The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts » New Orleans

Mel Chin to speak at Farm Lab 2/11 7pm

Ian Garrett — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:49:54 +0000

For those of us who have followed the art and ecology movement over the last two decades, Mel Chin is considered an influential pioneer combining art with brownfield remediation. His famous or infamous Revival Field (1989-ongoing) funded with NEA money that was rescinded then later reinstated, demonstrated the natural processes of removing heavy metals from soil using hyper accumulator plants. He did this project in collaboration with an agronomist at a landfill site in Minnesota.

Mel will be in Los Angeles next week to give a talk on his Fundred Dollar Bill Project in New Orleans. If you have never heard him speak, you should go, with the promise that you will be entertained and educated. Being an artist should be so much fun!

For more information go the FarmLab website HERE

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RETHINK Contemporary Art & Climate Change

RSA Arts & Ecology — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:07:14 +0000

Finally got to see some of RETHINK; it’s a wonderful exhibition. The Saraceno is gigantic, but the human biosphere, suspended high in the air, was closed for repair today so I wan’t able to go in it, which saved my vertigo.

Allora & Calzadilla’s A Man Screaming Is Not A Dancing Bear (2008) is stunning. Filmed in New Orleans, post-Katrina, it’s strange and elegaic. Repeating through the film are moments in which a barely-glimpsed man drums on some abandonded Venetian blinds. It lends an angry, jumpy soundtrack to the slow pans across water-stained walls.

Kerstin Eregenzinger’s Study for Longing/Seeing (2008) was unsettling in a very different way. Sheets of dark, lifeless rubber suddenly twitch unexpectedly, driven by strange spider-arms beneath them. It feels like a landscape that’s coming alive, animated by some strange pulse. “The work,” says the catalogue, “Is a reactive installation using data from seismographs and sensor-based structures to simulate a landscape and its changes. The installation responds partly to movements in the earth outside the exhibition building, and partly to audience movements in the exhibition room itself…”

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Message vs. Action

Mike Lawler — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:19:43 +0000

This Post was originally posted to Mike Lawler’s ecoTheaer blog on April 25, 2007. We are reposting it here to share this ecoTheater classic with new readers while MIke continues to regain his health. You can read his blog about his ongoing battle with cancer, The “C” Word, by clicking here.

In 1992, American Theatre ran an article called Green Theatre: Confessions of an Eco-reporter, in which Lynn Jacobson traveled to three performing arts companies–Merrimack Repertory in Lowell, MA, the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, and Dell’Arte Players Company in northern California–and wrote about the work they were doing on the allegedly emerging front of “Green Theatre.”

In the fall of this year my first published foray into “greening” our theaters is slated to appear in the pages of American Theatre too–over fifteen years after Jacobson wrote, at the close of her piece, “Can theatre save the earth? I don’t know. But from sea to polluted sea, I’ve seen it trying.” Well, Jacobson was certainly right about one thing: Theater can’t save the earth–at least not alone. But, it does seem that it can make more of an effort than it has. Because, though Jacobson failed to really take it into account in 1992, the greening of our theater isn’t just about putting on ecologically themed work. It’s also about putting on ecologically friendly work, whether it be new, old, experimental, or otherwise.

In my research, I am struggling to find theater artists out there who are striving for a more sustainable approach to theater production. If you are one, or know of one, get in touch with me–I’d love to hear from you.