Yearly Archives: 2019

Life in the City of Dirty Water at HotDocs

Life in the City of Dirty Water, a transmedia storytelling project, is an expression of decolonization and healing. Think of it as a survival guide to the urban Indigenous person.

The global premiere of the Life in the City of Dirty Water documentary will be at Hot Docs on May 1st, 2019!  

Rooted in Indigenous storytelling tradition, Life in the City of Dirty Water is a series of intimate vignettes that weave together the remarkable life of Indigenous climate change activist, Clayton Thomas-Muller. The film plunges audiences into an immersive storytelling journey, discovering the people and places and traumas and triumphs that shaped Clayton’s identity and cosmology. These are impossible stories weaving together different roles: a Sundancer, a father, a husband, an abused child, a hustler, a leader. Stories that juxtapose Clayton’s rise as a prominent Indigenous campaigner (at the Indigenous Environmental Network, Idle No More, and 350.org) with his raw and troubled journey of addiction, incarceration, healing, and forgiveness.

 SHORTS | 20 MINUTES | 2019 | CANADA | ENGLISH | WORLD PREMIERE

Wed, May 1 8:30 PM 
TIFF Bell Lightbox 4 
Screening With The Sound of Masks

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Fri, May 3 3:30 PM 
Scotiabank Theatre 13 
Screening With The Sound of Masks

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Sun, May 5 2:30 PM 
TIFF Bell Lightbox 4 
Screening With The Sound of Masks

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Follow Clayton

https://www.facebook.com/ClaytonThomasMuller
https://www.instagram.com/clayton_thomas_muller/

The ninth annual Big Green Theater

April 25 – 28

Thursday at 7pm (PS75): Free!
Friday at 6:30pm (PS239): $50 Benefit Event + Performance
Saturday at 1pm (PS75) + 4pm (PS239): Free!
Sunday at 1pm (PS239) + 4pm (PS75): Free!

Created in collaboration with The Bushwick Starr
Directed by Jeremy Pickard

Plays written by Bushwick/Ridgewood elementary students at PS75 + PS239
This year’s plays are inspired by two big problems facing local eco-systems: Habitat Loss and Climate Change. Student playwrights have created a menagerie of characters who live in a community surrounding an urban salt marsh (much like this one in Brooklyn’s Marine Park). Throughout the plays, this community of humans and non-humans face pollution, deforestation, giant storms, poaching, and heat waves that threaten the survival of the marsh eco-system, ultimately finding solace and solutions in each other.

Playwrights:
PS75: Jason Adams, Jhoan De Jesus, Brandon Delk, Ricardo Espinal, Nancy Galindo, Leah Gethers, Jahmair Herdigein, Leanne Samulu Hunt, Aliyanna Peña

PS239: Elias Estrella, Aiden Negron, Yerlenie Nunez, Destiny Ortiz, Leah Ortiz, Abi Pathak, Adrian Ramirez, Jaelyn Raspardo, Arielys Rodriguez, Emily Sanchez, Erin Torres

FULL PRODUCTION CREDITS HERE

Big Green Theater is made possible thanks to the support of the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, City Council Members Antonio Reynoso, Rafael L. Espinal, and Stephen Levin, the Revada Foundation of the Logan Family, Con Edison, and the Lotos Foundation

Art, Environment, and Justice in a Changing World

Wednesday, May 1 – 6:30-8:30 PM

Asian American Arts Alliance
20 Jay Street, Suite 740
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Climate change, environmental justice, sustainability—these terms have become increasingly crucial to our current social and political discourse. How do artists respond to these issues in their creative work? How does their artistic practice advance their beliefs in environmental justice? How can the work itself gain wider traction and raise awareness in our culture and society?

Join the Asian American Arts Alliance for a closer look at how creative practice intersects with environmental justice and activism. Five artists working in multiple disciplines will present recent projects and walk us through their origin stories and underlying rationales, approaches to artmaking and activism, and desired impact. The presentations will be followed by a moderated discussion with the artists and Q&A with the audience.

Panelists include Lanxing Fu (Superhero Clubhouse), Juliann Ma (S E A S), Jess X. Snow (AFTEREARTH), Tattfoo Tan (Heal the Man in order to Heal the Land), and Yasuyo Tanaka (If the Wind Blows), moderated by Seema Pandhya (sustainability consultant and multidisciplinary artist).

This program is free and open to the public.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; and Con Edison.

News: Citizen Bravo – Build a thing of Beauty

Chemikal Underground Records announce the exciting news around the launch of Citizen Bravo, a new music venture by Matt Brennan, who led the Fields of Green research which Creative Carbon Scotland collaborated on. As part of our Green Tease programme we’re taking part in the launch event for the new album and ‘interactive musical sculpture’.

It gives Chemikal Underground Records great pleasure to introduce the unabashed geek pop of Citizen Bravo, AKA songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and music researcher Matt Brennan. His remarkable debut album Build A Thing Of Beauty will be released on 5 April 2019 exclusively on digital services, save for one, extraordinary and thoroughly unique physical manifestation – an interactive musical sculpture known as SCI★FI★HI★FI, which will be premiered at the launch event Green Tease: Citizen Bravo presents “The Terrifying Miracle of Recorded Sound” at the University of Glasgow Concert Hall on 11 April 2019. Completing this ambitious hybrid music and research experiment is a short documentary film The Cost Of Music, which will be screened as part of the sculpture launch event in Glasgow, ahead of further screenings at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Université du Québec in Montreal, the Australian National University in Canberra, and further tour dates to be announced. The video for the album’s lead single “Limbs And Bones,” was released on 15 March 2019.

Citizen Bravo is Matt Brennan, a dual citizen of Canada and Scotland. Born in Nova Scotia and raised in New Brunswick, he immigrated to Scotland at the age of twenty-two to study and make music. In the mid-2000s, Brennan was a founding member of indie pop group Zoey Van Goey (Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian produced the band’s debut single, and the group released two well received albums on Chemikal Underground Records before disbanding in 2012). Citizen Bravo marks Brennan’s first outing as a solo artist. Drawing on musical influences ranging from Jonathan Richman to Robert Wyatt, Brennan recorded the album with the help of friends including Andy Monaghan (Frightened Rabbit), Malcolm Benzie (Withered Hand), Raymond MacDonald (Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra), and Pete Harvey (Modern Studies). Brennan also found inspiration in scavenging and manipulating orphaned samples from antique recording formats and integrating them into his songs.

The Cost of Music

The short film The Cost Of Music (directed by Graeme O’Hara) documents Matt’s journey making the album: disillusioned by prevailing attitudes about the disposability of new music and the decline of physical formats, Matt set out to record his own songs and release them in an unusual way: not so much a ‘concept album’ as a musical sculpture that explores the concept of albums as historical artefacts. In doing so, he discovers how the cost of listening to records has changed over the past century: while the economic cost of listening to one’s choice of recorded music has never been lower, the environmental cost has never been higher.

By day, Brennan works as a music academic at the University of Glasgow. His research draws from his practice as a musician and vice versa. In the case of Build A Thing Of Beauty, for example, the album’s release coincides with the publication of videos presenting collaborative research on the economic and environmental costs of recorded music, including new research findings on how the price consumers have been willing to pay for recorded music has changed across formats and over history. Similarly, the sole physical copy of the album is a one-off interactive musical sculpture called the SCI★FI★HI★FI, which will tour as part of a series of public lectures in 2019.

SCI★FI★HI★FI

Built in collaboration an electronics engineer (Peter Reid) and metal worker (Mark Reynolds), the SCI★FI★HI★FI is what its name suggests: a science-fiction inspired hi-fi system that can play the music of Citizen Bravo on seven of the most historically significant recording formats (Edison wax cylinder, 78 rpm disc, vinyl LP, cassette tape, compact disc, mp3 on hard drive, and streaming remotely from the cloud). It explores how playback technology changed the parameters of musical work at different moments in history: from two minutes of lo-fidelity mono sound on wax cylinder, to a streamed AI-composed remix that is unstoreable and infinite in length. To listen to the album Build A Thing Of Beauty via the SCI★FI★HI★FI is to make sense of recorded music not as a fixed, frozen object but as an historical event unfolding over time. How was recorded music valued before the advent of albums, and how might it be valued after albums are gone?


TOUR DATES:

  • Thursday 11 April, 7pm: Launch event – Green Tease: Citizen Bravo presents “The Terrifying Miracle of Recorded Sound” at University of Glasgow Concert Hall, Glasgow
  • Sunday 14 April, noon-5pm: SCI★FI★HI★FI demo as part of Record Store Day weekend at Monorail Records, Glasgow
  • Saturday 18 May: The Cost Of Music film screening at Berklee College of Music, Boston
  • Saturday 25 May: The Cost Of Music film screening at Université du Québec, Montreal
  • Friday 28 June: The Cost Of Music film screening at Australian National University, Canberra

More dates TBC at www.citizenbravo.com

The post News: Citizen Bravo – Build a thing of Beauty appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

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Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

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On Earth Day, Take (Artistic) Action

Earth Day is one of the most important days of the year because it reminds us of a most fundamental truth: we belong to the Earth. Like it or not, we are of the Earth. Despite our dizzying technological progress and illusion of separateness, our well-being is still intricately connected to the well-being of all the creatures with whom we share this planet.

There are many ways to celebrate this day. We can (and should!) go outside, soak in the sun, take a walk in the forest or a long bike ride along the river. We can donate to worthwhile environmental organizations or participate in local festivities. Or, if we are short on time, we can at the very least step outside for a minute and take a deep breath.

But a day of appreciation is not enough. Given the urgent social and environmental challenges we are facing, ours is a time for sustained action – as exemplified by the courageous students and activists who have recently taken to the streets. So as an artist and co-organizer of Climate Change Theatre Action, I want to invite you, on Earth Day (or on any day between now and the end of the year), to sign up for a season of theatrical presentations and action taking place this fall between September 15 and December 21, 2019.

Climate Change Theatre Action is is a worldwide series of readings and performances of short climate change plays presented biennially to coincide with the United Nations COP meetings. Through theatre, we bring communities together and encourage them to take local and global action on climate. We providing tools (a series of plays) free of charge, some guidance on how to produce events, marketing support, a model that encourages leadership and self-determination, and empower everyone to harness their creative potential and put it in service of the greater good.

How It Works

Earlier this year, 50 professional playwrights, representing all continents as well as several cultures and Indigenous nations, were commissioned to write five-minute plays about various aspects of climate change under the theme “Lighting the Way.” (In the spirit of celebrating the amazing work that is being done, we are giving center stage to the unsung climate warriors and climate heroes who are lighting the way towards a just and sustainable future.)

This collection of plays is now available to producing collaborators (that’s you!) who might be interested in presenting an event in the fall using one or several plays from the collection. Events can be in-house readings, public performances, radio shows, podcasts, film adaptions – the possibilities are endless! You can design your event to reflect your own aesthetic and community, and include additional material by local artists.

The CCTA New York Launch, 2017

In addition, to emphasize the “Action” part of Climate Change Theatre Action, we urge collaborators to think about an action – educational, social, or political/civic – that can be incorporated into their event. It may involve the scientific community, other departments within a university, local environmental organizations, etc. Examples of actions from previous years include: presentations by scientists; donations to hurricane relief efforts and food banks; conversations with social justice and environmental organizations; writing letters to legislators, and; sharing tools for sustainability at the local level.

Our Track Record

We piloted this project in 2015. Two years later, in 2017, close to 140 collaborators in 23 countries hosted events, reaching an audience of 12,000. In the United States alone, 90 events took place in 60 cities. Plays were read and performed, live and on radio, and presented in a variety of settings including: theatres, high schools, middle schools, universities, yoga studios, community centers, libraries, churches, museums, cafes, bars, people’s living rooms, and outdoors. At the end of the season, the plays were published together in Where Is The Hope? An Anthology of Short Climate Change Plays available from the York University Bookstore.

Now, two years later, we want to continue to bring our communities together to discuss what kind of future we want to create, and put pressure on elected officials and CEOs to do what is right. We want to build on what other dedicated climate warriors are doing to ensure we avoid the worst. And most importantly, we want to help everyone come to terms with the inevitable losses we are facing, and learn to be resilient.

Join Us

Climate Change Theatre Action is participatory – that means we can’t do it without you. We hope you’ll join us this fall by organizing an event in your community and adding your voice to the countless other voices who are demanding an end to the status quo. Actors, producers, directors, avid arts supporters, and concerned community members from all countries – everyone can participate! Check out our Call for Collaborators for more details and email us at ccta@thearcticcycle.org to receive the guidelines and access to the plays.

Together, we can do this. Happy Earth Day.

(Top image: The Anthropologists at the CCTA New York Launch in 2017. All photos by Yadin Goldman.)

Previous articles about Climate Change Theatre Action:

What I Learned About Gender Parity and Racial Diversity from Running a Global Participatory Initiative by Chantal Bilodeau
Changing the Climate Narrative Fifty Plays at a Time by Chantal Bilodeau
A Theatrical Revolution of Hope by Alicia Hyland
Graz, Austria: City of Culture… City of Climate Change Communication by Nassim Balestrini
Does Laughter Have a Place Here? by Aysan Celik

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Chantal Bilodeau is a playwright whose work focuses on the intersection of science, policy, art, and climate change. She is the Artistic Director of The Arctic Cycle – which uses theatre to foster dialogue about our global climate crisis, create an empowering vision of the future, and inspire people to take action – and the founder of Artists & Climate Change. She is a co-organizer of Climate Change Theatre Action, a worldwide series of readings and performances of short climate change plays presented in support of the United Nations COP meetings.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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The 2019 Artists & Climate Change Incubator – Alaska

Anchorage, Alaska
Monday – Friday, May 27 – 31, 2019
10am – 5:30pm
Fee: $385
Leader: Chantal Bilodeau

Calling all artists, activists, scientists, and educators who want to engage or further their engagement with climate change through artistic practices! Join The Arctic Cycle for the 3rd Artists & Climate Change Incubator, May 27 – 31, 2019 at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.

The Incubator is open to artists, activists, scientists, and educators who want to engage or further their engagement with climate change through artistic practices. All disciplines are welcome and individuals from traditionally underrepresented populations and communities are encouraged to attend. The Incubator is an inclusive environment that supports diverse perspectives.

During this 5-day intensive, participants interact with accomplished guest speakers from fields such as environmental humanities, climate science, climate change activism, and visual and performing arts. Work sessions allow everyone to dig deep into the challenges and concerns of working at the intersection of arts and climate change such as embracing activism without sacrificing personal vision and artistic integrity, letting go of the idea of “product,” and bringing the arts to non-traditional audiences. Group exercises and discussions cover a range of topics including:

  • How to think about climate change as a systemic issue
  • How to effectively engage communities
  • How to take the arts out of traditional venues to reach underserved populations
  • How to develop collaborative projects with non-arts partners to achieve specific goals
  • How to reframe climate change narratives to energize audiences

Limited to 20 participants.

All sessions will take place at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, 3211 Providence Dr, Anchorage, AK 99508. Availability is on a first come, first serve basis. Participants are responsible for their own travel and accommodation. For more information, visit the website or contact The Arctic Cycle at: info [at] thearcticcycle [dot] org.

The Incubator will also be offered in New York City this summer. For more info, click here.

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Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

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Guest Blog: Staging Change – A green theatre network

Staging Change is a new initiative for performers and makers interested in greener theatre. Alice Boyd, Founder and Co-Director talks about how they’re forming a network of performers and makers who believe in a greener future for theatre.

As storytellers, performers and makers have a unique capacity to explore key issues with audiences both on and off the stage. In a warming world, this means taking leadership in communicating the importance of environmental action, whether that be through the content of our projects or the sharing of our practice.

Last year at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, my theatre company, Poltergeist Theatre, challenged fellow theatre makers to reduce their plastic, paper and material waste, as part of our #SustainableFringe campaign. We were thrilled that over 100 individuals and companies committed to sustainable actions over the course of the festival.

Staging Change

Since then, alongside a fantastic team, including my co-Director, ThisEgg’s Josie Dale-Jones, I’ve developed a new initiative called Staging Change. Staging Change is forming a network of performers and makers who work together to discuss how the industry can overcome the challenges it faces in becoming more environmentally sustainable. With over 50 individuals and groups in the network as of March 2019, and supporters including The Pleasance Theatre Trust, High Tide Theatre, The Bunker Theatre and the very inspirational Creative Carbon Scotland, we aim to see this grow and have a wider impact.

Alongside the network, we are developing a series of campaigns, including a new and improved #SustainableFringe at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Follow us on social media or join the network to stay up to date with the events, tips and opportunities we are offering to this year’s Fringe-goers.

Beyond August, we are exploring how we can set up campaigns across the nation and opportunities for performers to develop and present green work.

Join in

Whether you’re a green theatre machine or new to the sustainability game, everyone is welcome to join the discussion! Together we can create a theatre industry that has a small footprint, but a big impact.

Join the network at www.stagingchange.com
Follow us on social media @StagingChange
Or get in contact at info@stagingchange.com

The post Guest Blog: Staging Change – A green theatre network appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

———-

Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

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