In 2015-16, I had the opportunity to spend two years working with Riksteatern, Sweden’s touring national theatre, as leader of artistic and audience development. Part of my brief was to bring together practitioners from within and beyond the world of the performance arts to explore the role(s) of art under the shadow of climate change.
My starting point was to reject the basis on which artists are generally invited to collaborate in projects about climate change: however this is worded, it tends to come down to helping ‘deliver the message’. The result almost always fails – both as art and as political communication – because art isn’t a sophisticated extension of the public relations department or a cheap alternative to an advertising agency.
One of the fruits of this work was a list of the roles that art might sometimes play. I wrote this up in the context of a longer essay for Dark Mountain, ‘You Want It Darker’, but during this week’s Transformative Imagination workshop with the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, I realised that it might be useful to present this unfinished list on its own terms, as a contribution to conversations that seek to get beyond the old binary of ‘instrumentalisation’ vs ‘art for art’s sake’. So here it is:
Art can hold a space in which we move from the arm’s-length knowledge of facts, figures and projections, to the kind of knowledge that we let inside us, taking the risk that it may change us.
Art can give us just enough beauty to stay with the darkness, rather than flee or shut down.
Like the bronze shield given to Perseus by Athena, art and its indirect ways of knowing can allow us to approach realities which, if looked at directly, turn something inside us to stone.
Art can call us back from strategic calculations about which message will play best with which target group, insisting on the tricky need for honesty – there’s a line I kept coming back to, from the playwright Mark Ravenhill, that your responsibility when you walk on stage is to be ‘the most truthful person in the room’.
Art can teach us to live with uncertainty, to let go of our dreams of control.
Art can hold open a space of ambiguity, refusing the binary choices with which we are often presented – not least, the choice between forced optimism and simple despair.
(Thanks to Måns Lagerlöf for making the unlikely decision to bring me to work at Riksteatern – and to all the members of the Dark Mountain Workshop which I ran there and the guests who joined us in those conversations.)
Well, here’s a thing. My friend Emelie Enlund is a choreographer who has taken the Dark Mountain manifesto as the starting point for a whole practice of ‘uncivilised dance’. We got to know each other when she was part of the Dark Mountain Workshop which I hosted at Riksteatern in 2015-16 – and now the latest phase of her project is on stage at Dansens Hus in Stockholm, under the banner of We Love Holocene IV (12-13 April, 2017).
That’s the official trailer from Dansens Hus – and here’s another video from an earlier phase of We Love Holocene, a residency at Skarpnäcks kulturhus in Stockholm last year.
Of all the unexpected consequences flowing from that text which Paul and I wrote almost a decade ago, I can’t think of one that’s more unexpected – or more pleasing – than that our words should feed into work like this.
In 1678, the protestant preacher John Bunyan published what was to become one of the most widely-read books in the English language: The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to that which is to come: Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream. On this wintry morning in Stockholm, we are not headed for the Celestial City – if we talk about the world which is to come, it is a world turned upside down by the consequences of ways of living which we grew up taking for granted – yet Bunyan’s title seems to fit this journey.
And today, we are joined by an artist whose feet have followed long paths across Europe, the paths by which pilgrims have travelled through the centuries. Monique Besten is a walking artist: at the centre of her work are the encounters that happen on these journeys, the chance meetings and conversations, and the relationships that she weaves together as she walks. On her most recent journey, she walked from Barcelona to Paris for the COP21 climate conference.
In a world of cheap flights and expensive trains and car manufacturers who cheat on emissions tests, what does it mean to walk for weeks to a destination that could be reached in an afternoon? (I am writing this, three days after the workshop, on a bus between Västerås and Uppsala, a journey that would take two days on foot – or one on skis, under current conditions.) And what difference does it make to walk as an artist, rather than as a protester or a holidaymaker? These questions are in the room, as Monique tells us stories from her walks.
Also in the room is a fleet of paper ships. As she walked to Paris, Monique collected whatever discarded paper she found lying along the way – flyers, betting slips, pieces of newspaper – and folded it into ships. Each ship is dedicated to one of the people who helped her on this journey. In the evening, when we welcome the guests who have come to join us for The Village & The Forest, the ships are in the space between the pillars, in the middle of the room. (The same patch of floor that was covered in salt, three months ago, when Ansuman Biswas was here.)
This month, Monique and Fredrik and Johan and I sneaked in to Kägelbanan, the day before the workshop, and played at being spiders. We made webs joining the pillars, four walls of string that became the background to the maps that the group would make together.
I want to tell you about these maps.
The first map is a map of language, a map of words that matter.
This project started with questions like: what is the role of culture, under the shadow of climate change? What can we do, as artists, with this knowledge? We can’t make work that pretends that we don’t know. Nor can we pretend that art works as a delivery mechanism for messages – to treat art as a sophisticated extension of the Public Relations department, a low-paid advertising agency, is a misunderstanding. So we are searching for other answers.
One suggestion is that art can offer other languages in which to talk with each other about the mess the world is in. The language in which we generally talk about this mess is a daylight language, an expert language, a language of facts and models and policies. You can see some of these words, clustered towards the left-hand side of this map, some in English and some in Swedish. You can probably think of others that belong there: climate change, sustainability, resilience, security, technology, resources.
Art can remind us that other languages are possible, that other languages may be necessary, if we are to navigate the shadowed paths that lie ahead. The languages of night time and of twilight, of the ‘vargtimmen’ – the wolf hour, before dawn – that someone has added here, of the hour between dog and wolf.
To say that other languages are needed is not to suggest that the daylight words should be abandoned, though it may mean putting them in question. Around the cluster of these words, I notice the pairing of ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘honesty’, and the injunction to ‘slow down’.
My eyes cross the map to another cluster: ‘uncertainty’, ‘trust’, ‘grace’. We need words that touch parts of our lives that cannot be held at arm’s length.
Others invite us to reframe our conversations. What happens if, instead of accepting the designation of the new phase in planetary history as ‘The Anthropocene’ – ‘The Age of Man’ – we talk about ‘The Humbling’?
The second map is a map of the terrain in which we find ourselves – as artists, as people, as societies – when we start trying to face the mess the world is in.
The idea is to name the sticking points, the places where we see ourselves or others getting stuck, but also the starting points, the landmarks that might help us find a way forward.
Maybe you recognise some of these: ‘The Dragon of False Optimism’, ‘The Dead End of Dystopia’, ‘The Mountains of Madness’, ‘The Future City of Everything Is Gonna Be Fine’, ‘The Desert of No Conflict’, ‘The Great Swamp of Asking for Permission and Waiting for It’.
At this point, we are channelling Bunyan’s allegorical mapmaking, and this seems to make it possible – not just possible, but playful – to give names to our fears and darknesses, as well as to the fragile zones of hope.
There are images here that will stick with me. I’ve stood gazing out across ‘The Infinite Clearcut of Facts’, my heart sinking at its endlessness. With bare feet, I have walked ‘The Pebbled Beach of Guilt’ and sometimes arrived, unexpectedly, at the ‘Shore of Happy Meetings’.
The third map is a map of widening webs: the people, projects, networks and organisations with whom it feels as though this work is or ought to be connected.
The Dark Mountain Workshop sits at its centre, but this is only a reflection of the perspective from which it has been drawn. We place ourselves around the workshop and use threads to mark the connections. Green threads plot existing connections, orange threads connections that should exist. (Someone has strung an orange thread out to a distant card which says ‘Popular Culture’.)
Looking at this map, I see a reflection of the different roles we play. For some of us, building networks is at the centre of our work; for others, work happens in solitude, so that this day we spend together once a month is a chance to reconnect with a wider web.
These maps were made quickly, in between the other activities of the day – and what I am telling you is only one route through each of them, there are other routes to be taken – but of the three, it is this last which feels most obviously incomplete. We are five months into our eight months together, just past the halfway point. If the first half was a journey inwards, now we have turned: it is time to start asking what we are bringing back that could be shared and how we could widen these conversations.
So, at six o’clock, a small group of guests gather in the foyer of Kägelbanan, friends and strangers, people who heard the invitation that went out quietly over the past week or so. A camera at one end of the room captures how they enter in small groups, each group joined by two or three of the artists from the workshop, retracing the journey through these maps.
Later, we gather in the space beyond the maps and listen for a while as Monique tells stories of walking across Europe in the soft armour of her suit, and then a group goes off to one corner where Anders reads from a script he’s working on, while others gather again around the maps or at the bar, talking in twos or threes.
This was the first time since November that we opened up for the evening. Back then, we were charging for tickets, so we got an audience – but we realised that we are not looking for an audience, not yet. We are looking for people who care about the same questions that have brought us together. More than anything, we are looking for other artists and writers and musicians and performers who are willing to join us in this space.
The invitation went out quietly, because we are still learning how to open this up. But people came – and I hope we made you welcome. You encouraged us to take this further.
So we would like to invite you to join us for three more evenings over the spring – and to share this invitation with others who you think should be in the room, to help us widen the web a little further.
On 7 March – ten days from now – we will be working for the first time with music as a starting point: our guests are the British psych-folk duo Billy Bottle & Martine, longstanding collaborators of the Dark Mountain Project. With their help, we invite you to come and think about ‘What will survive of us?’ What forms of art and culture will continue to make sense in the world which is to come? (RSVP here, Facebook event here)
On 4 April, we are joined by the cultural ecologist, philosopher and magician, David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal. With his help, we hope to ground ourselves a little more firmly in ‘the more-than-human world’, ‘the breathing commonwealth’ of which we are a part. (RSVP here, Facebook event here)
On 2 May, we bring our current journey as a group to an end, with the help of the British theatre critic Maddy Costa. This will be a chance to reflect on what we’ve learned over these eight months together and offer some glimpses of where this may lead next. (RSVP here, Facebook event here)
The Dark Mountain Workshop is Anders Duus, Andrea Hejlskov, Andreas Kundler, Ayesha Quraishi, Clara Bankfors, Dougald Hine, Emelie Enlund, Jesper Weithz, Lisa Färnström, Liv Elf Karlén, Måns Lagerlöf, Ninna Tersman, Patrik Qvist and Ruben Wätte. This project is made possible by Riksteatern, the Swedish national theatre, in its role as expert support to the performing arts in Sweden.
A problem calls for a solution; the only question is whether one can be found and made to work, and once this is done, the problem is solved. A predicament, by contrast, has no solution. Faced with a predicament, people come up with responses. Those responses may succeed, they may fail, or they may fall somewhere in between, but none of them ‘solves’ the predicament, in the sense that none of them makes it go away. — John Michael Greer
The world is on fire.
We know this. We have been hearing the messages since we were in our teens. And somewhere down the line, it got real to us.
We changed lightbulbs like it would save the planet, clambered on desks at the end of late-night shifts to switch off every screen in the newsroom. We recycled with an obsessive compulsion. We got fired up by speakers at rallies, gathered signatures on petitions, marched chanting to the gates of summits.
And still a day came when doubt would not be ignored. We had to admit to ourselves that no amount of lightbulbs would be enough and we no longer believed that one more giant mobilisation of activists would do it.
What then? It’s not like we went out and bought SUVs. Many of the things we had done, we went on doing. It’s just that the slogans on the placards and on the adverts for the eco products no longer rang true; the movements we had been part of no longer spoke for us in the way that they had seemed to.
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As artists, we found ourselves getting asked to help. Mostly this meant helping to deliver the message that the world is on fire.
It doesn’t work. The words slacken on the page; a gap opens between stage and audience. Art is not a communications tool for delivering messages and the importance of the message doesn’t change this.
Yet we cannot retreat into a feigned ignorance. To make work that pretends not to know that the world is on fire is to have a lie in our work like a worm in an apple.
So we begin again. We try to find ways to make work that can go into the darkness, go down deeper even than the mess we are in; work that crosses the rivers north of the future and comes alive, beyond all expectation, there, on the far side of hope.
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Here is one measure of the depth of the mess we are in.
Since we were in our teens, scientists have been warning about the threat a changing climate poses to our whole way of life. World leaders have been making speeches about the need to cut emissions.
Eighteen years ago, they signed a treaty in Kyoto. In those eighteen years, there has only been one year in which global emissions fell. That was 2009, when financial crisis shrank the world economy. In 2010, emissions leapt by the largest amount ever recorded.
Not long ago, I listened to someone who has been in the negotiating rooms explain, quite calmly, that it would not be possible today to get the countries involved to sign again the agreements they already signed in the 1990s.
This is one measure of the depth of the mess we are in.
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Listen to the words, though; the ones we use to talk about this mess. Don’t they die as they are spoken? Don’t they turn to ashes in the mouth? At the bottom of all this, there is something that turns our imagination to stone.
In old stories, there are forces like that, creatures so terrible that even to look on them would turn a person to stone. But there are also cunning ways to approach such creatures. Athena gives Perseus a bronze shield and, by following its reflections, he is able to creep up on Medusa.
There are stories that work like that shield, stories that give us a dark mirror with which to approach the source of our terror.
This could be the kind of clue we are looking for.
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‘I haven’t a clue whether we humans will live for another 100 years or another 10,000 years,’ says our first guest, the storyteller Martin Shaw. ‘We can’t be sure. What matters to me is that we have fallen out of a very ancient love affair, a kind of dream-tangle, with the Earth itself.’
Could you get any further from the grown-up language in which serious discussions of our predicament are meant to take place? And yet, there is something here that demands admittance, a voice that will be heard.
Before all this is over, we will have to find a way to talk together again about loss and longing and love, and it will take voices such as this to call the deep words out of the private places within us.
This is the kind of task that lies ahead.
First published on the blog of the Dark Mountain Workshop, a project I created during my time as leader of artistic development at Riksteatern, Sweden’s touring national theatre.
This October, as the leaves gather in the gutters of Stockholm, a gang of artists, writers, performers and theatre makers will set off on a journey in search of a cultural language capable of reframing the largest questions the world is facing.
The search will take us deep underground, into the places inside ourselves that never see daylight, the kingdoms of loss and longing, the dark soil in which love begins again.
Time works differently down here.
Down here you are still a child. You are older than the mountains. You are bones that have shed their name. You are waiting to be born. All of this is happening always.
A thin thread of story is the safety line between us and forever: the memory of an upper world where cars wait at traffic lights and carry in their tanks the remains of ancient sea creatures, where cafes serve drinks brewed from beans shipped halfway around the world, and all of this looks as though it could go on forever.
It will not go on forever. We know this and we don’t know how to know this, how to make it real to ourselves, how to imagine what it is that will go on.
At night, this knowing and unknowing comes to us and takes the place of sleep.
This is what has brought us here, together, to this journey.
Originally published on the blog for ‘the Dark Mountain Workshop’, a project I created during my time as leader of artistic development at Riksteatern, Sweden’s touring national theatre.
