DOUGALD HINE

Tag: theatre

  • Kartan över oss – How Does the Future Make You Feel?

    Kartan över oss – How Does the Future Make You Feel?

    I spent two years working for Riksteatern, Sweden’s touring national theatre, and much of that time was spent in a room in their headquarters in Hallunda, one of Stockholm’s outer suburbs, which I shared with the directors Lisa Färnström and Joakim Rindå. As ‘leader of artistic development’, my work lay so far upstream from the actual productions that went out on tour, it wasn’t always easy to know if there was a connection between the endless, fascinating conversations that went on in that room and the actual making of theatre. So five years on, it was a joy to get an invitation to work with Lisa and Jocke again, making a small contribution to Kartan över oss (The Map of Us), a production which has its premiere this month, and which is the final element in a strand of repertoire that came out of the work we did together in 2015-16.

    Kartan takes the form of an audiowalk. A fictional bureaucracy, Myndigheten för Emotionell och Själslig Beredskap (the Authority for Emotional and Spiritual Preparedness) has been tasked with creating a map of how Sweden feels about the future. The audience are greeted by the MESB’s representatives, members of the local Riksteatern association in fluorescent jackets, and led by an app on their phones and the voices in their headphones.

    Along the way, there are forks in the road. You get a question about how you imagine the future will play out, and depending on your answer, you choose one path or the other. (All of this has been mapped onto the streets of forty towns and neighbourhoods, up and down the country.) At a certain point in the journey, depending on the choices you have made, you’ll be prescribed a message from one or other of the MESB’s specialists.

    This is where I come in, as one of seven contributors asked to write and record a seven-minute reflection aimed at members of the audience whose choices suggest a certain outlook on the future. (The other members of this team of specialists include a physicist, an environmental psychologist and the Archbishop of Uppsala.) I don’t think I’m giving too much away if I say that I was asked to speak to the most pessimistic fraction of the audience, but the aim of these reflections is to rattle the frames a little: ‘to cultivate the capacity for second thoughts’, as Ivan Illich once put it.

    Kartan över oss will premiere on 19 September 2020 at forty locations all over Sweden. The play is in Swedish – it’s the first time I’ve written anything directly into Swedish, and I’m grateful to Lisa and Jocke for helping me work up the text, as well as to Anna who went through the first draft with me – but there’s a plan for an English language version in the near future.

  • The role(s) of art under the shadow of climate change

    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:

    1. 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.
    2. Art can give us just enough beauty to stay with the darkness, rather than flee or shut down.
    3. 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.
    4. 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’.
    5. Art can teach us to live with uncertainty, to let go of our dreams of control.
    6. 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.)

  • The Consequences of Unacknowledged Loss

    The village is full of memories, scenes that loop in the minds of these four characters, setting in motion the events of Mayfly. In lots of other ways, the village is empty: there are no kids anymore, the pub is closing down, the pigs on the farm were sold off years ago.

    As I start to list these losses, I hear another voice, a memory from somewhere else: ‘Surely you agree that it’s a good thing that we don’t all have to work on the land anymore?’

    It was New Year’s Eve, a long way to go till midnight, and the conversation had taken a wrong turning. I’d made the mistake of trying to explain the book that I was writing. It made no sense to him: how could I not see that history was headed in the right direction? He had a PhD in political science and a job in a government ministry. From where we were sitting, in a desirable neighbourhood of a European capital city, the arc of progress looked obvious and undeniable.

    I thought of an afternoon, ten years earlier, when I’d sat at the kitchen table of a farmhouse in South Yorkshire. The press release that brought me there was cheerily worded, sent out by an organisation that gave out grants to support rural entrepreneurship. The producer thought it would make a piece for the Saturday breakfast show: ‘Meet the farmer who’s swapped cows for cats!’ His wife showed me round the new cattery, a holiday home for the pets of nearby townies, but as we arrived in the kitchen, I was faced with a man in deep grief. When the dairy herd had gone, the silence nearly killed him. The farm that had been his life was an empty shell. For a month, he said, he couldn’t sleep indoors: the only thing that worked was to go out and lie on the grass.

    History is an accumulation of changes, playing out through lifetimes and across generations. Among them, there are changes which no sane person would wish away: who wants to forego antibiotics or anaesthetic dentistry? We could each add to that list. History is made up of gains as well as losses. Sometimes it is easy to say which is which. Sometimes it depends on where you’re sitting.

    There is a dream of a standpoint from which it would be possible to settle the accounts of history, to weigh all these gains and losses against each other, to say whether we are up or down from year to year. No such standpoint exists. Even where we agree on the gains and losses, they do not balance like numbers in a table. For the purposes of national population statistics, the death of your father and the birth of your son may cancel each other out, but this statistical fact bears no relation to the reality which you or anyone will experience.

    Just now, we seem to be dealing with the consequences of a great deal of unacknowledged loss. For years, the number of people whose experience bore little relation to the stories of progress told by politicians had been growing. When surveys showed rising fears for the future, these were reported with barely concealed scorn, for the long-term trends in GDP showed the slow miracle of economic growth to be unstoppable. When loss goes ungrieved, it doesn’t go away, it festers. Out of this may come dark eruptions, events declared impossible by people with PhDs in political science, sitting in the desirable neighbourhoods of capital cities.

    That New Year’s conversation took place on the last evening of 2015. Twelve months later, maybe it would have had a different flavour. We have seen the rise of political movements which appeal to an imagined past, promising to recover a lost greatness. Against this, there are those who want to double down on progress. Public intellectuals publish books the size of bricks which prove with statistics that things have never been better. Others acknowledge that something has gone badly wrong and ask how we can recover the kind of collective faith in the future which took men to the moon and built the welfare state.

    Well, perhaps another attitude is called for. Perhaps we need room to do the work of grieving. Not to write off the losses of the past, nor to romanticise them. Not to pretend that they can be recovered. Grief changes us, calls our stories into question. It can sharpen our sense of what matters. The journey it leads us on is seldom pretty, but it cannot be headed off with calls to optimism, or cost-benefit analyses proving our losses are outweighed within the greater scheme of things.

    There is plenty of loss in the village where we find ourselves. It can take people to the edge of humiliation, or self-destruction, or mistaken identity. But none of this need be the end of the story.

    First published in the programme for the Orange Tree Theatre production of Joe White’s Mayfly.

  • Medan klockan tickar at The Stockholm Act

    Medan klockan tickar at The Stockholm Act

    The play I co-wrote – about what it’s like when the Anthropocene is your day-job – is getting a further outing this week at Kulturhuset Stadsteatern as part of The Stockholm Act festival.

    For more details, see The Stockholm Act website. I should probably mention that the play is (mostly) in Swedish.

  • You Want It Darker

    As things stand, I don’t believe we will get a story worth hearing until we witness a culture broken open by its own consequence.

    Martin Shaw, Dark Mountain: Issue 7

    The regular mechanisms of political narration are breaking down. The pollsters lose confidence in their methods, the pundits struggle to offer authoritative explanations for events that they laughed off as wild improbabilities only months before.

    It’s a measure of how badly things have broken that, over the past year or two, members of the strange crew that meets around Dark Mountain have found ourselves filling the gap. I’m thinking of posts we’ve written in our various corners of the internet that were read and shared far more widely than most of us are used to, seemingly because they helped readers find their bearings in a time of deepening disorientation.

    There’s a role for this kind of writing now that seems clearer than it did eight years ago, when we started this project. That’s why, today, we are launching a fundraising campaign – asking for your help to build and launch a new online publication. It won’t replace the Dark Mountain books, but it will run alongside them and provide an online home for writing that seeks – as my co-founder, Paul Kingsnorth put it at the start of this series – ‘to make sense of things, and to examine our stories in their proper perspective.’

    At this point, if you want to head straight for our fundraising page and make a donation, then be my guest – but in the rest of this post, I want to make a few suggestions about why this kind of writing matters now, based on what Dark Mountain has taught me over the past eight years.

    * * *

    Let’s start with a few of the pieces I mentioned – the chances are you already read some of these, but setting them alongside one another, something else comes into view:

    These are posts that got shared and reblogged and quoted and seemed to travel halfway around the internet. Mostly, they were written for our personal blogs or websites – but the authors are editors or regular contributors here at Dark Mountain. You can see places where we spark off each other’s ideas, as well as significant differences in perspective. If you read them all, you’ll probably find some that jive with you and others that jar. But I want to point to some common ground.

    For one thing, while we draw on different political traditions, this is writing that starts a couple of steps back from the familiar terrain of political debate and analysis. I’m reminded of an answer I gave, years ago, when asked if Dark Mountain was a political project: ‘I think there may be times when it is necessary to withdraw from today’s politics, in order to do the thinking that could make it possible for there to be a politics the day after tomorrow.’ Or as Paul put it at the opening of this series, ‘Sometimes you have to go to the edges to get some perspective on the turmoil at the heart of things. Doing so is not an abnegation of public responsibility: it is a form of it.’

    If you start exploring the work of any of these writers, you’ll find that mythology is a recurring reference point, a deep element in how we make sense of things. At the end of his post from the morning after the Brexit vote, Martin Shaw wrote, ‘Television, radio and internet will be able to tell you all the above-ground implications of what’s just taken place.’ When these surface accounts fail to satisfy, though, there’s a hunger that is fed by the underground currents of old stories.

    One of the things that marks out this writing, then, is a willingness to enter territory that we could call ‘liminal’. It’s a term that comes from the study of ritual, given to the middle phase of a rite of passage: the preliminaries are over, you have shed the skin of an old reality, but not yet acquired the new skin that would allow you to return to the everyday world. The liminal is the space of the threshold, with all the vulnerability and potential of transition: the costliness of letting go, with no guarantee of what will come after. The liminal phase of a ritual is the moment of greatest danger – or rather, ritual is a safety apparatus built around the liminal. Whichever, the liminal is where the work gets done, where the change happens.

    So here’s the first suggestion I want to make: if this writing is filling a gap left by the failure of more conventional kinds of political narration, it’s because it is able to operate in the territory of the liminal, and these are liminal times.

    * * *

    It’s not just the broadening audience for this writing that points to its timeliness. The past year also saw more conventional voices getting drawn into the territory that Dark Mountain has been exploring.

    Take Alex Evans, a former advisor to the UK government and the United Nations, who just wrote a book called ‘The Myth Gap’. After a career based on belief in the power of ‘evidence, data and policy proposals’, his experience of global climate negotiations brought him to a crisis, and to a sense of the need for something more than facts and reasoned arguments. ‘We’ve lost the old stories that used to help us make sense of the world,’ he says, ‘but without coming up with new ones.’ And he quotes Jung: ‘The man who thinks he can live without a myth is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or the ancestral life within him, or yet with contemporary society.’

    Or check out the series on ‘spirituality and visionary politics’ that the political strategist Ronan Harrington edited for Open Democracy last year – and Jonathan Rowson’s report on spirituality for the RSA. ‘Scratch climate change confusion long enough,’ writes Rowson, ‘and you may find our denial of death underneath.’

    There’s lots to say about these examples, but for now I just want to take a couple of points from them. First, that the call of the liminal is making itself felt ‘above ground’. But then, that there is a danger of wanting to jump straight to rebirth, to promise bright visions and new positive narratives. Evans draws on Jung, but I’m not clear how much room there is here for the shadow – nor for the loss and uncertainty, the darkness and disorientation that are the price for entering the liminal.

    Then again, by the end of 2016, others were ready to make the descent. I once spent an hour on stage with George Monbiot pounding me over the pessimism of Dark Mountain, so it was striking to read his list of ‘The 13 impossible crises humanity now faces’. Then you had John Harris discovering Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies. Watching experienced journalistic commentators move in the terrain that Dark Mountain has been exploring for the best part of a decade, it strikes me that there is another danger. To navigate at these depths, you need a different kind of equipment. Facts alone don’t cut it down here.

    This brings me to the other aspect of Dark Mountain which may be crucial to finding our bearings within the liminal – the centrality of art and culture to the work of this project.

    * * *

    A man is whispering in your ears, disorienting you, playing tricks with your perception, even as you watch him alone on stage with little more than a few bottles of water and a cast of microphones. This is Simon McBurney’s The Encounter, one of the most staggering pieces of theatre I witnessed in 2016: a show that leads you into the story of a meeting between a photographer lost in the Amazon and a tribe whose world is under threat. Their response to this threat takes the form of a ritual, a journey to ‘the beginning’, which is also a deliberate bringing to an end of their culture in its current form.

    The concept of liminality was first used to describe the structure of rituals like the one at the centre of The Encounter, but its application as a term for thinking about modern societies is connected to the study of theatre and performance. The anthropologist who made the connection, Victor Turner, distinguished the ‘liminal’ experiences of tribal cultures – in which ritual is a collective process for navigating moments of change – from the ‘liminoid’ experiences available in modern societies, which resemble the liminal, but are choices we opt into as individuals, like a night out at the theatre. This distinction comes with a suggestion that true liminality, the collective entry into the liminal, is not available within a complex industrial society.

    Now, perhaps this has been true – but here’s my next wild suggestion. The consequences of that very complex industrial society are now bringing us to a point where we get reacquainted with true liminality. To take seriously not just what Dark Mountain has been talking about, but what Monbiot and Harris are touching on, is to recognise that we now face a crisis which has no outside. The planetary scale of our predicament makes it as much a collective experience as anything faced by the tribal cultures studied by Turner and his colleagues.

    If this is the case, then where within our existing cultures do we go for knowledge about how to navigate the terrain of liminality? Not to the sources of factual authority, much as we need them, but to the places where liminoid practices have endured – to the arts, especially those forms in which people gather and share a live experience, and also (Turner would tell us) to those traditions and institutions that deal with the sacred.

    In 2016, I came to the end of two years working as leader of artistic development with Riksteatern, Sweden’s touring national theatre. The collaboration came about because their artistic director had been strongly influenced by the Dark Mountain manifesto. In the workshops we ran together, writers, directors and performers met around the question of what art can do, in the face of all that we know and fear about the depth of the mess the world is in.

    The answers that emerged began with a rejection of the usual invitation to put our art to use as a communications tool to deliver a message on behalf of scientists, policy-makers or activists – not out of some misplaced sense of ‘art for art’s sake’ purity, but because this isn’t how art works. 

    Instead, many of the possibilities I caught sight of during this work had to do with the liminal. 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. And 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.

    These are strange answers. For anyone in search of solutions, they will sound unsatisfying. But I don’t think it’s possible to endure the knowledge of the crises we face, unless you are able to draw on this other kind of knowledge and practice, whether you find it in art or religion or any other domain in which people have taken the liminal seriously, generation after generation. Because the role of ritual is not just to get you into the liminal, but to give you a chance of finding your way back.

    Among the messages of the liminal is that endings are also beginnings, that sometimes we need to ‘give up’, that despair is not a thing to be avoided at all costs – nor a thing to be mistaken for an end state. 

    * * *

    Somewhere in the tumbling days that followed the US election, I saw it go by in the stream of social media. ‘It’s basically Breitbart vs Dark Mountain now, isn’t it?’ someone wrote, like we’re the last ones left whose worldviews aren’t in smithereens after the year that just happened. And like a few things in 2016, it had the taste of a bad joke that might have more truth in it than you’d want to be the case.

    In the last weeks of the year, as we were putting together this series of reflections, a discussion got started among the Dark Mountain editors about what the role of this project should be, in the years ahead. Bad jokes aside, it’s clear that the work we’ve been doing has taken on a new relevance, and with that comes a sense of responsibility.

    A couple of things are clear. The books we publish will always be at the heart of this project – and the work of artists, the makers of culture, will always be our starting point.

    Every year, thousands of copies of our books go out to readers around the world. By the standards of an independent literary journal, it’s an achievement, and it’s through the sale of our books that we’re able to pay for some of the work that goes into Dark Mountain. (The rest of the work, as you can imagine, is a labour of love.) 

    A sobering realisation this autumn, though, was that the audience coming to this website each year is a hundred times the size of the number of people ordering the books. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course – but over the years, we’ve given only a fraction of the attention to this site that goes into each of our print issues.

    So we came to the conclusion that it’s time to do something online that comes closer to the richness of the books we publish (and will go on publishing). Exactly what form this takes, we’re still working on – but it’s going to be an online publication, something more and different to a blog – and a site that reflects more of the web of activity of the writers, thinkers, artists, musicians, makers and doers who have taken up the challenges of the Dark Mountain manifesto.

    To make this happen, we need your help. 

    We’re asking for donations to cover the costs of building and launching a new online home for Dark Mountain. You can send a one-off amount, or set up a small monthly subscription – or if you’d like to talk about other forms of support, then you can get in touch. Everything you need to know is here, on our new fundraising campaign page.

    How ambitious we can be with the next phase of Dark Mountain depends on the level of support we get, so at this stage we’re not setting a fundraising target or a deadline – but we’ll tell you more as we go along. 

    Meanwhile, thank you for reading and sharing the work we publish. From the crowdfunding of the manifesto onwards, everything Dark Mountain has done over the years has been made possible by the support of friends, collaborators and readers. We don’t take that for granted – and wherever things go next, however dark it gets, we’re thankful for the journey we’ve been on with you.

    Published on the Dark Mountain website as the closing essay in a series reflecting on the political events of 2016 — and to launch the campaign that crowdfunded the new online edition of Dark Mountain. Over the following six months, we succeeded in raising over £37,000 to fund the creation of a new online edition which launched in June 2018.

  • Medan klockan tickar

    Four researchers are thrown together in a room. They come from different fields and different backgrounds, they are at different stages in their careers, but what they have in common is that their work has brought them to the frontline of human impact on the living world. We listen in on their conversation, as they talk about what it does to you when climate change isn’t something you read about in the newspaper, or go to a protest about, or try not to think about, but the thing that is waiting on your desk at nine o’clock each morning.

    As part of the Människans scen project, the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm commissioned four members of the Dark Mountain Workshop to collaborate on a play. Each of us was paired with a scientist and through conversations with these partners, we created four stories which were then woven together into a script.

    The play toured Swedish university cities as a rehearsed reading, the audience seated in a circle, the actors among them, followed by a facilitated discussion. An afternoon performance with an invited audience of researchers was followed by a public show in the evening.

  • Medan klockan tickar (While the Clock is Ticking)

    Medan klockan tickar (While the Clock is Ticking)

    What’s it like, when the Anthropocene is your day job? How is it to live with climate change, not as a thing you read about in the newspaper or go on a demonstration about, but as what’s waiting for you on your desk at nine o’clock each morning? What does it do to you as a person, to your relationships with those around you, to the decisions you make about your life?

    Last summer, four of us were commissioned by The Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm and Riksteatern, Sweden’s touring national theatre, to write a play about the realities of life for the scientists who find themselves at the frontline of climate research.

    As writers, we were each paired with a researcher. Four researchers working in different fields, at different stages in their careers, with different backgrounds, whose work has brought them to confront the scale of the impact of human activity on global systems.

    We met for coffee, then again for longer interviews, and out of this research came the beginnings of four fictional characters, each telling their own stories, and questioning each other about how they got here, and what kinds of hope are left when you’ve swum with dead coral reefs and watched the failure of negotiations at close quarters.

    Yesterday, our play – Medan klockan tickar, While the Clock is Ticking – went into rehearsals. If those four researchers handed us their knowledge and their stories to work with, now it was our turn to hand on the results to the four actors who will bring them to life, under the direction of Sara Giese.

    I was there for the first read-through with the cast yesterday morning – and having never written for the stage before, it is both a nervous and a magical experience, hearing the words start to take shape in someone else’s mouth.

    I need to give a shout out to my experienced co-writers for their support and encouragement – Anders Duus, Ninna Tersman and Jesper Weithz. The four of us got to know each other through the Dark Mountain Workshop that I ran for Riksteatern during 2015-16 and the common ground we found through those sessions gave us the starting point for this collaboration. Big thanks also to Gustav Tegby, the dramaturge who wove our texts together, and Edward Buffalo Bromberg who, together with Sara, translated my text into Swedish.

    Medan klockan tickar is being produced as a directed reading, with a first performance for staff at the Royal Dramatic Theatre next week, then a tour of Swedish university cities over the following month. Each performance will be followed by a discussion with the audience.

    Tickets are available for the following public performances:

  • Maps for the Journey

    Maps for the Journey

    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.

    Words-that-matter

    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’?

    Sticking-and-starting-points

    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’.

    Widening-the-web

    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.

  • The Dark Mountain Workshop (2015-16)

    What does art do when the world is on fire? In the autumn of 2015, I brought together a group of fourteen artists from within and beyond the performing arts. The Dark Mountain Workshop was part of my role as leader of audience and artistic development at Riksteatern, Sweden’s touring national theatre. We met for a day each month, for eight months, gathered around the question of the role(s) that art might play under the shadow of climate change.

    Each month, we were joined by a guest whose work might help us find our bearings. These included the storyteller and mythographer Martin Shaw, the artists Ansuman Biswas and Monique Besten, and the philosophers Per Johansson and David Abram.

    Often these workshop days would be followed by an open session in the evening – The Village & The Forest – in which we shared where our conversations had taken us and hosted a performance by our guest contributors.

    During an early meeting about the project, I remember saying, ‘If there needs to be an evaluation, here’s how I’d like to do it: five years on, we send a storyteller around to ask each of those who were present what things have happened in the years since that probably wouldn’t have happened, had that group of people not spent those days together in that room.’ (It’s not quite five years yet, but the suggestion was taken up in another context by one of our guests, Maddy Costa, writing about one of the events at Redrawing the Maps.)

    Things I’m aware of that probably wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for those eight workshops include:

    Människa och natur – a three-year strand of repertoire at Riksteatern which grew out of a conversation with Per Johansson during the fourth workshop. The productions within this strand included Slutet enligt Rut (2018), a new play commissioned from the novelist Jesper Weithz, one of the members of the workshop.

    Medan klockan tickar (2017) – four of the writers from the workshop group were commissioned to write a play for the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm about what it’s like when the Anthropocene is your day job.

    A series of projects around ‘uncivilised dance’ by the choreographer Emelie Enlund, as well as Where the Words Run Out, a performance in which I collaborated with the dancers Alexander Dam and Sara Rousta.

    ‘Childish Things’, the essay I wrote for the SANCTUM issue of Dark Mountain, begins with the story of a work by Ruben Wätte, another of the artists in the workshop group.

    There’s more to add to this list, when I get time…

  • The Moment When the White Rabbit Goes Past

    This letter comes to you from a hotel room in Kiruna, north of the Arctic Circle. The hotel is called the Arctic Eden. From the window, I can see the mine buildings that crown what’s left of Gironvarri, the mountain the city came here to devour.

    The way I was told it, the Swedes knew there was a mountain full of iron ore, somewhere in this landscape, but the mountain was sacred to the Sami and they had no intention of letting the Swedes find it and tear it apart. Until eventually some prospectors got an old Sami man so drunk that he let out the secret.

    The history section of the website of the company that owns the mine that tore apart the mountain is headlined: ‘Faith in the Future since 1890’.

    In the foyer of the Folkets Hus is a scale model of the city. A red line loops across from the mine, taking in the whole downtown and chunks of the surrounding neighbourhoods. On the underside of the model, a reef of ore slants downwards more than two kilometres into the ground. As they keep following it, digging it out, the city itself will be undermined. The red line marks the zone in danger of subsidence. The answer is to take down the city and rebuild it three kilometres to the east.

    You can take a bus from the current city centre that drives straight into the side of the mountain, the road spiralling down into the mine to a depth of five hundred metres, but that will have to wait for next time, because this time I came here to see a play.

    Jag Kommer Härifrån is a story about what it means to come from a small place, to grow up with the idea that everything exciting in life is waiting for you somewhere else, somewhere bigger and brighter and more open-minded. Watching it, I was back in Darlington, twenty years ago, full of the desire to escape. There’s nothing wrong with that desire, it seems to me now, but there is a problem when it hardens into a claim about the objective superiority of life in the big city, held to be an obvious truth by people old enough to know better. This is the attitude I think of as ‘urban supremacism’ – what Anders Duus, who wrote Jag Kommer Härifrån, calls ‘metronormativity’.

    The train from Stockholm to Kiruna takes seventeen hours. That’s a lot of time for talking – and the other reason I am on this trip is for the luxury of that time together with Anders and my new boss, Måns Lagerlöf, the director of theatre for Riksteatern. I still struggle to get my mouth round words like ‘boss’ and ‘job’, but for the first time in a decade or so, I have both of these things. Since January, I have spent much of my time in an office in a tower block in the concrete surroundings of outer Stockholm, trying to work out what it means that I am now the Artistic and Audience Development Lead for Sweden’s national theatre. If this job had been advertised in the newspaper, it would never have occurred to me to apply, but it came to me by one of those chains of coincidence which I have learned to trust.

    I guess if you grew up in Sweden it probably seems normal to have a national theatre that is also a grassroots movement, a network of over two hundred volunteer-run local associations that own the national organisation and arrange performances in smaller and larger places, up and down the country. To me, this sounds like the start of some extraordinary story: the moment when the White Rabbit goes past, staring at his pocket-watch, muttering to himself, and you know that you have left behind reality as you knew it.

    So, when the laughter and the applause have died away, the staging for Jag Kommer Härifrån is packed and loaded onto the tour bus, ready to head on down the road to the next town on a forty-date tour that stretches the length of the country. And having seen one of our productions out on the road for the first time, the organisation I’m working with just got a little more real to me.

    I’ll be writing more about what I’m actually doing, as these newsletters get going again, and as I get further into the process of figuring it out. I should say that I’m working 70% (as we say in this part of the world) which means I still have 30% of my time available for writing, speaking and other freelance projects. Most importantly, I’ve wound up here because the things I’ve been thinking, writing and speaking about seem to resonate with what they want to do over the next few years, so this is a chance to put some of my ideas into action.

    Jag Kommer Härifrån has fun at the expense of the hipsters of Södermalm, buying their organic groceries at Urban Deli on Nytorget. That bit reminded me of Venkatesh Rao’s essay, ‘The American Cloud’, where he suggests that today’s America consists of a Jeffersonian simulation, an imagined version of small-town life, running on a Hamiltonian platform of mechanised processes the scale of which is uncomfortable to think about. He starts with the example of a Whole Foods store, its pre-distressed wooden fittings connoting authenticity, while behind them is the concrete and steel of which the building is actually made. Steel that came out of a mountain like the one outside my hotel window.

    The deposit of iron ore under Gironvarri is one of the largest and richest ever found. When mining began, there were 1.8bn tonnes of it down there. As part of the project of moving the city, the municipality held an architectural competition. The winning design was called ‘Kiruna 4-ever’. Today, less than half of the original ore remains to be mined. It seems that Kiruna has accepted the need to dismantle and re-mantle itself with little complaint. I imagine that only a city whose existence was this bound up with a single industry could be so accepting. The current rate of extraction of iron ore is over 25m tonnes a year. The new city hall will open next year and by 2021 the beautiful wooden church will have been rebuilt on its new site. The full project of moving the city will be complete sometime in the mid-2030s. By my reckoning, that is about when the ore will run out. I suppose that’s what they mean by faith in the future. Still, ‘4-ever’ seems an ambitious timescale.

    Sent as Issue 5 of Crossed Lines, my occasional email newsletter.