This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

Fiona MacLennan writes: I recently attended a seminar, arranged by Green Business Fife and NJS Lighting Solutions, on the use of LED lighting – Making the Right Choice. We had excellent contributions from a range of speakers, which included designers, manufacturers and suppliers as well as a case study of a recent lighting replacement project at Diageo presented by the project manager at the plant.

Resource Efficient Scotland also provided information on their SME loans scheme which provides interest free loans to allow SMEs to make efficiency improvements which include more efficient lighting.

Lighting is a major user of energy and producer of emissions for many in the arts and culture whether for theatres, galleries or museums – even for touring companies. We use lighting on stage, in the auditorium, cafes, in display spaces and it has to be fit for purpose and we can’t do without it. LED lighting is often seen as the answer to all our lighting problems.

• It uses a fraction of the energy of traditional technologies for the same light output such as halogen lighting.
• With lower energy use we should see lower costs and emissions.
• It comes in an array of colours so doesn’t need colour filtering.
• It can be easily controlled and can be switched on and off instantly unlike other low energy technologies like compact fluorescent bulbs.
• It is now available in a huge range of shapes and sizes both to replace traditional bulbs or for whole new types of fittings and effects.
• The expected lifetime of most bulbs is more than 10 years.
• New legislation means that most high energy use bulbs such as Mercury and Sodium will be phased out within the next 2-5 years so replacement bulbs will be unobtainable

With all those advantages it seems like we should all be changing to LED lighting or should we? The answer is ‘probably’ but as with all new technologies it’s worth taking some time to understand what you want it to do and analysing the costs and benefits. We learned yesterday about the importance of choosing the right colour to suit the location. The way that the human eye works means that the colour of lighting can have major effects on our mood, how efficiently we work and how safe we feel.

LED lights come in such a dazzling array of colours, shapes and sizes that it can make choosing the correct type difficult. Added to that is the range of manufacturing quality. The cheaper fittings often disappoint because of poor illumination and early failure. So how do we avoid costly mistakes?

• For large schemes think about appointing a designer who can guide you through the technology choices. Moving to LED lights can save 40 -50% in energy costs but using the best controls can save a further 20-30%. Controls are now available to maintain a constant illumination level in spaces with daylight avoiding wasteful use of artificial light when the sun is shining. Software controlled lights can be programmed to come on as you approach corridors and stairwells. The list is endless.
• For small schemes it’s worth spending a small amount on trialling bulbs and fittings to find out what you like.
• Think about replacing old fittings as well as bulbs if they are in inaccessible spaces to avoid having to arrange access at heights when the fittings fail (as they often do after 10-15 years).
• Remember LED lighting is not maintenance free. Keeping the light fittings dust free can extend the lifetime of the lamps by years. So factor regular cleaning into your costs.
• Consider paying a bit more for better quality. Make sure that any equipment you buy is certified and from a knowledgeable supplier. LED lights are made up of several components all of which can fail if they are of poor quality. Ask your supplier to guarantee the whole light fitting before agreeing the purchase.

The good news is that when done properly, LED lighting can save you up to 70% of your lighting costs and produce great results, providing a much improved experience in spaces as diverse as car parks to cafes. Tessa Ward of Diageo explained the benefits of their new warehouse lighting which had previously been supplied by traditional SON (Sodium) fittings. Users are no longer bathed in a permanent orange glow and can now distinguish between colours of blue, green and white labels (everything looked orange before!), see into previously dark corners and are happier with their new brighter surroundings. Added to that, they hope to reduce costs, saving tens of thousands of pounds on electricity bills and reducing their maintenance efforts significantly too.

For more information on the event and the contributors contact Fiona MacLennan.

Want to learn more about LED lighting and discuss the risks and opportunities with Fiona? We will be at the Federation Scottish Theatre’s Technical Winter School on the 2nd of Feb having a lunchtime discussion on LED Lighting. More info here. 

Image credit: Museum of Technology by Pirhan (Creative Commons)

The post Throwing Light on Your Lighting Choices 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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The work they produced was exhibited at the Churchill Theatre and their learning was captured in a film we bring you below.

Lorna MacDonald with John-Paul Valentine and Roxy the Robot at Church Hill Theatre

I had no idea of the fantastic artwork, inspiring stories and creative learning that would come from our project, The Lifecycle of Stuff, for which I worked in partnership with Gemma Lawrence of Creative Carbon Scotland.

The six schools involved were

• Canal View Primary
• Gylemuir Primary
• James Gillespie’s High School
• Liberton High School
• Pilrig Park Special School
• St Peter’s RC Primary

The six schools all engaged in different learning journeys, but they all tackled issues that affect each of us today: our relationship with waste and how we deal with ‘stuff’ in our lives. The potentially complex concepts of linear and circular economies were dealt with in a way that was meaningful to the young people.

The short film The Story of Stuff was shown to the pupils to provide a context for their work.

Each class collected items that would otherwise have gone to landfill and used them to create sculptures, learning skills and techniques within art and design. Importantly, all the pupils had the choice to make something original, rather than having a product prescribed. The process of playing with the materials and coming up with ideas was at least as important as making something wonderful in the end.

A hanging chandelier created by some of the students out of intercepted waste.

 

One teacher from James Gillespie’s High School commented that the artist, Kathy Beckett, inspired their students, not only with her understanding of the issues and of the process of creating artwork, but by demonstrating her personal commitment to making conscious choices in her actions. The students felt she was a role model as an artist and as an eco-warrior.

At Pilrig Park Special School, the art and design teacher commented:

The class gained confidence as well as learning new skills. One particular pupil, who is normally extremely shy and will not talk to many people, actually spoke independently about her art work in front of the class. This was very encouraging to witness.

The teacher felt that, for herself

Roxy the Robot

it was invaluable to gain knowledge of various new techniques and processes which I can use within my department in the future. It was also refreshing to work alongside an artist… share ideas and discuss possibilities.

Pilrig Park pupils said:

It made me feel happy to see our artwork hanging up in a place where anybody can go and see it!

Thank you Kathy for teaching us…it made me think about where our rubbish goes to.

A teacher from St Peter’s RC Primary commented on the pupils’ learning

Pupils were challenged to extend their thinking to include examples of linear and circular movement of resources and appliances in their everyday lives.

I really liked how… it was really left to the pupils to create and explore their ideas. I think this was incredibly valuable for the learner… something I’d love to be able to replicate in the future. It taught me a little about letting go and going with the creative process.

The whole project has really highlighted to me about the value of the creative process and not just the finished artwork, something I could definitely work on.

Watch the short film below to get a flavour of the work within each school and think: what will you do?

View the original post here.

For more information on Bright Futures and the work provided by the City of Edinburgh Council visit their website.

The post Sustainable Art Inspires at the Churchill Theatre 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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This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

‘BY LEAVES WE LIVE’ AND BY TREE, ANIMAL, ENERGY

In addressing the carbon facts of climate change, the intimate, emotive and perplexing relations between the human and the other-than-human can be side-lined, out of reach of measurement and calculation. But these relations are inseparable from how the climate, and the human, is known. Stories, walks and installations continued the long-lived strand of performance about nature and human relations, in historical and contemporary performance forms.

Patrick Geddes’ passage on inter-relation inspired a slow, very slow walk in the garden of Dunbar’s Close, Edinburgh, led by Karen Gabbitas. Geddes wrote ‘This is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent on the leaves. By leaves we live…’ As an interior rhythm, the words ‘by leaves we live’, accompanied the conscious step as it became less than conscious, as walkers connected within an urban garden and to the effects of slowing down. The event was completed by a walk out of the close, to a reading of poetry about gardens, walking and the environment by Andrew Sclater.

Ben Macfadyen with his Beuy’s oak seedling.

In Huntly, with Deveron Arts, the White Wood was planted by Caroline Wendling and the community earlier in 2015, a wood that included oaks grown from acorns from Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Oaks. Storyteller Ben Macfadyen’s residency continues the project and connected Huntly directly with Paris in a hybrid of theatre and social practice that has characterised much of the innovative work relating performance and ecology. Ben, with a Beuys’ oak seedling, bicycled to Paris (from the ONCA Gallery in Brighton, also hosting weeks of workshops and seminars on climate change). The tree was planted in a protected new woodland near Paris. On returning to Huntly, Ben will continue The White Wood Story, working with the community to develop a story of the wood, trees, and peace-making that will last for 300 years, the span of the first stage of growth for an oak.

A convivial evening of stories about trees at the Scottish Storytelling Centre, harkened by the shaking of the bells on the branches of a pine, brought out tales of how human relations with trees expose human folly and are redemptive. The evening itself was like coming in to an extended family that just enjoyed the telling and listening, blurring performer and audience. In a somewhat chaotic group movement/ritual, the meeting in Paris was extended a collective energy before the evening came back to the long duration of trees and human stories.

Exercising a more troubled relation between the human and animal, Dougie Strang’s solo performance piece Badger Dissonance, part of the UNFIX programme at the CCA, Glasgow, invoked familiar but undomesticated animals with whom the human finds identity and meaning. This was, though, the animal as road kill, the shot and culled animal, including, too, Jyoti Singh, the woman raped and murdered by a gang in a bus in Delhi in 2012. ‘Cognitive dissonance’ is the concept that Strang used to explain disjointed human behaviour. ‘Dissonant’ explained, too, the unknowable and uncontrollable behaviour of the badger, fox, deer, rabbit, the buried and the unburied animal, disturbing human expectations.

Light Field @ Gayfield Creative Spaces.

The ecological also includes human relations with the inanimate, the materials, elements and energies of environments. In Light Field, in a dark room, Saffy Setohy and Bill Thompson experimented with giving people devices with wind-up torches that also emitted the sounds of energy production, and seeing what happened. The sounds were fascinating, the lights, less so, or less reliable. The event depended on a group of people willing to share and improvise, with no instructions, and to do so both as an art event, and as an experience that might connect with climate themes. It was an experiment, too, in how humans approach arts events, and for those who stayed with it, how humans approach each other in a strange situation, how they find alliances and make efforts at making meaning, when the authorial direction is intentionally missing.

Many of the difficulties that beset theatre and climate change were evident especially in Light Field, and throughout many pieces: how much information or instruction to provide when the public’s understanding is variable and constantly changing; does there even need to be any direct reference to the climate for a piece to effectively explore human responses to the situation; how can the subjects of climate change and sustainability change the relations between the work, the performers and the audience.

‘GOOD LUCK, EVERYBODY’

Nic Green & Laura Bradshaw performing Cock and Bull.

I live in Cumbria, and the floods in early December meant that I could not see Cock and Bull, Nic Green’s performance, with Laura Bradshaw and Rosana Cade. The following week, when waters subsided, roads opened and trains resumed, in Glasgow, Nic described the work to me in an unembellished account of what happened. She talked me through the first part of the piece, an exposure of corporate and governmental powers, of the weight of injustices of gender, class, ethnicities, shown through machinic movements and repeated choruses of party political texts, ‘hard working people/ pistons firing / we’re on your side…’. Then the energy and qualities of movements shifted, from something like an exorcism of aggression to a reprise, expressed in the softness of movements and an openness with the audience. The words changed to more of a dedication to the power between people, to ‘good luck, everybody’.

Flooding in Cumbria in December.

Those words struck hard, after days of the wrong rain, its intensity, direction and duration ripped out of any familiar pattern; of rivers without bounds, bridges breached, and winds slamming from the wrong direction. To wish someone ‘good luck’ in the face of uncontrollable situations, whether that of a malevolent politics or of a river that cares nothing for the lives in its path was not light-hearted irony. It felt more like an honest generosity, all that could be said to someone else in the circumstances, whether or not ‘luck’ exists. The words came closest to understanding something of the feel of being in the midst of a storm, expressing not a sentiment or intellectualisation, but an existential reality.

Had I seen the production, I may not have had this response. But having felt so immediately the effects of climate instability against my body, on my face and in the faces of my neighbours, imagining those words spoken to an audience, not as lines, but as an act of empathy, felt raw and right.

The UNFIX productions followed, and with the exception of Strang’s, were symbolic enactments of a future or indicative of apocalyptic disorder. While appreciating their intent and skill, those loud versions of an ending time belonged too much to a safe ‘theatrical’ stage and held no association for me beyond the room in which they were played. Their darkness felt contrived, familiar, not like the uncharted darkness for which luck may be necessary.

My impatience continues for theatre experiences that can do what that conversation did: prepare one for a moment through which some feeling rises that is unexpected, something is struck, something happens that is both rational and visceral and after which, something has changed. These are extreme expectations for theatre, and, of course, theatre has many layers of value. It may be that the everyday practices of making a communal kind of theatre, of workshops and walks are those that offer as rich a territory for what will be needed with increasing climate instability as that of theatrical productions with explicit themes. And I want to defend the apocalyptic, the utopian, the naturalistic, absurd and ironic, even the agit-prop, whatever theatre experience, as long as it, and the climate, do not become normalised and tamed.

But if theatre and performance want to move an audience, they will have to do more than provide information, or educate, or speculate about a life based on scientific models, or mine the fearing, warning and mourning rehearsals of an experience that has existed more in the abstract or as a prediction. My impatience is for more productions that feel like the experiment-in-progress that is life in a time a climate instability; that understand, in this human-to-human art form, that the human, itself, is changing.

ArtCOP Scotland offered many practitioners a short time to think about the climate. What would happen, if they were supported to think about it for longer, supported with access to the many strands of knowledge about the climate? What would happen if it was more than the central subject around which theatrical ideas were asked to form, embedding itself into other ideas and practices, allowed to worm away to make something that was not directly about the climate, but was inseparable from it? What if the very kinds of theatre that were being made started to change? My impatience, too, is for more diverse and imaginative methods for supporting practitioners, and for expanding the range of knowledge available for and from them. ArtCOP Scotland happened mostly where people were already working, which gave it a novel effectiveness; it is time now to think longer term if and how organisations can extend and intensify that more aesthetic rather than carbon-calculating support.

In the month of COP21, the situation changed. As storming waters brought the topsoil and river beds onto the streets, the climatic changes became material and rending of everyday life. Theatre will, and must, inhabit this new territory of immediate human experience, as it is undergone here, on this island, not simply to re-tell the stories of floods, but to pursue what those floods mean. The decision from Paris will not be enough. Fashioning a new sense of what humanity can accomplish, even if a vision of this is barely focused, is a task for theatre and its entertainments, in all its forms and locations.

ArtCOP Scotland Listings:

Stage to Page: Climate Change Edition
White Monochrome Kingdom, playwright Héloïse Thual; director Lou Mcloughlan
Timewatch, playwright Fergus Mitchell; director Alyson Woodhouse
The Heat is On, playwright Stewart Schiller; director Lisa Nicoll
performed readings
Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Glasgow

It’s Getting Hot in Here, Village Pub Theatre
Bluelines, by Sylvia Dow
Citylink, by Ellie Stewart
A Funeral for Snow, by Louise E. Knowles
Little Nellie: A Tale of Bleak Times, by Helen Shutt
On the Edge, by Sophie Good
Inge, by Clare Duffy
– plays from Climate Change Theatre Action:
An Average Guy Thinking Thoughts about Global Warming, by Neil LaBute
Talking to Dolphins, by Bryony Lavery
You Stink, by Amahl Khouri
director Caitlin Skinner; actors: Amy Drummond, Gerry Keilty, Matthew Leonard, Sarah MacGillivray
performed readings
The Pond pub, Edinburgh

The White Wood Story
Ben Macfayden and Deveron Arts
storytelling, community story-making, bicycle journey, woodland planning
Huntly, Brighton and Paris

Cock and Bull
by Nic Green, with Laura Bradshaw and Rosana Cade
performance
CCA, Glasgow

The Tree of Life
storytelling evening
Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh

Light Field
Saffy Setohy & Bill Thompson
immersive installation
Gayfield Creative Spaces, Edinburgh

Green Tease: Gardens, Walking and Poetry
immersive walk led by Karen Gabbitas
Dunbars Close, Canongate, Edinburgh
poetry reading with Andrew Sclater
Gayfield Creative Spaces, Edinburgh

Anthem: Tom Butler
workshop
CCA, Glasgow

Much Reduced and Getting Smaller
Firefly Arts’ Gasbags-in-Residence
performed by Laura Firth and Daniel Brown
Gayfield Creative Spaces, Edinburgh

Report from a Threatened City
Ailie Rutherford and young people from Govan High School
video and spoken word
CCA, Glasgow

About Wallace

Wallace Heim writes, researches and teaches in the median zone where culture, art and human performance meet nature, the other-than-human and ecological thought. In these conjunctions, new forms of human experience can emerge, new modes of understanding and action take shape.

Wallace’s work is to analyse the experience of these art works and social practices, to consider how these events shape their social and ecological contexts, and to develop critical frameworks appropriate to the experience of culture in the time of climate instability.

Contact: home@wallaceheim.com

The post ‘Good Luck, Everybody’ – the theatres of ArtCOP Scotland: Part II 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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This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

During COP21, Paris was a city undergoing the theatre that surrounds a critical decision, the political players negotiating values, profits and survival. Theatre filled the streets, too, replacing the cobblestones of other uprisings with the red lines of inflatables, banners and bodies. Activists breached the Louvre. Glacial ice melted on the Place du Panthéon (Ice Watch). Cape Farewell and COAL brought together scores of arts projects for ArtCOP. Many more, uncategorised artworks spread throughout the city, all articulating more than could be spoken in the meeting rooms and drafted in the papers of COP, fashioning other languages in different scales.

How could one stay at home and be together with all that? Creative Carbon Scotland devised ArtCOP Scotland, a festival of events, exhibitions, workshops and performances in Scotland simultaneous with the Paris meeting. ArtCOP Scotland was also a different way of doing a festival. It included performances by artists whose work already had an ecological dimension. But more than this, Creative Carbon Scotland took ideas of climate change and sustainability out to groups, artists and organisers already working with theatre and performance, but who had not yet incorporated ideas about the climate into their practices and productions. ArtCOP Scotland worked from where people were already enjoying the making of theatre, in meeting rooms, pubs, arts centres, schools, clubs. It asked practitioners to consider climate change as an idea they could play with, turn over, adapt. It showed that climate change is not merely a subject for certain strands of performance work, but is a subject that can imbue any work, in any place, for any audience.

Creative Carbon Scotland asked me to write a contextualising essay, offering not critiques, but a view of how a changing climate was expressed and what this might mean. The works varied in subject, audience, genre, intention; my responses loosely gather the works according to their form.

But the context itself changed in early December with Storm Desmond and my experience of it living in Cumbria. My responses to climate and theatre cleave around that and around a conversation that I recount below with Nic Green, whose performance I could not attend because of the floods. This doesn’t change how I thought about the preceding works, and their importance, but does change what I now expect, or need, from theatre. And my impatience with it.

‘THERE’S A POLAR BEAR IN THE BATHTUB’

Two events saw climate issues drawn into evenings of open rehearsals and readings that offer theatre-in-the-making for public enjoyment. ‘Stage to Page’ provides the chance for writers, directors, actors and audience members regularly to get together, take a scene from a newly-written play, hand it over to a director, choose the actors on the night, send them off to rehearse for an hour, and then play the scene to an appreciative and critical audience. For ArtCOP Scotland, Ben Twist, director of Creative Carbon Scotland, chose three climate change related plays from an open submission to get the ‘stage to page’ treatment: the consequences of a one-night stand of unprotected sex are set in a future world of rationed water and rigid economic hierarchies; a distressed polar bear is found on the street and brought home causing domestic trouble; a strange man in the woods hands a time-advancing watch to a young man who thinks it will help him in romance.

Stage to Page Actors

The plays kept to the convention that theatre is about human personal relationships, if absurdist, comedic and sci-fi influenced. The future has been a strong element in climate theatre, mostly to show and warn against dystopian prospects. But these plays leap-frogged over the transitions of the next decades to new world orders where the habits and expectations of human desires remain familiar, but are limited and frustrated by the controls of those necessary new orders; a post-climate-changed life. The public discussion that followed drew on both theatre ideas and climate apprehensions, and seemed as though at the beginning of putting those two together.

The second of these evenings, ‘It’s Getting Hot in Here’, was performed readings of short scenes from nine climate-related plays, held in a crowded pub back room. A couple choose a coffin for snow; a woman learns to listen, not talk, to dolphins; a couple with a house on a sea cliff come to know that ‘the sea takes back her own’; two Scots women talk about fossils while waiting for a bus; an average guy (American) talks over the facts of global warming. In a futuristic scenario, people walk ‘to the end of the line’, only to receive confusing hospitality. Activism is included in the one-hander of a woman from an oil-rich island in jail for protesting against oil extraction and contemplating suicide; and a Lebanese student comes back to his country warning of climate instability, but is not believed. An historical route is taken as a Victorian woman pub-keeper becomes a whistle-blower over pollution, and is betrayed by supposed allies co-opted by the controlling company.

Both evenings were good nights out, offering the enjoyment of theatre-making as a public process, as a local show among friends, with climate ideas seeping into the mix. Both evenings were firmly tied to naturalistic theatre. Some of the imagery and the settings, though, particularly in the ‘Hot in Here’ plays, felt fresh, as if a deeper layer of understanding was being exposed than that of relaying information, giving a warning, or proscribing behavioural changes that were such strong elements in early climate change works.

‘NOT IN MY NAME … BUT WITH MY MONEY’

Artist-activists have redefined disobedience and resistance over the past 40 years, and in doing so, challenged ideas of art and of the political. The contributors who offered more directly politicised actions to ArtCOP Scotland used the route of a workshop leading to a performance to bring out the immediacy of Scottish issues. The three shared in their movement from complex ideas to a mode of communication that was, or strived to be, authentic and a window through which to view a situation.

Anthem workshop attendees developing their protest song

Looking for the clarity of a protest song that could teach, mobilise and remember was the task of Tom Butler’s workshop, ‘Anthem’. In a few hours, with a group of strangers, myself among them, under his guidance, we talked over our thoughts on climate change, the economy, politics, honing the divergent responses and obsessions into a few stanzas and a chorus that we could sing, and did, on the balcony at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow. The historical legacy of song as communicator and container for social movements felt both archaic, given social media, but also a familiar ground. What emerged, on that day, with that group of people, was the unresolved conflicts within which one lives, that one can protest ‘not in my name’ against injustices, but the economic forces of neo-liberalism mean that the institutions and corporations using one’s money can act unimpeded against one’s intentions. (Watch their performance here).

The Firefly Arts’ GASBAGS’ piece, Much Reduced and Getting Smaller, performed by Laura Firth and Daniel Brown, came closest to an agit-prop event, a rap on consumerism, food waste and carbon footprints told through dialogue and physical theatre with a contagious, at times frenetic, energy. In another project by young persons, students at Govan High School worked with Ailie Rutherford and the short story Report on the Threatened City by Doris Lessing, in which an alien views earth society. They produced a looped stills montage of images of Govan, energy use, pollution and of their statements and imploring challenges, some read aloud at the CCA. ‘You think talking about a problem will solve it’, the alien says.

Laura Firth and Daniel Brown, Firefly Arts, performing “Much Reduced and Getting Smaller” at the ArtCOP Scotland Launch.

It was significant to have both these workshops included as a full part of this mix of events. The arts have been used to ‘teach’ climate change in the education system for many years. Having the acute observations and expressions of emotions as one among the many efforts at grappling with theatre and climate change was a reminder of how close the development of ideas by young persons is to that of the adult practitioners, and how meaningful it can be in their lives.

Part II will be released shortly.

ArtCOP Scotland Listings:

Stage to Page: Climate Change Edition
White Monochrome Kingdom, playwright Héloïse Thual; director Lou Mcloughlan
Timewatch, playwright Fergus Mitchell; director Alyson Woodhouse
The Heat is On, playwright Stewart Schiller; director Lisa Nicoll
performed readings
Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Glasgow

It’s Getting Hot in Here, Village Pub Theatre
Bluelines, by Sylvia Dow
Citylink, by Ellie Stewart
A Funeral for Snow, by Louise E. Knowles
Little Nellie: A Tale of Bleak Times, by Helen Shutt
On the Edge, by Sophie Good
Inge, by Clare Duffy
– plays from Climate Change Theatre Action:
An Average Guy Thinking Thoughts about Global Warming, by Neil LaBute
Talking to Dolphins, by Bryony Lavery
You Stink, by Amahl Khouri
director Caitlin Skinner; actors: Amy Drummond, Gerry Keilty, Matthew Leonard, Sarah MacGillivray
performed readings
The Pond pub, Edinburgh

The White Wood Story
Ben Macfayden and Deveron Arts
storytelling, community story-making, bicycle journey, woodland planning
Huntly, Brighton and Paris

Cock and Bull
by Nic Green, with Laura Bradshaw and Rosana Cade
performance
CCA, Glasgow

The Tree of Life
storytelling evening
Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh

Light Field
Saffy Setohy & Bill Thompson
immersive installation
Gayfield Creative Spaces, Edinburgh

Green Tease: Gardens, Walking and Poetry
immersive walk led by Karen Gabbitas
Dunbars Close, Canongate, Edinburgh
poetry reading with Andrew Sclater
Gayfield Creative Spaces, Edinburgh

Anthem: Tom Butler
workshop
CCA, Glasgow

Much Reduced and Getting Smaller
Firefly Arts’ Gasbags-in-Residence
performed by Laura Firth and Daniel Brown
Gayfield Creative Spaces, Edinburgh

Report from a Threatened City
Ailie Rutherford and young people from Govan High School
video and spoken word
CCA, Glasgow

Images courtesy of: Thomas Butler and Stage to Page.

About Wallace

Wallace Heim writes, researches and teaches in the median zone where culture, art and human performance meet nature, the other-than-human and ecological thought. In these conjunctions, new forms of human experience can emerge, new modes of understanding and action take shape.

Wallace’s work is to analyse the experience of these art works and social practices, to consider how these events shape their social and ecological contexts, and to develop critical frameworks appropriate to the experience of culture in the time of climate instability.

Contact: home@wallaceheim.com

The post ‘Good Luck, Everybody’ – the theatres of ArtCOP: Part I 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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