Robert Butler

Hitting the high water mark before Sandy

Eve Mosher: High Water Line

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Wallace Heim writes:

The Talk of the Town in the New Yorker last week was all about Sandy. Elizabeth Kolbert framed her piece on the impossibility of flood protection around an artwork by Eve Mosher.

Using a Heavy Hitter, the machine to make chalk lines on baseball fields, Mosher drew a blue line around the edge of Brooklyn and lower Manhattan ten feet above sea level, the height that waters were expected to rise during a once-in-a-hundred-year flood.

Mosher’s plan with High Water Line was to leave a visual mark and to open up a space for conversation, in 2007.

“I have pictures of where I drew the line and, if you look at the debris line, they’re pretty close”, Mosher writes on her blog, continuing, “I never wanted to be right.”

“ashdenizen blog and twitter are consistently among the best sources for information and reflection on developments in the field of arts and climate change in the UK” (2020 Network)

ashdenizen is edited by Robert Butler, and is the blog associated with the Ashden Directory, a website focusing on environment and performance.
The Ashden Directory is edited by Robert Butler and Wallace Heim, with associate editor Kellie Gutman. The Directory includes features, interviews, news, a timeline and a database of ecologically – themed productions since 1893 in the United Kingdom. Our own projects include ‘New Metaphors for Sustainability’, ‘Flowers Onstage’ and ‘Six ways to look at climate change and theatre’.

The Directory has been live since 2000.

Go to The Ashden Directory

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A bestiary of wonders, or, ‘Attenborough on acid’

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Wallace Heim writes:

Caspar Henderson’s The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. A 21st Century Bestiary came out this month, published by Granta. Here on Ashdenizen, Caspar contributed to our metaphors for sustainability with coral reef. And on the Ashden Directory, he was part of our panel on theatre and climate change in 2006.

Robert Macfarlane calls The Book of Barely Imagined Beings a genre-bending grimoire, a spell-book of species.

Reviewers are marveling at how the compendium of real animals, from the axolotl to the zebra fish, prompts Caspar’s essays on the nature of seeing, walking or being:

Philip Hoare in the Literary Review

Roy Wilkinson for Caught by the River<
Bella Bathurst in the Daily Telegraph
Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman

John Lloyd for We Love This Book
Anthony Davies in the Ham and High.

The advance reviewsare by Robert Macfarlane, Frans de Waal, Callum Roberts, Simon Critchley, Roman Krznaric and Richard Holloway.

Real Monstrosities calls it ‘fantastic!‘.

Caspar blogs at The Book of Barely Imagined Beings.

“ashdenizen blog and twitter are consistently among the best sources for information and reflection on developments in the field of arts and climate change in the UK” (2020 Network)

ashdenizen is edited by Robert Butler, and is the blog associated with the Ashden Directory, a website focusing on environment and performance.
The Ashden Directory is edited by Robert Butler and Wallace Heim, with associate editor Kellie Gutman. The Directory includes features, interviews, news, a timeline and a database of ecologically – themed productions since 1893 in the United Kingdom. Our own projects include ‘New Metaphors for Sustainability’, ‘Flowers Onstage’ and ‘Six ways to look at climate change and theatre’.

The Directory has been live since 2000.

Go to The Ashden Directory

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dramas missing in action

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Kellie Gutman writes:

With War Horse coming to the end of its run in Boston, the theatre critic for the Boston Globe, Don Aucoin remarks on the dearth of war dramas on stage.  He writes:During a decade when the United States was mired in two wrenching, costly, and divisive wars, the only combat drama to win a Tony Award as best play was a heartwarming, puppet-driven tale about a British lad and his beloved steed in World War I: War Horse… In fact, if you scan the list of plays, musicals, and performances nominated for Tonys in the past ten years, you’d barely know we were at war at all.

Until recently, much the same could be said about plays on climate change.

See british playwrights have “blithely ignored” climate change

 

“ashdenizen blog and twitter are consistently among the best sources for information and reflection on developments in the field of arts and climate change in the UK” (2020 Network)

ashdenizen is edited by Robert Butler, and is the blog associated with the Ashden Directory, a website focusing on environment and performance.
The Ashden Directory is edited by Robert Butler and Wallace Heim, with associate editor Kellie Gutman. The Directory includes features, interviews, news, a timeline and a database of ecologically – themed productions since 1893 in the United Kingdom. Our own projects include ‘New Metaphors for Sustainability’, ‘Flowers Onstage’ and ‘Six ways to look at climate change and theatre’.

The Directory has been live since 2000.

Go to The Ashden Directory

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Nigerian theatre mixes oil and climate, on the ground

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory
Wallace Heim writes:

The Nigerian playwright and academic Greg Mbajiorgu got in touch with us after reading Robert Butler’s blogs on Ashdenizen on the difficulties of writing plays about climate change. Greg sent us his play, Wake Up Everyone, which has a preface quoting from this blog.

Wake Up Everyonebegan as a commission by the African Technology Policy Studies Network, Nairobi, Kenya for their international conference on climate change in Nigeriain 2009.

That policy world is represented in the main character, Maukwe Aladinma, a retired professor of agriculture, now attempting to get the local government in the rural Ndoli area to build flood defences and advising communal farmers on using organic waste and planting stronger, non-GMO seeds. The professor, too, is a dramatist. In a play-within-a-play, the actors of his theatre company rehearse scenes describing the effects of climate change, those happening now and those anticipated: rivers dried, torrential floods, tornadoes, plagues, famines and poverty. The surrounding scenes are of a naturalistic theatre style; the rehearsals are a play to be performed as if in a dream or possessed.

A local official, Chairperson of the Ndoli Local Government Area, Hon. Edwin Ochonkeya, blocks the building of the defences. When the threatened flood sweeps the land, the farmers become an angry mob, running off-stage to extract revenge on the official.

Greg’s writing is purposeful: to support impoverished farmers, to educate, to build resilience against the effects of climate change in rural Nigeria.

The information on climate change is familiar enough, if uncomfortable. The role of the expert in presenting knowledge to farmers is familiar, too, the belief and disbelief, the sometimes awkward juncture of different kinds of experience, the social power implicit in different kinds of knowledge.

The depiction of the official, Ochonkeya, is what startles. His actions are presented as commonplace. A militant against the oil companies, he was on the verge of forming his own kidnapping gang when a massive oil spill damaged his family’s land and killed his father. He employed a lawyer to bring an action against the companies, who settled out of court for three hundred million naira and funded his campaign for local office on the condition that he didn’t make any further case on behalf of affected farmers. He won his campaign with the rhetoric of environmentalism: ‘Before this plague of climate change the oil companies had milked our land dry, but have given nothing to nourish it. All that is left (of my family’s farmland) is thick layers of oil, oil in our waters, oil in our wet lands, oil in our fragile soil, down to the roots of our edible crops, oil and more oil…’

And now, he is stopping any adaptation to or mediation of climate damage.

In a single character, the play conveys the immediate, turbulent, deceptive forces underlying oil production in Nigeria and in Canada, Baku-Tbilisi, Iraq, the Arctic, a world not wholly expressed by the activists against it, working across political boundaries.

It couldn’t be more topical. Last week, in The Hague, four Nigerians and Friends of the Earth began a lawsuit against Royal Dutch Shell Plc for  its environmental record in the in Niger Delta, a case that may set a precedent for claims related to the activities of international corporations.

And on Friday, Wake Up Everyone received a first Individual Award in Arts and Humanities Research at the 5th Nigerian Universities Research and Development Fair in Mina, Niger State.

“ashdenizen blog and twitter are consistently among the best sources for information and reflection on developments in the field of arts and climate change in the UK” (2020 Network)

ashdenizen is edited by Robert Butler, and is the blog associated with the Ashden Directory, a website focusing on environment and performance.
The Ashden Directory is edited by Robert Butler and Wallace Heim, with associate editor Kellie Gutman. The Directory includes features, interviews, news, a timeline and a database of ecologically – themed productions since 1893 in the United Kingdom. Our own projects include ‘New Metaphors for Sustainability’, ‘Flowers Onstage’ and ‘Six ways to look at climate change and theatre’.

The Directory has been live since 2000.

Go to The Ashden Directory

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miniature horse meets war horse

Celeste and Joey, courtesy the Boston Globe

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Kellie Gutman writes:

War Horse opened in Boston on October 10 for a two-week run.  The traveling Broadway production, which originated at the National Theatre a few years ago, is getting all sorts of press.  The day before the opening the main characters – the horse Joey, his owner and his puppeteer – went to the Animal Rescue League in Dedham, Massachusetts to have a play date with Celeste, a miniature horse who had been involved in an animal cruelty case earlier in the year.  Joey is a well-traveled steed.  He has also been to Windsor Castle where he apparently won over the heart of the Queen.  The Handspring Puppet Company cofounders Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones, who designed the War Horse puppets, were featured in a long article about their puppets in the Boston Globe.

“ashdenizen blog and twitter are consistently among the best sources for information and reflection on developments in the field of arts and climate change in the UK” (2020 Network)

ashdenizen is edited by Robert Butler, and is the blog associated with the Ashden Directory, a website focusing on environment and performance.
The Ashden Directory is edited by Robert Butler and Wallace Heim, with associate editor Kellie Gutman. The Directory includes features, interviews, news, a timeline and a database of ecologically – themed productions since 1893 in the United Kingdom. Our own projects include ‘New Metaphors for Sustainability’, ‘Flowers Onstage’ and ‘Six ways to look at climate change and theatre’.

The Directory has been live since 2000.

Go to The Ashden Directory

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the family and the world heat up in Nick Payne’s play

Photo: Joan Marcus

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Kellie Gutman writes:

If There Is I Haven’t Found it Yet, with Brian O’Byrne and Jake Gyllenhaal, opened in New York’s Roundabout Theatre in September and runs through 25 November.  It was written by Nick Payne, and inspired by his reading of Heat by George Monbiot, about decreasing one’s carbon footprint.  Payne saw that many authors of environmentally-themed books had dedicated them to their children, and it gave him the idea of a father trying to save the planet in order to make the world a better place for his children, and beyond.  But the father is so wrapped up in his work that he fails to notice the problems within his own family.  The New York Times review is here.

Artistic director Todd Haimes writes:

On one level, we are watching a domestic drama play about a mother, father, daughter, and uncle.  But the play also takes on a much bigger global issue.  We all want to do the right thing for both the world at large and for the world of our own family, but maybe that’s impossible.

More George Monbiot on ashdenizen:
roundheads and cavaliers
the negotiator and the polemicist
vanishing act
George Monbiot finds Dr. Faustus the classic text for climate change

 

“ashdenizen blog and twitter are consistently among the best sources for information and reflection on developments in the field of arts and climate change in the UK” (2020 Network)

ashdenizen is edited by Robert Butler, and is the blog associated with the Ashden Directory, a website focusing on environment and performance.
The Ashden Directory is edited by Robert Butler and Wallace Heim, with associate editor Kellie Gutman. The Directory includes features, interviews, news, a timeline and a database of ecologically – themed productions since 1893 in the United Kingdom. Our own projects include ‘New Metaphors for Sustainability’, ‘Flowers Onstage’ and ‘Six ways to look at climate change and theatre’.

The Directory has been live since 2000.

Go to The Ashden Directory

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Carbon 13: Ballroom Marfa and Cape Farewell team up

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

In Marfa, Texas

Kellie Gutman writes: Marfa is a small town of 2,121 people in western Texas.  In 2003, Virginia Lebermann and Fairfax Dorn converted a former 1927 ballroom into a performance and exhibition space called Ballroom Marfa.  In this intellectual environment, issues and perspectives are explored through film, music, art and performance.

Ballroom Marfa contacted Cape Farewell’s David Buckland to curate Carbon 13: From the High Arctic to the High Desert, which runs from 31 August until 20 January 2013.  Eight artists who have traveled with Cape Farewell to the Andes, the Arctic and Scotland’s island communities are presenting newly-commissioned works to highlight the effects of climate change.  The exhibit is supported in part by an Artistic Innovation and Collaboration (AIC) Grant from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

The artists represented are Ackroyd & Harvey, Amy Balkin, Erika Blumenfeld, David Buckland, Adriane Colburn, Antony Gormley, Cynthia Hopkins and Sunand Prasad.

In the online art newspaper, artdaily.org, the reviewer of Carbon 13 wrote:

Ballroom Marfa continues its ambitious mission of presenting art as a transforming media capable of addressing the most pressing issues of our time.

“ashdenizen blog and twitter are consistently among the best sources for information and reflection on developments in the field of arts and climate change in the UK” (2020 Network)

ashdenizen is edited by Robert Butler, and is the blog associated with the Ashden Directory, a website focusing on environment and performance.
The Ashden Directory is edited by Robert Butler and Wallace Heim, with associate editor Kellie Gutman. The Directory includes features, interviews, news, a timeline and a database of ecologically – themed productions since 1893 in the United Kingdom. Our own projects include ‘New Metaphors for Sustainability’, ‘Flowers Onstage’ and ‘Six ways to look at climate change and theatre’.

The Directory has been live since 2000.

Go to The Ashden Directory

Powered by WPeMatico

The golden glow of arts funding

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Wallace Heim writes:

Wooloo.org is the organisation in Copenhagen that came up with the idea of housing artists and activists in people’s home for the climate talks. Their website lists open calls for artist’s awards, residencies and other opportunities.

This week’s Special Call is for Passion to Perform – Art Competition 2012, for paintings, photography, sculptures and drawings, with prizes of Canadian $6,000, $2,500 and $1,000.

It’s not exactly an ‘open’ call.

The sponsor is Yamana Gold, one of the world’s leading gold and copper mining companies, with operations throughout the Americas, primarily Argentina and Brazil. They are asking for artworks that are inspired by the company’s core principles: “sustainability, dependability, respect for the environment and our communities, safety of our colleagues.”

“Passion to Perform is a competition which celebrates the success of Yamana Gold, and we are looking forward to engaging creatively in a way that reflects our company’s diversity and core values.”

Other views about Yamana Gold’s principles are here and here.

Photo above of the Gualcamayo open pit, heap leach gold operation in the San Juan province of Argentina, courtesy of the Yamana Gold website.

“ashdenizen blog and twitter are consistently among the best sources for information and reflection on developments in the field of arts and climate change in the UK” (2020 Network)

ashdenizen is edited by Robert Butler, and is the blog associated with the Ashden Directory, a website focusing on environment and performance.
The Ashden Directory is edited by Robert Butler and Wallace Heim, with associate editor Kellie Gutman. The Directory includes features, interviews, news, a timeline and a database of ecologically – themed productions since 1893 in the United Kingdom. Our own projects include ‘New Metaphors for Sustainability’, ‘Flowers Onstage’ and ‘Six ways to look at climate change and theatre’.

The Directory has been live since 2000.

Go to The Ashden Directory

Powered by WPeMatico

The first river to have legal rights

The Whanganui River, Aotearoa / New Zealand, photo: Phil Robinson

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

Wallace Heim writes:

For the first time, a river has been given a legal voice. The Whanganui Riverin New Zealandhas become a legal entity, and will be recognised as a person in law in the same way that a company is, giving it rights and interests.

The status of the river as Te Awa Tupua (an integrated, living whole) is a step in the resolution of historical grievances and court cases between the Whanganui iwi, the Maori peoples and nations living along the river, and the Crown. Two guardians, one from the Whanganui Riveriwi, and one from the Crown will be given the role of protecting the river.

In the UK, ‘rights’ generally means the right to access for humans to rivers, or the right to flood protection.

But many artists are negotiating the relations between human use and the free-running of rivers, navigating the values and affections towards rivers. Just now, among these are Multi-Story Water on the River Aire in Shipley and the River Frome in Bristol, and River Runs on the Thames near Oxford. Jem Southam is exhibiting photographs of the River Exe, investigating what makes or defines a river. Earlier this year, Flow turned the Tyne into music in Newcastle. And two decades ago, Still Waters uncovered the buried rivers of London.

“ashdenizen blog and twitter are consistently among the best sources for information and reflection on developments in the field of arts and climate change in the UK” (2020 Network)

ashdenizen is edited by Robert Butler, and is the blog associated with the Ashden Directory, a website focusing on environment and performance.
The Ashden Directory is edited by Robert Butler and Wallace Heim, with associate editor Kellie Gutman. The Directory includes features, interviews, news, a timeline and a database of ecologically – themed productions since 1893 in the United Kingdom. Our own projects include ‘New Metaphors for Sustainability’, ‘Flowers Onstage’ and ‘Six ways to look at climate change and theatre’.

The Directory has been live since 2000.

Go to The Ashden Directory

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Weather presenter freaks out

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory
http://youtu.be/TmfcJP_0eMc

A colleague has emailed us this clip. A weather presenter strays into climate reporting, comedy and reality.

“ashdenizen blog and twitter are consistently among the best sources for information and reflection on developments in the field of arts and climate change in the UK” (2020 Network)

ashdenizen is edited by Robert Butler, and is the blog associated with the Ashden Directory, a website focusing on environment and performance.
The Ashden Directory is edited by Robert Butler and Wallace Heim, with associate editor Kellie Gutman. The Directory includes features, interviews, news, a timeline and a database of ecologically – themed productions since 1893 in the United Kingdom. Our own projects include ‘New Metaphors for Sustainability’, ‘Flowers Onstage’ and ‘Six ways to look at climate change and theatre’.

The Directory has been live since 2000.

Go to The Ashden Directory

Powered by WPeMatico