Tacoma Chapter
Our solution to climate change? Democracy.
Music
(scroll to end for Dance/Performance)
Antonique Smith, Love Song to the Earth, 2024, new version, accompanied by its composer Toby Gad. The song was produced soft-rock-anthem style in 2015, with Paul McCartney, Jon Bon Jovi, Sean Paul, Sheryl Crow and others joining in support of the Paris Climate Agreement. Smith's powerful stripped-down version has the same lyrics, but an appropriately sadder, more soulful tone.
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This is a love song to the earth
You're no ordinary world
A diamond in the universe
Heaven's poetry to us
Keep it safe, yeah, yeah
'Cause it's our world
It's our world...
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Smith is a climate activist who launched her Climate Revival effort recently to "take the climate message into the Black church." (Bill McKibben). She said, "We're in a new civil rights movement, fighting for the right to clean air, clean water and existence. We inform them that the biggest cause of climate change is pollution from big oil. They learn that the pollution from power plants and petrochemical factories is predominantly in communities of color and poor communities causing cancer and asthma. We make it really hit home!"
Kenny Loggins, This Island Earth, 1997. Another sweet, mellow 'love song to the Earth' for Earth Month! Loggins donated his work for the TV special and Emmy-nominated educational film of the same name created for the National Park Service and the Audubon Society.
Maybe our moment is gone
Maybe we've stood and watched
A moment too long
So why do I believe?
Someone said
That the truth's too much to take
But tell me how we can face it
If we only want to look the other way
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Oshima Brothers, Burning Earth, 2022. "Those were the golden days, but look the gold is gray." A litany of hellish conditions follows--heat, fire, drought, haze, ashes. But "you are the rain...and underneath the gray the gold remains." (There's hope that people can still help turn things around). The liner notes simply say We are in a climate crisis. Call your representatives. These folk-pop musicians and filmmakers from Portland ME performed in Ayana Johnson's Climate Variety Show (scroll down to Performance)
​Midwinter summer days
Harmless as hand grenades
A manufactured age
Will we escape
My eyes are burning red
But your finger points ahead
And underneath the gray
The gold remains​
The Pretenders, My City was Gone, 1982. This lament over rampant development and degradation of nature was written by band leader Chrissie Hynde after a visit back to Akron in the 80's. "All my favorite places....reduced to parking spaces...the farms of Ohio had been replaced by shopping malls and Muzak filled the air." The problem certainly hasn't gotten any better in the decades since then! The tone is angry but the rockin' bass line is so catchy, even Rush Limbaugh chose it for a theme song! (in 2011, reportedly enjoying the irony of an arch-conservative using such an anti-conservative song) ​
Jeffrey Derus, From Wilderness, 2022, a choral meditation on the Pacific Coast Trail performed by Sacra Profana. Evoking the soothing effects and sacredness of nature, this award-winning choral composition utilizes vocalists, texts, crystal singing bowls, and cello. "In his piece, Derus has aligned the rainbow of seven pitches of the singing bowls...with the seven chakras of the body...as well as their attributes: stability, pleasure, confidence, compassion, communication, intuition, and awareness." Five soloists will give voice to different “spirit animals” (the wolf, fox, fish, eagle, and mockingbird) that one might encounter on the trail. Through landscape and soundscape...it offers quiet meditation and profound beauty."​​
(Thanks to Nancy Feree-Clark for this suggestion! She saw the 2024 NW premiere in Seattle performed by The Esoterics).
Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Green is Blue, 2019. Written as if from a future perspective five years ago, the lyrics seem ominously current today. Lost opportunities, divided people, degraded planet, and suffering wildlife no longer seem the least bit like imaginings of the future but today's headlines. Simple piano chords and his trademark plaintive vocals make for a beautiful and moving lament. Young has long urged environmental awareness and action. "Mostly, I would like a lot of people to see what's going on on the planet that is so obvious to me. I don't - I just don't know why people don't get it. Or if they do get it, then why don't they get with it?"
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And I know why green is blue
There's so much we didn't do
Oh, I know why green is blue
We heard the warning calls, ignored them
We watched the weather change, we saw the fires and floods
We saw the people rise, divided
We fought each other while we lost our coveted prize...
Bernie Krause, The Great Animal Orchestra Symphony for Orchestra and Wild Soundscapes, with composer Richard Blackford, 2012. For over 40 years, musician and bio-acoustician Krause sought out truly wild habitats, free of the noise of human activity, and recorded over 5,000 hours of the myriad voices and rhythms found there. Listen to wild soundscapes on the exhibition's interactive website developed by the Fondation Cartier.
The book The Great Animal Orchestra, "shares fascinating insight into how deeply animals rely on their aural habitat to survive and the damaging effects of extraneous noise on the delicate balance between predator and prey, as well as his lifelong pursuit of natural music in its purest form, and an impassioned case for the conservation of one of our most overlooked natural resources-the music of the wild."​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
The symphony, a collaboration between Krause and Blackford, is drawn from the textures, rhythms, and melodies found in the field recordings and is an "homage to the source of our music, the voice of the natural world." Excerpts:
"Song of the Musician Wren"
"Scherzo and Riffs"
John Luther Adams, Become Ocean, 2014. This Alaskan composer won the Pulitzer Prize for his majestic orchestral creation inspired by the oceans of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. Commissioned by the Seattle Symphony, it is scored for three spatially-separated groups of instruments, and the entire piece is a palindrome--the second half is the first half played in reverse! There are rippling effects, surges, the effect of waves, and great "tsunami" crescendos of sound. A New Yorker critic called it "perhaps the loveliest apocalypse in musical history". The Guardian ranks it "the 10th greatest work of art music to be written since 2000."
."Life emerged from the ocean and right now we are facing an unprecedented and likely self-created threat: we are melting the polar ice caps and the seas are rising. If things don't change we may find ourselves quite literally becoming ocean again." Adams once worked as an environmental activist but later "took a leap of faith, which is that music and art can matter as much as politics. In recent years I've come to believe they matter more."
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Cosmo Sheldrake, Wake Up Calls 2020. An album composed over nine years, based on his recordings of British birds on the endangered list, accompanied by Sheldrake's whimsically sweet music. "Running through all his work is a belief that the world is a noisy and musical place with the power to change how we think, feel and imagine...he creates music that speaks to the urgency and possibility of our times." 50% of the royalties from Wake Up Calls are distributed among conservation organizations that work specifically to protect those birds and their habitats. (His brother is mycologist Merlin Sheldrake, author of the excellent book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape our Futures.)
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Mumu Fresh (Maimouna Youssef), State of Emergency, 2023. Environmental degradation is everybody's problem, sings this Grammy-nominated singer, rapper and activist of Choctaw, Cree, Cherokee and African-American heritage, and the "bald heads" just can't be relied on to act.
The world is waking up
No time for politricks...
This is a state of emergency
Don't scroll by
Show some urgency
If we don't act now
It will be too late
We can't let the bald heads decide our fate
All Around the world river running dry
And at the same time hurricanes and floods at an all times high...
Erik Ian Walker, Climate, 2022, performed by the Climate Music Ensemble. The Climate Music Project in San Francisco takes real climate data to produce instrumental pieces that evoke the change. Walker's composition uses data from 1870 to projected data in 2125, and each minute of it represents 25 years on Earth:
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere → tempo
Surface air temperature → pitch and harmony
Earth Energy Balance → volume, modulation, distortion
Ocean pH → musical form, integrity of form
A quietly beautiful violin solo introduces the early years (about minute 10), but then, as Walker explains, "as the Co2 levels rise, the music goes faster. As the temperature increases, the harmony gets more dissonant, pitches go out of tune, and the melody becomes more urgent, frantic, chaotic. Then the Earth’s Energy Balance gets thrown out of whack, things become more distorted and instruments modulate. As the ocean pH levels drop, the music starts to lose its structure entirely. Just chaos. We found, I think, just the right level of unpleasantness and [held] it there just long enough, so that audiences in the theater would be just about to…get up and leave, and then the piece would end.”
“Music is really visceral… It can make climate change feel more personal and inspire people to take action.”
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Antonio Vivaldi, The Four Seasons, ca.1720, reimagined as altered by climate change, by Hache Costa, 2023.
It debuted on Global Climate Action Day at Teatro EDP Gran Via, Madrid, and the performance was enhanced with projected images of climate change impacts, hoping to send a wake-up call and urge swift action. Temperatures have been soaring and heat waves increasing in Spain--the musical adaptation reflects that with a much longer and more dramatic "Summer" section and abbreviated sections for the cooler seasons. Costa believes that "if Vivaldi were alive today, he too might have portrayed a more aggressive and gritty approach, mirroring the drastic climate shifts."
This is not the only such recent adaptation of Vivaldi's work: See others.
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Aurora (Aurora Aksnes), "The Seed," 2019.This Norwegian indie singer and environmental activist based her passionate message of warning on the Cree proverb (also used by Greenpeace on banners in 1983):
"When the last tree has been cut down,
the last fish caught,
the last river poisoned,
only then will we realize we cannot eat money."
She said, "I'm missing anger in the youth. Not the blind rage, pointed toward all and nothing. But the kind of rage that wakes you up in the morning, the kind of rage that inspires you to do something with the power you have in you. So I made a song. Filled with fire. And power. It's time for us to really fight for her. This is a cry for Mother Earth."
(Thanks to Bridget Mousaw for this contribution!)
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Ludovico Einaudi, "Elegy for the Arctic," 2016. The Greenpeace press release: "Acclaimed Italian composer and pianist Ludovico Einaudi performs one of his own compositions on a floating platform in the Arctic Ocean, in front
of the Wahlenbergbreen glacier (in Svalbard, Norway). The composition, Elegy for the Arctic, was inspired by eight million voices from around the world calling for Arctic protection (from the OSPAR Commission). The Greenpeace ship the Arctic Sunrise carried Einaudi, the grand piano and eight million voices to Svalbard." Note the dramatic timing of ice calving during the premiere performance of this hauntingly beautiful piece!
Viet Cuong, Re(new)al, a Concerto for Percussion Quartet, 2018.Three continuous movements: Hydro, Wind, and Solar. "I have tremendous respect for renewable energy initiatives and the commitment to creating a new, better reality for us all. Cooperation and synergy are core themes of the piece, as I believe we all have to work together to move forward." The percussionists' movements. are carefully choreographed--for instance during part of Wind they rotated around a single drum like wind turbine blades as they played. (We enjoyed seeing this performed by Northwest Sinfonietta at the University of Puget Sound on 1/20/24, it was incredibly original and entertaining!)
Mozetich, Marjan, Postcards from the Sky I: Unfolding Sky, 1996. This Italian/Canadian composer, like Aaron Copland, began in an avant-garde minimalist mode but later changed to a more romantic and accessible yet still sophisticated style. Performed at the same concert as mentioned above, it was accompanied by poetry readings by Tacoma Tree Foundation's Lowell Wyse. This gorgeous piece, with its upward-rising, powerful and majestic tone, paired perfectly with a poem about a towering Sequoia in the city from TTF's workshop, "An Ode to Tacoma Trees."
Sister Hieu Duc, Brother Pham Huu, with rapper Born I, "Little Star," From Plum Village tour 2023, including a retreat for climate leaders and activists "to deal with both personal suffering and the collective suffering of climate destruction, biodiversity loss, and social injustice," based on Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh's teachings.
"You and I collective energy, that's how it's s'posed to be...Love is a paintbrush, life is the biggest art..."
(Thanks to Linda Cohan for this music suggestion)
Melissa Etheridge, "I Need to Wake Up," 2006. Written for the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, it won the Academy Award for best song. In her acceptance speech, she said "Mostly I have to thank Al Gore, for inspiring us, for inspiring me, showing that caring about the Earth is not Republican or Democrat; it's not red or blue, it's all green." That year she went on tour across the U.S. and Canada in a biodiesel bus.
"I need to change, I need to shake up, I need to speak out...I've been asleep and I need to wake up now"
One Republic, "Truth to Power," 2017. Written for the film, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. The lyrics for this call to action on climate change by Ryan Tedder and T Bone Burnett are from the perspective of Mother Earth, talking to those who would betray her. "If you could see me the way I see you, If you could feel me the way I feel you, You'd be a believer."
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David Crosby and Graham Nash, "To the Last Whale/Critical Mass/Wind on the Water," 1975. This elegiac lament on the senseless slaughter of whales was soon adopted by the "Save the Whales" movement. Nash wrote it after seeing a blue whale from Crosby's boat--"it is preposterous that we are killing these creatures...it's not that we don't know, it's just that we don't want to care." An intricate a cappella piece initiates the reverent mood, then lush harmonies (here aided by James Taylor) and strings carry the poignant lyrics.
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Sting (Gordon Sumner) "One Fine Day," illustrated by James Larese. Performed at the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize Concert. "Sting calls for climate sanity in the charming yet urgent animated video, with beautiful imagery undercut by a sense of peril."
"Apologists say
The weather's just a cycle we can't change
Scientists say
We've pushed those cycles way beyond
Dear leaders, please do something quick
Time is up, the planet's sick
But hey, we'll all be grateful
One fine day?"
Sting with Rhythms del Mundo, "Fragile Planet," 2008. Produced by Artist Project Earth. Sting has been extremely active in social and environmental causes for decades. "on and on the rain will say how fragile we are, how fragile we are..."
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Kenny Loggins, "Conviction of the Heart," 1991. Al Gore called this "the unofficial anthem of the environmental movement" when Loggins performed it on Earth Day in 1995 at the National Mall in Washington D.C. "It's been too many years of talking now...You say you're aware, believe and you care, but do you care enough to talk with conviction of the heart?" (True in 1991, still sadly true today)
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Paul Halley/Paul Winter, "Ocean Dream," 1987. From the album Whales Alive, a celebration of whales featuring recordings of humpback songs in improvisational duets or trios with human musicians on sax and pipe organ. Paul Winter was a pioneer in studying whale songs, and said this was "a milestone experience in my musical life."
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Jackson Browne, "Before the Deluge," 1974. Prophetic lyrics, “Some of them were angry/At the way the earth was abused/By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power/And they struggled to protect her from them/Only to be confused/By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour.”
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Neil Young, "After the Gold Rush," 1970. Such a hauntingly beautiful song. The line “Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s” has been updated by Young, who now sings “in the 21st Century” in concert. "He has remained a committed environmental activist and in 2018 he criticized President Trump for his denial of climate-change science."
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Ellie Goulding and Steven Price, "In This Together" from NETFLIX "Our Planet," 2019.
Excerpt of lyrics:
How did we get here?
There was so much love in us
And all I have left is my faith
That I can change
I can't watch this burn
I can't watch this burn to the ground
You'd have thought we'd learned
You'd have thought we'd learned by now​
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Marvin Gaye, "Mercy Mercy Me (the Ecology)" 1971. Remember this? "What about this overcrowded land how much more abuse from man can she stand." There are multiple videos on YouTube, find your favorite.
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Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi” 1970. One of the first, and still one of the best! Lines like these say it all:
“Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone?
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot”
Dance/Performance
SpectorDance, Ocean Trilogy, a collaboration between SpectorDance and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, premier 2017 (but still being updated and performed today!)
Ocean Trilogy is a "new multidisciplinary performance and educational outreach program inspired by filmed interviews with a wide variety of ocean science experts. Based on an evolving partnership between choreographer Fran Spector Atkins, media artist William Roden, rap artist Baba Brinkman, and scientist Kyra Schlining, Ocean Trilogy looks at the challenges confronting our ocean and hopeful possibilities from cutting-edge ocean science research." Themes include ocean acidification, plastic pollution, the food web, extinction of species, climate change, the power of human imagination, engineering, bioluminescence, and cross-disciplinary partnership.
"By weaving together audio sound bites from interviews with scientists, underwater film footage, contemporary classical and rap music, and a variety of dance styles, Ocean Trilogy communicates the urgency of the problem on a level that reaches people’s hearts."
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Excerpt: "Bioluminescence" Watch on YouTube
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Andrew Boyd, Stand-up Tragedy Tour for I Want a Better Apocalypse: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope and Gallows Humor 2023. I entered his title in the Books section when it came out, because I personally found it very useful, honest, and surprisingly funny! So, book tour as stand-up makes a lot of sense. "Boyd invites us to reflect on some of the biggest questions that face humanity....steers readers through their climate angst as he walks his own. He finds answers that will surprise, inspire, and maybe even make you laugh."
Watch on YouTube​​
Ayana E. Johnson, Jason Sudeikis, Brad Einstein, and many more, Climate Variety Show (as book tour for Johnson's What if We Get it Right?) with music (Oshima Brothers), game-show skit, poetry reading (Jacqueline Woodson), hula hoop science storytelling (Perrin Ireland), magic tricks, dance-off, and more! Johnson's book is infectiously energetic and the show is self-described as "An irreverent, forward looking, solution focused, slightly chaotic, utterly delightful mix..." This marine biologist and author feels that a message via pop culture, humor and futurism may meet this crucial moment and wake us up from our climate doom paralysis. The show includes proactive elements for the audience such as filling out a personal Venn diagram and texts for Environmental Voter Project. As Bill McKibben writes, "Ayana Johnson is no Pollyanna. She’s a hard-nosed and extremely competent scientist who has not shied for a minute from facing the hard truths. So if she thinks there remain ways we can use this crisis to build a better world, then rejoice, listen, and act!" ​
"Earth gone give it to ya" Hila the Earth. Watch on YouTube
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Annie Saunders, installation artist, and Climate Power, Apocalyptic Dioramas in 6 storefront windows of the Germania Building, Milwaukee during the Republican National Convention, July 15-16, 2024. A woman looks around in despair at her flood-damaged room and scattered FEMA paperwork. A man sits in a child's room filled with melting plastic toys, his flushed face bent over the broken air conditioner, an orange haze of pollution outside the window. Three men in suits sit with their heads buried in a pile of sand, the TV news glitching on the wall. These sets, props and actors displayed daily life for ordinary people during extreme weather scenarios, taken from firsthand accounts. Above them, digital signs flash warning messages: NO END IN SIGHT, RECORD HEAT, BILLIONS TO BIG OIL, RISK OF DEATH. Located right on the path to the convention, the windows got plenty of attention from passersby. Some responded as,'Yeah, I'm a Republican and I'm a Trump voter, but like, my house flooded, I recognize this situation.'
A spokesperson for Climate Power, “By putting Big Oil’s corruption on full display, we’re confronting Republicans with scenes inspired by real-life damage caused by their disastrous policies and reminding voters about the catastrophic consequences for our environment and economy if we don’t keep far-right extremists out of office.”
The Climate Comedy Cohort is a 9-month fellowship co-created and directed by Generation180 and the Center for Media & Social Impact’s GoodLaugh initiative. The Cohort "brings together diverse comedians from around the country to flip the script on the way we think about climate change. Research shows that the majority of Americans are concerned about climate change, but most know little about meaningful steps they can take... Humans now have an unprecedented opportunity to make a huge impact on climate change in their own homes and communities...Individuals can also make a massive impact on climate change through policy advocacy. Comedians play an essential role in helping people understand this stuff."
Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, On Behalf of Nature, 2016. (First part of a trilogy with Cellular Songs 2018 and Indra's Net 2022) In her long career, this avant-garde singer and composer has explored a wide array of wordless vocal textures and expressive sounds paired with simple instrumental accompaniment and a kind of folk movement. "On Behalf of Nature is a plea for ecological awareness and biodiversity with no lectures, just beauty and empathy, revealing truths that are difficult to articulate in any language." Suggestions of forest whoops, beehive buzz, cicada rasps, earthy ground shifts, mix with other moments of lullaby sweetness and ethereal serenity. In her liner notes Monk, quoting poet Gary Snyder, stresses the importance of the artist’s ability to “bear witness” to the natural environment and create artwork that draws from its “wildness.”
Recognized as "one of the most unique and influential artists of our times," a "magician of the voice," she received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2015.
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Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, Kyoto, 2024, at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon. A dramatization of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, a landmark agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions taking years of tortuous negotiations (sometimes over a single word!) In order to convey the human drama involved, Murphy and Robertson decided to use Donald Pearlman, an American lawyer advising Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, as the anti-hero narrator and "agent of disagreement" who continued to foster discord and delay. We uncomfortably identify with Pearlman, if we are honest, in avoiding hard change and clinging to our fossil fuel addictions.
With the Protocol's signing, the authors “want the audience to feel the euphoria that something is possible, that there is hope, that we can do this together. But it seems to us that we have to change the weather, literally and metaphorically. How do we stop the defining question of our time being dragged into a wider culture war of disagreement? We have to conduct our discourse in a more compassionate, productive way, and make arguments that innovative and immediate mitigation will not only prevent climate catastrophe but also create livelihoods for the future and ensure energy security in an increasingly dangerous world.”​​​
Christoph Winkler (German choreographer), Mapping Environmental Dance Project, 2021. "The aim of Environmental-Dance.com is to make climate change tangible and visible on different levels, using dance, scientific data and personal testimony." Clicking on a specific region on the globe on the website displays climate data and takes you to the commissioned dance videos--responses to climate change and environmental degradation, mostly from Africa and the Global South. Another element of the project is videos of traditional dances. "Many cultures have a large repertoire of dances that express the relationship between humans and nature in many different ways. Harvest dances, animal dances or rituals, such those to call for rain, are often part of complex ceremonies based on the close observation of how nature shifts and changes, as well as an understanding of local ecosystems." This is complemented by interviews in which farmers, artists and climate activists report on how climate change becomes tangible for them.
Parody Project (Don Caron), "Confound the Science II," 2018. A little humor, anyone? Humor is one of humanity's best time-honored coping mechanisms when faced with frustrating and frightening situations. Parody Project protests environmental degradation using the rock classic, "The Sound of Silence," with Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon wigs and brilliantly angry lyrics!
Global Water Dances: Dance for Safe Water Everywhere, 2011-present, 180 locations and over 1,000 dancers worldwide. At 3pm local time on the same set day, community groups of dancers perform the same choreography to the same music. "Global Water Dances orchestrates a biennial multinational, community-oriented event that takes place at different water-related sites around the world, to raise awareness about water issues and to celebrate water through movement. We connect and support a global community of choreographers and dancers to inspire action and international collaboration for water issues through the universal language of dance."
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Terje Isungset and Bill Covitz, When Ice Sings, Ice Music Festival Norway, and other performances, 2012-present. With musical instruments made of ice or partly of ice, they perform in special "igloo" concert halls around the world. The sound is amazingly beautiful, crisp and pure. “If you take artificially frozen ice out of the freezer, acoustically it has no sound properties. It’s as flat as concrete. Natural ice has a hugely dynamic acoustic composition. You can tune it to a D flat, and it sounds correct. The musicians are always shocked at how accurate the sound is." "For Isungset, it’s not just about the music though. He’s also making an environmental statement. The event itself metaphorically mimics global warming as it melts away every spring after the audiences have gone. In partnership with the Bergen-based Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, the Ice Music Festival Norway presents discussions and art installations illuminating the effects of climate change on snow and ice."
Ice Quartet, Watch on YouTube.
"When Ice Sings" with dancer Embla Skogedal Bergerud.Watch on YouTube
Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante, The Bureau of Linguistical Reality, started 2015, ongoing. The artists set up a "Mobile Field Office" at the Paris COP for people to talk about their feelings about climate and to help each one create a newly-invented term to describe their own personal experience of climate distress. That custom-made word "won’t end a drought or put out wildfires, but it might, eventually, motivate you to act in some way."
"Favorites are shadowtime (acute consciousness of the possibility that the near future will be drastically different than the present), blissonance (when an otherwise blissful experience in nature is disrupted by the feeling that your presence is harming that very place), and ennuipocalypse (a doomsday that occurs slowly, instead of all at once). Anyone can submit words via the Bureau’s website, but they say the real power of the project comes from the in-person interaction, the conversation and the space that helps people understand that their feelings are valid." The Bureau goes "into public spaces with communities that haven't been given an opportunity to share their grief. We’re just here to listen.” So far, the response has been "off the charts."
Lelavision (Leah Mann and Ela Lamblin, based on Vashon Island), Pandemonium, performance on their musical ship at the 2023 Tacoma Ocean Fest. "A ship of fools? Or a journey into the future? Lelavision creates captivating circuses from musical sculptures, sailing their Pandemonium over an ocean of climate crisis to planetary healing." Plastic bottles, styrofoam, and scrap metal are incorporated into the kinetic sculpture/trash trawler, as well as lots of noise and energy! (video below)
Diana Movius and MOVEius Contemporary Ballet, Glacier: a Climate Change Ballet, 2015. Movius is both a professional ballet dancer and policy expert who has written papers about climate change and deforestation and put in work at the World Bank and the Center for Clean Air Policy. For her, the two disciplines complement one another. “Dance is a great medium to personify love and despair--in Glacier: A Climate Change Ballet, the dancers convey emotion through their movements, particularly in the ‘calving’ and ‘melting’ sections where they crash to the floor and ultimately bid adieu to the audience, and you can’t help but feel the emotion inherent in the movement."
Corey Baker, First Dance on Antarctica, 2018, with dancer Madeleine Graham and music by London Grammar. This young New Zealand choreographer aimed to celebrate the marvel that is Antarctica as well as to warn of its fragility. His project was supported by the scientific community there, who "were very on board and glad we were there to help tell this story in a different way." Captions at the end of the video read "While you have been watching, 860,000 tonnes of Antarctic ice have melted..." and "Let's not ignore the signs any longer."
"Dance for the Climate", Greenpeace International, 10,000 people on a beach in Copenhagen,2009. Took place during the UNCCC Copenhagen Summit. I can't find much information about this (help if you can!), but it's fun and energizing! I'm surprised and disappointed that there aren't many more large visible public events like it.
Ananya Chatterjea, Ananya Dance Theatre, Ashesh Barsha:Unending Monsoon, 2009. This feminist contemporary dance group is based in Minneapolis. This work is part of a trilogy focusing on environmental justice in "a world out of balance," which includes Pipaashaa: Extreme Thirst of 2007 (toxic contamination) and Daak: Lost Homes 2008 (land rights violations). Hindustani music by Aneesh Pradhan and Shubha Mudgal.
Tacoma City Ballet, Whalesong, performed at Tacoma Ocean Fest in 2019 and again as the festival grand finale at 4:30 pm June 12, 2022. "It’s back – Tacoma City Ballet’s beloved “Whalesong” ballet, choregraphed by Erin Ceragioli to the iconic “Song of the Humpback Whale” with 30 dancers and a 60-foot sea of silk."
Dancing Earth, Seeds Regeneration and Between Underground and Skyworld, 2019.
Dancing Earth is an indigenous contemporary dance group led by Rulan Tangen. "They collaborate with indigenous artists and musicians around the world, focusing on decolonizing theater at every level" with special attention to input from local tribal communities. Their work expresses deep grief at ecological losses combined with offerings of culturally-inspired ways of healing.
Davalois Fearon, Consider Water, 2015, Bronx River Park, a performance to grapple with the issue of water shortage. "Her family in the U.S. had already spent money bussing clean water to relatives in Jamaica when a conversation with the U.S. ambassador to the U. N. prompted Davalois Fearon to think about the big picture of water resources. As part of her work Consider Water, two dancers randomly distribute cups to audience members and a third pours water into some of the cups. The symbolism allows other audience members to glimpse what it feels like to be denied a resource, overlooked and ignored."
Extinction Rebellion’s Red Rebel Brigade, CODE RED, at Glasgow Central Station, Nov 2021. "The iconic Red Rebel Brigade joined forces with Scotland’s Blue Rebels in holding world leaders to account during the COP26 Climate Summit. They delivered a haunting performance and a reading, followed by a silent procession around the station and its concourse, ending in the unfurling of a banner signifying the end of their journey and the hope that COP26 will drive political climate action." “It is now CODE RED for humanity, for climate, and for nature. There is not a single moment more to waste, and policymakers who don’t come to the table ready to make sacrifices really will have blood on their hands.”
Nelson, choreographer, Joan Jeanrenaud, composer, Dead Reckoning, 2014, performed by the ODC Dance Company in San Francisco. The title refers to navigating in poor visibility, increasing the stress and likelihood of error-- is this our situation re: the climate crisis? This KQED newsroom special is great for some background on this beautiful and expressive piece. Click on image to watch the whole performance.
