Seeking initiatives on theatre and climate change / global warming

[Denis Salter]

A matter of degrees: a Climate Change Dionysia

Bath Spa University Department of Drama seeks your support for its Climate 
Change Dionysia.

As we increasingly have come to know, climate change is underway. Very 
importantly, as scientist and explorer Tim Flannery writes in The 
Weather-Makers , climate change is a matter of degrees:

When we consider the fate of the planet as a whole, we must be under no 
illusions about what is at stake. Earth's average temperature is around 15 
degrees and whether we allow it to rise by a single degree or 3 degrees will 
decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of species and most probably 
billions of people

'Degrees' thus becomes a charged word impelling us towards more action 
sooner rather than less action later.

How can we in the arts and in higher education help reduce climate change?

Climate changes calls for innovation on many fronts! For its part, to 
coincide with the opening of the new University Theatre, Bath Spa University 
Department of Drama proposes to host a ' Climate Change Dionysia' in Summer 
2007.

Climate Change + 'Dionysia'? Dionysia implies ritual, tragedy and comedy 
confronting the most universal aspects of life in a unitary and cathartic 
communal event. What is more universal at the moment than Climate Change?

The festival aims

* To ensure live performance forms a key part of the response to climate 
change
* To enable artists to recognize, explore, reckon with climate change and 
its impacts
* To embody-mourn-celebrate cultures and species dead and dying as a result 
of climate change
* To draw further - and more deep - attention to climate change and to what 
we can do about it
* To catalyse 'making degress of difference' in the extent to which climate 
change occurs

How can you help? At this stage we seek 'expressions of interest' from 
artists and others.

Ian McNish
Interim Subject Leader (joint), Drama Studies
Department of Drama
School of Music and Performing Arts
Bath Spa University
Newton St.Loe
Bath BA2 9BN
Tel 01225 876332
Email i.mcnish at bathspa.ac.uk



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" . . . we have to accept that our tragedy lies always in our past, that we have to live with our ancestors' folly and suffer for it, just as they, in their turn, suffered, and as we, through our vanity and ignorance, ensure the pain and suffering of our own children. How to correct history, that's the thing."--Robert Fisk
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"In 2005, the world . . . pass[ed] the trillion-dollar mark in the expenditure, annually, on arms. We're fighting for $50 billion annually for foreign aid for Africa: the military total outstrips human need by 20 to 1. Can someone please explain to me our contemporary balance of values?" --Stephen Lewis.
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Denis Salter
Professor of Theatre
McGill University
853 Sherbrooke St. West
Montréal, QC
H3A 2T6
Tel (514) 398 6592 
Regular Fax (514) 398 8146
Computer Fax (309) 294 0444
denis.salter at mcgill.ca
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