in ways that advocate for environmental justice? In what ways does performance practice provoke ecological debate and/or facilitate community engagement in eco-activism? 

Other questions, approaches and topics that clearly address any of the four identified threads of inquiry. 

In advance of the conference, session participants will exchange papers and engage in peer review of one another’s work in order to raise key questions around the threads of:

1. the anthropocene/climate change in/through performance;
2. eco-materialisms;
3. postcolonial eco-theater; and
4. environmental justice and activism in performance.

We will be holding online discussions around these themes and relevant, related practice, through theASTR website Group function. At the conference, we will be meeting for three hours. Roughly, the first hour and a half will be dedicated to small group discussion around these threads by sub-sets of participants; the second hour and a half will include a round-table discussion in which the sub-groups share the key connections and conundrums emerging from their joint discussion of research and collectively outline a structure and timeline for the next volume of critical essays in this field. 

Please send an abstract of approximately 300 words along with a brief biographical note as a Word attachment to all three Working Session conveners below by May 31st: 

Karen O’Brien, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (obrien@unc.edu) 

Lisa Woynarski, Royal Central School of Speech & Drama (lisa.woynarski@cssd.ac.uk) 

Courtney Ryan, University of California, Los Angeles (crdram12@gmail.com)