Play: Z: a meditation on oppression, desire & freedome || Playwright: Anne Szumigalski Shoot: CSN || Model: Ariane Gagné
FEMALE VOICE
And I’ll tell you again and again the same story.
Once I was a child and once I was a woman.
A woman in a cage, a lynx in a trap.
I was my own mother and I nursed myself.
I was my own child and I suckled myself.
Sometimes in my sleep I saw a house.
Sometimes a fire warmed my dreams.
Once I ate a chocolate dream cake.
Once my lover came to me.
That’s when I died and was burned.
Nothing, nothing remains of me but ashes in the wind.
In part two of our Sky Sounds series, we turn our ears to the mysterious Ranchlands Hum: a near-subsonic drone that has been plaguing residents of the north west Calgary community for more than half a decade, without any explanation as to its cause. We speak to community association president and Ranchlands resident Terry Avramenko, as well as acoustic ecologist Dr. Marcia Epstein. Plus the Deep Field team heads out to the quiet suburban neighbourhood to see if a little bit of fieldwork won’t shed some light on the mysterious phenomenon.
Writer/director Wajdi Mouawad was an Artistic Director at the NAC when he penned a letter to Stephen Harper in 2008.
I was never more proud to be theatre artist than on the day Wajdi Mouawad produced wrote that letter to Stephen Harper during the 2008 federal election. Mouawad accused the Prime Minister of declaring war on artists during his mean spirited pre-election slash of arts funding. The best part was when he threatened the Prime Minister:
“The resistance that will begin today, and to which my letter is added, is but a first manifestation of a movement that you yourself have set in motion: an incalculable number of texts, speeches, acts, assemblies, marches, will now be making themselves heard. They will not be exhausted.”
These were galvanizing times. Remember the Department of Culture? They organized troops of artists to campaign against the Conservatives in swing ridings. Remember the Wrecking Ball in 2008? I do. In fact, when I think back through my personal history, I can trace an unbroken line between the consciousness raising momentum of that election to where I am now, employed as the legislative assistant to the NDP Opposition Critic for Aboriginal Affairs. It was when I spoke on a panel at McGill University about surviving Harper’s attacks on artists that I serendipitously met my current boss, Niki Ashton, who was then the youngest woman in Parliament. And now we are facing possibly the most critical election Canada has ever faced – and what are we, the arts community, doing about it?
The fact that my artist friends don’t show up when it comes to politics or activism doesn’t make sense to me. We’re all so passionate about politics and social justice and community well- Most of us cite at least one of those three things in our stated purposes for making our art in the first place. So when the call is put out for bodies to join in protest, attend town halls or community meetings, knock on doors or volunteer at a local campaign office for a worthy candidate, I am disheartened by how few arts workers show up.
It’s a bit of a mystery why Canadian artists don’t see themselves as exploited proletariat. They live below the poverty line. Their work contributes hugely to the economy, and even moreso to society, and they see almost nothing of that profit. Most of them have no housing security. Some have no food security. They feel they can’t afford to have children. Yet they don’t cultivate a tangible sense of solidarity with each other or with the millions of other Canadians who are also working poor. Movements are built through that kind of solidarity.
Wajdi said you would come! Where are you, with your voices and your writing and your irregular work hours and long stretches of unemployment? Come help!
Some people will reply it’s because the arts are not an election issue this time around. No one has threatened to slash the Canada Council for the Arts for a while; Heritage Canada funding seems to be flowing regularly enough (so long as your project has some propaganda value regarding the War of 1812 or Canada’s 150th Birthday) and what else do we care about?
The Canadian Arts Coalition came knocking last winter, but their asks were tame and their presence is now long forgotten in platform building season. I was present at the meeting my boss took with the CAC for their Arts Day on the Hill. It was disappointing that only arts administrators and one fundraiser came to our meeting. I wondered why they were praising the government instead of shaming us.
It is ridiculous, however, to direct anger at the Canadian Arts Coalition for not being more radical. They are volunteers and they are working with very little while balancing the needs of arts organizations that need their funding. I told Eric Coates, a member of the coalition, that I might take a swipe at the Arts Coalition in this article and he wrote to me:
“My question is, why take a swipe at it, at all? Why not take a swipe at those who complain about the lack of arts funding, but don’t take any action to address it? When we lobbied in 2013, Heritage Minister James Moore told us afterwards that our actions spared Canada Council from sustaining any cuts. We were in a position where the only thing we could realistically ask for was to spare the axe – and I believe we succeeded. I know it’s anathema to be thankful for no cuts, but it is the sober reality of life under Stephen Harper’s Conservatives.”
The Member or Parliament for Davenport in earlier days.
I am not upset at Arts Day on the Hill. I’m upset because my community, we of the trained stage presence and masterful writing skills have no collective or subversive voice. The truth is that people who are exploited and oppressed have a very hard time advocating for themselves. The reason there were few artists at the Arts Day on the Hill is because they couldn’t afford to volunteer to be there. The reason I have the resources to write this now is because I’ve escaped the poverty of a playwright’s life and have a unionized day job.
Politicians eventually answer to political movements. When we speak about what the federal government can do for artists why are we not speaking the same language of anti-poverty activists or the trade labour movement? Why don’t fine arts majors ever participate in the student movement? Our needs and interests are all the same.
Although artists have next to nothing and work like dogs they are not low class. They are the cultural class. Many are the result of privileged backgrounds and high-level educations. Most of our parents had enough money to give us the kind of childhood that supports artistic passions. However, most of us can’t forge a consistent living wage out of the work we do even when we are regularly published, produced, on stage, in a gallery or in residence. I can think of no other professional industry where that is the case, and where the labour force doesn’t consider themselves oppressed? When should artists start to self-identify as oppressed?
After Harper announced his arts cuts in 2008, he further insulted us by saying that all we do is sip champagne at galas. I know enough from my time on Parliament Hill to know that insult was not a gaffe, but a calculated move on the Prime Minister’s part. Anti-intellectual dog whistling was a cornerstone of Harper’s strategy to destroy the Liberal Party and it worked. It was a strategy that came fully to bloom in 2011 when I couldn’t knock on a single Northern BC doorstep without hearing about what an effete, Harvard educated, geek Ignatieff was. I was happy enough to sop up his votes at the time for Nathan Cullen and his cultivated folksy cadence, but I recognized that sentiment as bigotry and I knew not to let many people know that I’m a Jewish playwright from Toronto.
I think that’s why the champagne sipping comment hurt our feelings so much: poor as we are, we do know how to look good at a Gala and sip champagne over sparkling conversation. But that privilege, in my opinion, doesn’t negate the fact that paying someone 50 cents an hour to do something that society values is exploitation.
I wonder where Wajdi is now. Where are the other senior artists, few though they are, who can afford to take the time to rally against the government? It’s true that in 2008 our interventions failed at unseating Harper. But maybe Wajdi was playing a long game. Maybe he was thinking about people like me who would naively romanticize what he said eight years ago, forage out a place for themselves in a progressive political party and then quote his letter to validate her plea to her friends: I know you are poor and tired but you have voices and you are convincing and you have irregular work hours. Please come help.
Through social media I’m fortunate to be connected with many artists across Toronto and the country. We share posts day after day expounding various theories, opinions, likes and dislikes, often burning hours of our time reading reviews, open letters, and other discussion around arts, culture, and politics. When I heard about a new initiative called LIFE LINE SYRIA, a citizen-led initiative to sponsor families from Syria to resettle in Canada, I was struck by this challenge:
Could a group of hundreds if not a thousand Toronto Theatre artists sponsor ONE family from Syria? Could we raise $25,000+? Could enough of us commit to share our time and resources to help?
For years I have wondered about the chaos that the people of Syria have endured, and how we in Canada and the rest of the world have failed them. I wondered how a country like ours, built upon generations of people fleeing conflict and persecution in search of ‘a better life’, had not done more. I wondered how our country that has thrived and can only survive on a steady stream newcomers had out fear (or even xenophobia) purposefully made it difficult for Syrians to come here.
Other countries in the region buckling under the pressure of so many displaced people and resettlement in many Northern European countries have put our efforts to shame. When Canada welcomed the “boat people” of Vietnam by the thousands a generation ago, were we inherently more compassionate? There was some resistance internally and those refuges did face racism, but that didn’t stop us from ultimately doing what was right.
Today, are we reluctant with Syrians because we might have different cultural and religious practices? Is it because they are seen as potential “security threats”? Are we so afraid and have we become so cynical that we cast judgement on an entire population? A population that is so desperate that creating social unrest and violence here in Canada is probably one of their lowest priorities.
In another time, under another regime, we might have looked to our government to deliver the services refugees need, but these are not those times. Many Syrians are looking for a chance to start over and we are 35 million Canadians who can help them.
How many fellow theatre artists, musicians, dancers, and performers must be among those displaced millions? From folk art to high art, from the fringes to concert halls, fellow artists, on the run with their friends, peers and families, unable to do what they were put on earth to do: make art.
I think about how worried I find myself these days trying to make a living as an artist, how I’m trying to feed my own family, raise money for upcoming projects, face months on the road touring, and ultimately how impossible it would be for me to help these people and how most of my friends would feel the same. We have our own struggle to deal with. Their problem is beyond our scope. That’s what I let myself think. Maybe that’s what you let yourself think as well. What if we are wrong?
Then I thought about how artists are filled with determination. How artists make something out of nothing. How artists are among the most curious and compassionate in our society. And then I thought… I bet we could do it.
Lifeline Syria suggests groups of five, a church group, for example, support a single family, to help share the burden. If that might be a challenge for only a handful of artists to take on I understand. We have hundreds who could share the burden, not just the financial one, but also the personal and emotional aspects. As a community we have a diverse pool of skills and talents to lend to this effort. Perhaps a much larger network of theatre artists under the leadership of a handful of “point people” could work together to raise the funds and divide the time needed to make it happen.
As we celebrated The Dora Awards last night surrounded by so much talent, I hope we can find a way to help ONE family come to this city and start a new chapter, sponsored by Toronto’s theatre artists.
For more information go to https://lifelinesyria.ca . I have reached out through the website to request more information on how a group of likeminded artists could help. There is an information session in Toronto on July 22nd and I encourage everyone to go the website and talk with friends, and I will post any information in the upcoming weeks that I come across that might inspire a group to take up the challenge.
Watch this space for updates in the upcoming weeks as the whole initiative is in the formative stages but hopefully we can help Lifeline Syria and the people who need our help.
In STO Union’s latest show, What Happened to the Seeker, I play, and in many ways ‘am’, the lead character: a woman whose multiple attempts at healing from a traumatic event leads her down numerous roads, which lead to more trauma, until she finally finds the space she needs in order to heal.
The “space to heal”… Space here is the operative word. Like air around a wound, empty space is the key ingredient in all transformation. It can be the empty space of the meditation hall, or the empty space of the theatre, but it is always found in the empty space of the breath itself, entering the wound, transforming it, almost miraculously.
Photo: Steve Lucas
First, the Seeker must re-discover the trauma: it is covered over by multiple failed attempts at suppressing it: booze, sex, partying, you name it: we all have our demons. Those demons distract, cover over the broken heart. The lack of stability that most of us in the theatre world live with adds to the confusion: we give so much and are rewarded with the insecurity of not knowing where the next job will come from, and if what we do has any merit or value at all, at the end of the day.
So the Seeker must start at the beginning: the first step is the agitation, the subtle level of nervousness that feels slightly uncomfortable, that is always kind of ‘there’, right under our conscious minds. In the Seeker project, we have people moving around, from experience to experience, as the agitation propels us forward on the search. Eventually the search and the overwhelming pressure of too many distractions must make us stop. Stop.
At 29 years old I began the process of ‘stopping’. I was so frayed by a life on the run, spinning out of control, longing for a home to replace the one I had left at a very young age. My home was in the Ottawa-Gatineau region, on the Québec side of the border. I couldn’t wait to leave it so that I could go out into the world and find a better, safer place for myself.
The search began to end when, alone on a road trip through the United States, I parked in a Sedona mall, not knowing where I was going to go next. I saw a sign that said ‘free healing session’ and, because I was lost, I decided to try it out. I remember one of the healers just repeating, almost under his breath, “so much pain, so much pain”. When I got back into my car, I burst into tears – I felt so sad for myself… how had I come to this?
Life then led me to a meditation teacher, whose initial comment to me was: “you are hanging onto life by a thread”. And it was true, I was ready to leave this world of suffering – I saw no way out of it. Then began the years of sitting in meditation halls, becoming familiar with silence, stillness, and eventually peace. I worked with many teachers who taught me the critical role that breath has in the process of transformation. They showed me how to empty the well of sadness I had carried for so long.
I recall weeping in the arms of a fellow meditator, an older woman, who held me in her arms and rocked me like a baby. I stayed in her arms for hours, so deep was my well, as fellow meditators took turns giving her water and supporting her back as she held me and gave me the motherly love that I had so little experience with. My well emptied out and what was left was space: beautiful, peaceful space.
For fifteen years I sat in those halls, heard the most tragic and beautiful stories from people who had come there too, to find some kind of way out of the burdens that life had brought to them. The similarities in between those halls and the theatre space were in no way lost to me – they are close cousins, both spaces for healing, both fully dependent on the power of space, both know, at the core, that space itself is what does all of the healing.
Photo: Austin Lui/Barry Padolsky architects
Through healing, I was able to make peace with my past and let it go. That peace allowed me to return to my home, the Gatineau hills, the very same landscape where the wounding had happened in the first place. The land no longer terrorizes me, but rather has transformed into the net that now sustains me. hat I ran away from, I return to, as if returning to the scene of a crime, no longer looking for clues to solve the mystery, but rather to plant a garden in gratitude for everything that it has taught me.
The space of the meditation hall, the theatre, and the breath merge together: space holds life without judgment or fear. My first home was the theatre – that is where I got my first inkling of the power of space. My second home was the meditation hall: that is where space took over my being. My final home is here, on this planet, no longer the walking wounded, but the wounded held by a peace and stillness that is always right here and now. I am deeply grateful for whatever forces that led me here and even more grateful that I have the opportunity to share this story with others.
When I became Executive Director of STAF I insisted on having a double title that included “Transformation Designer”. I wanted it to be super-clear change was coming and that it was my job to make sure about that. Over the past ten months I have worked with artists and arts workers within the organization and the broader community to make a lot of changes with the aim of strengthening independent theatre. The positive nature of this experience has reinforced what I have known for a while:
When we set our minds to it, artists are really good at making shit happen.
Each of these artists explores a different type of change: Raoul Bhaneja investigates whether theatre artists can make change for one Syrian family, Nadia Ross reflects on her journey to bring about change within herself, and Darrah Teitel on bringing about the change in arts activism Wajdi Mouawad called for seven years ago.
About two years ago Vancouver-based Director and UBC theatre professor John Cooper approached me about a project he was interested in pursuing that explored the issues surrounding and questions regarding the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline Proposal. The idea was to use a book, Extract,The Pipeline Wars, Volume 1: Enbridge, comprised of articles from the Vancouver Observer following the issue over several years, as the foundation for the project. John had already been in discussions with Sebastien Archibald and Chelsea Hamberlin, the two principal artists of Vancouver-based indie Theatre Company ITSAZOO.
He recognized very early on that in order to tell this story adequately it required an aboriginal perspective as the proposed pipeline directly impacted over a hundred First Nations.
So he approached me. John asked a very simple question: How are we meant to live?
I don’t know? But I knew if I am to do this project, my company Savage Society needed to co-pro with ITSAZOO, to lend our perspective and to explore this question together as partners.
To help us imagine and explore the stories with a visual sense, John also contacted Video Projection Designer and Photographer Tim Matheson.
I felt that it was essential that we have an aboriginal female voice at the table so I contacted my friend, actor and playwright, Quelemia Sparrow.
With our core company assembled, we started by examining the book. We met as a company, reading the book together, exploring and discussing it chapter by chapter. We pulled anything between quotations as potential dialogue and text. Our approach brought a number of challenges and discoveries. The articles read well, but they were journalistic in nature and didn’t immediately lend themselves to theatre. To play them required a lot reworking to make it dramatic.
This reworking had to be carried out with a delicate hand so as to not to manipulate the verbatim text and overly distort the sources intent or meaning. The scope and scale of the issues and personal stories were dramatic enough, but the voice of the journalists who wrote the articles needed to be included to make any of it make sense as a piece of theatre. So we invented a character called “The Journalist” that could contain that voice. We also explored media coverage, or “noise“, from both sides of this intensely polarized issue. The noise is all around us. Polluting the water. Nonsense and shitfaced opinions from demagogues and fear mongers. To search for any truth about this the issue you will quickly find that it is distorted by a discord between facts and feelings:
Do you feel that there is an economic benefit? Or you do you like water and everything that it sustains? Those are the arguments.
The facts themselves seem only to be useful as tools to understanding. Understanding requires experience and a connection to the story. So we began to explore our personal connections to these issues. Asking ourselves the central question: How are we meant to live? Like so many things about the Petro-Chemical Industrial complex, it’s just so fucking big.
Petroleum is in everything! We burn it, Play with it, eat it, wash with it, wear it, drive with it, sleep on it, War with it, fly with it, ship it, text and send emails with it, breath it, fuck it. Everything we do in this modern industrial technologically saturated world is made possible only by the wondrously complex hydrocarbon chains we call oil.
It is so ubiquitous to our civilization that we take it completely for granted. How can we possibly live without it? How can we possibly live with it? How are we meant to live?
Over the course of about a year and a half, we collectively wrote a first draft that initially read at almost 3 hours. Like I said, big. We were given an opportunity to present a staged reading at the 2015 Talking Stick Festival. So for the next 6 months we delegated three writers to take over that end of the project: myself, Sebastien, and Quelamia. We proceeded to knock it down to a manageable size. We cut it in half and read this second draft at the Talking Stick Festival. We received a ton of helpful feedback.
The evolving nature of this story has dramatically shaped our work (pun intended). Since we started this project, the world has gotten hotter. The Kitimat Plebiscite resulted in a no vote. The price of oil has tanked. The NDP swept the Alberta provincial elections for the first time in history. The Middle East is melting down. Vancouver experienced its very own oil spill in the Burrard Inlet. Burnaby Mountain became the site of a massive protest against the twinning of the Trans Mountain Pipeline. And the Tsilhqot’in Nation won a lands claim case in the Supreme Court of Canada, upholding their claim to their un-ceded ancestral territories.
All of it.
This decision will pave the way for the rest of the First Nations who have never ceded their lands, to reclaim what was always theirs, redefining the relationship between First Nations and the Federal and Provincial Governments who have occupied, administered, and settled their lands for only the last 150 years.
Right now the First Nations are shaking the foundations of the province we still call British Columbia, and any pipeline to the Pacific has to pass through them.
So where do we go from here? We began this project thinking it was about a pipeline. We thought that the source for this story was a book of articles and our interpretation of second-hand accounts. What we’ve discovered is that it’s about us. It’s about our relationship to this land. It’s about rediscovering what is important to us as citizens of this one and only Earth. It’s about what it means to be a human being in this technologically saturated media frenzied world. As we move towards another draft and another workshop this summer at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, we’ve cut the Journalist, stripped away the verbatim, toned down the noise, and listened to each other, and to ourselves. How are we meant to live?
Sea Sick, written and performed by Alanna Mitchell
“The ocean contains the switch of life. Not the land, not the atmosphere – the ocean. And that switch can be turned off.” ~ Alanna Mitchell, Sea Sick
* * *
In May 2014, I wrote a piece for this very publication called Why the Canadian Arts Coalition doesn’t speak for me. The CAC at that time had recently come out in support of the Harper Government’s 2014 budget, for “renewing key programs”. This essentially boils down to a big thanks-for-not-cutting-arts-funding, while avoiding mention of any other aspect of the government’s agenda.
In my article I argued that it was irresponsible for me – for our community – to support arts funding policies while ignoring so many other issues we examine/question/challenge as artists: the corrosion of civil liberties, draconian “tough on crime” policies, the treatment of our indigenous population, the list goes on. Among several other Harper-related issues I could not ignore, was the muzzling of scientists, and the blatant disregard for anything resembling environmental policies related to climate change.
“My priorities as a citizen outweigh my priorities as a cultural worker”, I wrote.
* * *
This May, I spent much of the month touring a show for The Theatre Centre that examines how the global ocean has come to be “warm, breathless, and sour”. Alanna Mitchell’s Sea Sick opened The Theatre Centre’s new home in March last year, and has been touring the country ever since, with stops in Montreal, Vancouver, and Calgary, as well as a successful remount in Toronto. Last year it was nominated for a Dora Award for Outstanding New Play. This play was getting around.
And so in May of 2015 – one year after writing about the Canadian Arts Coalition – I found myself taking Alanna and the show to the Uno Festival in Victoria. Prior to UnoFest, however, some of The Theatre Centre team, including Artistic Director Franco Boni, our Manager of Artist & Community Activation Tiana Roebuck, and myself, all made our way with Alanna to Ottawa to be a part of NAC’s Ontario Scene.
Not only did we have the opportunity to present the work three times to the fantastic audiences of Ottawa, we also had the chance to introduce Alanna and her stories and research on Parliament Hill. The World Wildlife Fund had caught wind of the fact that Sea Sick would be in Ottawa, and got in touch with Alanna and The Theatre Centre to help arrange a lunch meeting with the government’s “All-Party Oceans Caucus”. So we all marched over to the hill, where Alanna took the opportunity to teach the caucus the definition of PH, and Ocean acidification.
We even conducted a little experiment in which Alanna demonstrated (with chalk and vinegar) how hydrogen ions in vinegar “steal” the calcium carbonate out of chalk – the same process that is happening in our oceans. As ocean water becomes ever more acidic, hydrogen ions are grabbing on to calcium carbonate – the same stuff that makes up bones, and teeth… and the skeletal structures of phytoplankton. And phytoplankton supplies this planet with 50% of its oxygen. The ocean, after all, contains the switch of life.
Alanna asks MP Fin Donnelly, Co-chair of the All-Party Oceans Caucus, to drop the chalk into the pitcher of vinegar. (We had to smuggle the bottles of vinegar past security upon arrival at Parliament Hill.)
And how is the ocean becoming more acidic? We’re all pretty familiar with how an excess of carbon dioxide is affecting our air and our atmosphere, but I think we’re less familiar with the fact that approximately a third of human-created CO2 finds its way into the ocean. As the CO2 dissolves into the ocean, carbonic acid is formed, leading to higher acidity. Alanna pointed out to the room that over-fishing may not be our biggest problem in the ocean anymore, given that we’re actually facing a situation in which the oceans’ organisms are finding it more and more difficult to survive in ocean waters at all.
Whenever Alanna performs the vinegar experiment in the show, there are always audible murmurs throughout the audience as they come to realize the relationship of chalk and vinegar to bones and carbonic acid. But the loudest gasps can always be heard as she spells out the timeline for all this acidification: it all dates back to just a few hundred years – to the beginning of the industrial revolution when we started burning fossil fuels.
* * *
After the closing performance of Sea Sick at Ontario Scene (which was attended by some of the MPs we’d had lunch with – including MP, and leader of the Green Party, Elizabeth May), our team returned to festival hotel. As we passed by the festival’s welcome table, we realized we’d forgotten to pick up our Ontario Scene t-shirts. I’m not usually one for event t-shirts, but these ones came in women’s sizes, which is too rare to pass up.
Here’s the back of the shirt:
I had a moment when I saw the logos of the festival’s major sponsors. It reminded me of a moment I’d had several months earlier while attending the premiere of my husband’s play Butcher at Alberta Theatre Projects. A group of us were attending a Q&A session with Butcher’s director and playwright. Upon arrival, attendees were given welcome bags, and lanyards to wear.
Halfway through the Q&A, while sipping a coffee, I looked down and finally noticed I was wearing advertising for Enbridge around my neck. It was an Enbridge-branded lanyard. But of course the event was sponsored by Enbridge… we were in Alberta after all. The ATP new play program, of which Butcher was a part, is called Enbridge New Canadian Plays.
The ethics of arts funding is an issue I (and many others long before me) have considered and questioned for some time. So many of us in Ontario make our art through funding that comes straight out of gambling proceeds – you’ll note the OLG logo right next to Enbridge’s on the t-shirt.
Within the last few decades, new federal legislation was enacted, eventually banning all tobacco sponsorships of art and sporting events, forever changing the landscape of arts funding in this country.
In the end, despite the huge impact that tobacco sponsorships were having on arts and culture in this country, it was decided personal and public health outweighed these artistic benefits. And it was argued that the arts would go on to survive without this funding. It was more important that we make strides in ridding society of these addictive and unhealthy products: “By ending the export of tobacco advertising, Canada will be a more responsible global citizen”.
But don’t we, as a society, have an unhealthy reliance on oil? Aren’t we being told, internationally, that we need to rid ourselves of our dependence on fossil fuels? That our current activities are unsustainable, that we’re destroying the planet, that it’s the world’s most vulnerable populations that will be the hardest hit by oncoming impacts of climate change?
The Canadian Government may not be able – or willing – to acknowledge it, but hell, even the President of the United States is calling climate change deniers “stupid, short sighted, irresponsible…” The science is clear, he says. What about our children, he asks.
But these questions are always asked (and I ask them myself): what if the art can’t be made without the funding? If oil is going to continue to be a major part of our national and world economy, shouldn’t we take advantage and benefit from these activities? Shouldn’t we make these corporations pay in some way for some good in this country? Can’t we do good things with this money? Educate our audiences? Make change from within?
* * *
Alanna’s Sea Sick doesn’t offer solutions – those are up to us. Sea Sick tells us the story of how we came to be in our current situation… and about Alanna’s own personal journey of uncovering this story, the fear of telling it, and the strength to forgive and move on. We learn that the way forward may come down to each of us recognizing what we personally have to give to the world, and offering that.
In some cases, that’s going to mean writing a play about the ocean becoming warm, breathless, and sour, and touring it around the country. The world, perhaps.
I didn’t ask Alanna what she thought of the t-shirts at Ontario Scene. And I find it difficult to talk to my friends at ATP about the lanyard I found hanging around my neck. But it’s a conversation I think we need to start having. Openly and honestly… knowing that there may be no good and right and obvious answers.
But in the end, I have to wonder about those values of mine: do my priorities as a global citizen truly outweigh my priorities as a cultural worker?
Climate Change is real and a major threat to life on earth.
The President of the United States, basically every scientist not on a carbon-producer payroll, and the United Nations are in agreement on this fact. This colossal, generation-defining challenge has naturally had an impact on theatre makers, especially in a country like Canada that is a major exporter and producer of carbon.
What is happening? What can we do? Who is it okay to take money from in this context?
Each of the contributors to this edition recognizes the answers to these questions are not black and white. We are each implicated in a system that contributes to climate change, and yet complicity does not equal powerlessness.
This week Canada joined with Japan to block a G7 agreement to reduce greenhouse gases by 2050, preferring to set a target for the rather ridiculous date of 2100. Meanwhile in Alberta, The Calgary Herald had engaged in a three–partseries on how the decline of oil prices has changed arts funding in the province. The situation is fluid and now is a time where art and artists can play a part shaping new models and ideas for sustainability.
As Kevin Loring succinctly puts it in his article, “How should we live?”
