The Directory debate
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Why are there no plays about climate change? We invited seven experts to our London office to discuss the issue. The conversation began with the idea that maybe the subject was simply too big.
Around the table were:
Dawn Bishop, Policy Officer, Council for Environmental Education
Emma Dunton, Executive Producer, Actor’s Touring Company
Kevin Graal, storyteller, Talking Tales
Caspar Henderson, journalist, openDemocracy.net
Anthony Koncsol, Director, Konflux Theatre-in-Education
Peter Rogers, new media artist, Climate Change Explorer
Miranda Thain, Director, Konflux Theatre-in-Education
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| Miranda |
Our company, Konflux Theatre, tours environmental plays for four to 11-year-olds to schools across the UK, and has been doing so for the last seven years. We’ve looked at all aspects of the environment, with a view to prompting young people to realise they can make a difference in their homes and schools. We’re now working on a project about climate change for 2007. Our last show looked at recycling and waste, which is easy to teach. We can say to kids, ‘This is how you sort your rubbish. This is what you can do when you get home. This are the basic things you can instill in your school, and in your life, to make an impact.’ With climate change, it’s such a huge topic on a global scale, we’re confronted with the problem of how we can make it relevant and real to younger children. How can you explain climate change to a five-year-old in an hour? How could they make any difference?
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| Peter |
I work with a group of kids to try to tackle climate change in a school in Cumbria. The one thing that I’ve found that really grabs their attention is if you talk about how their area is going to be affected.
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| Kevin |
You’ve got to grab their attention and make the thing concrete. I use traditional stories, creation myths, legends and folktales from around the world. There’s a traditional story for every situation, for every theme.
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| Dawn |
Miranda and Anthony, what is the reception from the teachers like? With something like recycling, it is quite simple. There is a certain acceptance that if you put waste in a landfill, it ultimately it requires more and more land. Whereas with climate change, even now some people dispute it’s happening. It would be interesting to hear if teachers are as keen to use the play as they have been with other ones.
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| Anthony |
The question is: are you going in to educate the children about something they could actively assist in putting right immediately? Or are you hoping to plant the seeds so that when they become adults they can be more politically aware of the situation. We do quite a lot of work in Northern Ireland, which is really about integrating Catholic and Protestant schools. We go into the schools and do workshops to bring these children together. The European Commission has seen that this is where the starting point is: to educate the children, in the hope that they’ll pass on some of that to their parents, but most definitely pass it on to their children. This is so that in a generation, or two generations’ time, there is going to be enough people in place who have that awareness.
As a theatre-in-education, or a learning-through-theatre company, where do we come in on this? Do we go for the immediate impact? Or do we go for planting the seed for children in the hope that in 20 years time they will want to become actively involved in actually making a change? If that’s not too late. It’s such a tricky one. We wouldn’t be in the situation now if people twenty years ago actively took part in doing something about it.
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| Miranda |
They’re starting to teach climate change now at Key Stage 2 as a requirement through science and geography. So they’re expecting at least a scientific understanding, if not a more personal understanding. And I think you’re right, Dawn, a lot of teachers are going to be fearful of it because there isn’t a huge amount of understanding about what is factually true and what isn’t.
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| Peter |
I’ve done a cross-curricular project with science, geography, English and citizenship. The factual side was fed through the geography and science classes. But in English, we could use it as subject matter to teach all the things that have to be taught in English for the SAT’s. It really worked well there. We could get the subject of climate change across very easily because all through the term the students could do all sorts of imaginative writing about it. You could do this with performance and other arts classes, too.
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| Dawn |
I was looking at the resources that other larger environmental organizations, like WWF and Friends of the Earth, choose for teachers. They produce loads of good stuff. It’s brilliant. But the thing that shocked me is that it’s all science and geography. There is nothing for art teachers or drama teachers. There’s no encouragement for art or drama teachers to work with many of these issues. They can be very emotive issues and can certainly produce imaginative works of art. Why are these organisations limiting themselves to making it so factual? Because ultimately climate change is an emotive thing. It’s looking at what we value and whether we want to preserve it. We’re all going to be affected by it, and we’re all contributing to it.
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| Caspar |
The basic science is there. There are greenhouse gases, and if they weren’t in the atmosphere, then the planet would be about 30 degrees colder than it is. There is very simple science that you can teach. Beyond that, there is a lot of variation in the climate, but we’re putting in almighty, huge, great compounds into the atmosphere at an incredible rate that’s never happened before, and we don’t know what’s going happen as a result.
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| Peter |
I think amongst young people there’s a very big confusion. Young people go, ‘Climate change, yeah, the hole in the ozone layer. How do you solve it? You recycle. You plant some trees and it will be all right’. They get a lot of different messages from the media, from parents, from people in schools. But they can’t really pinpoint climate change, and the information they have can often be quite inaccurate.
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| Kevin |
I’m sure that the place to start is with very young children. I’m sympathetic to the idea that you have to start as early as possible to educate a generation of children who will have the vocabulary in their grasp. They are the five-year-olds at your shows now. When they’re older, when they’re in their sixties and seventies, the shit really will have hit the fan. And then they’ll be more likely to act or pressure their politicians to act when they become citizens. And I don’t think we need to wait until they are teenagers or they are intellectually capable.
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| Peter |
We tried to get the young people to speak to their grandparents and ask them whether they had experienced any changes in the climate. Because what they are taught in science is that the climate is the average weather over thirty years. You can’t really expect young people to say, ‘Oh yes, I remember when I was younger…’. But if you relate that to other people then that’s a good starting point.
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| Kevin |
Sometimes the way to go is through metaphor and allegory. If you want to get children to understand how sacred the land is, then you can tell them myths and stories about baddy characters who desecrated the landscape, and then had really heavy things happen to them. That fires them up. There’s no end of stories about what happened to people who desecrate trees. I recently discovered this wonderful Greek myth. A king destroys the Earth Goddess’ tree. So the goddess sends the spirits out to the north to get famine to visit him. Famine breathes into his nostrils and he wakes up absolutely starving and nothing he eats will satisfy him. In the end, he eats himself, he consumes his own flesh. It’s an unforgettable image of what we’re doing. We’re consuming ourselves. Something like that, which is not agitprop or didactic, grabs children. Maybe that’s something for a smaller child, but they’ll remember it. Later on, when someone’s talking about trees, they’ll have that imagery in their mind.
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Erysichthon and the Sacred Tree
The king in classical Greek mythology who desecrated the sacred tree of Demeter, the Earth Goddess, and suffered those terrible consequences was Erysichthon. Kevin Graal presents the story and its sources in a short feature here on:
Stories to tell: Erysichton and the Sacred Tree.
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| Emma |
It has to be made personal in a dramatic context. We’re talking about educating children about the environment through drama. I think, simultaneously, we should be educating adults now. It’s happening now. Drama is the perfect medium for a story about a crisis. There are plays about AIDS, but in some ways AIDS is a more graspable subject. You can weave personal stories out of it because it is about individual people. Whilst the environment, we all know, it’s this drip-drip effect. Nobody’s quite sure how bad it really is. To get those themes in the context of an adult play is quite hard.
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| Dawn |
When we ask at our events about how to get more things into the media, people always come up with ‘Eastenders’. They say you need something like flooding in Walford to really bring it to people’s attention because it would be a real, local thing. It could feasibly happen.
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| Caspar |
The Hollywood film The Day After Tomorrow tried to make a big story out of climate change with big production values. But clearly, the scenario is absurd. A scientist, Myles Allen, at Oxford University, told me there were surveys done on people after they had seen the film. People were less concerned about climate change because they saw this extreme thing and thought, ‘Oh if that’s what it’s about, I just don’t believe it.’
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| Miranda |
A lot of adults still don’t really understand what climate change is. They just think they might get longer summer holidays.
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| Peter |
We’re talking about the human aspect of climate change, but what’s going to be affected, and is being affected now, is fauna and plant life. It might be more effective is people can attach themselves more to the natural world than seeing climate change as just being a personal thing about how we are getting hotter.
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| Miranda |
Our story that we are playing with at the moment is about the Inuits, and how climate change affects their immediate habitat, and we’re using the dramatic metaphor of hearing thunder for the first time. That personal story will have an impact on children. But what we’re not trying to do is just to develop more empathy. We want to make the drama more than a story for young audiences. We need to apply learning.
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| Peter |
We can try to tell ourselves, ‘We’ll adapt’, but we know it’s not the answer. I think that people are very keen to find a solution but in reality there isn’t a solution apart from some gut-wrenchingly difficult decisions.
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| Caspar |
This scientist I referred to, Myles Allen, has been involved in work which says that scientists are confident that the heat wave in the summer of 2003, which killed about 30,000 people in France and elsewhere, can be attributed to human influence. They are more than 90% confident of this. Basically they can say that those deaths were caused by our actions. And he says there’s going to be a lot more like that. And that’s very immediate and definite. These things are already happening. And, they say, they can now be certain enough of this to the point where they think you can prove it in a court of law and sue people.
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The blame game
Myles Allen and Richard Lord published The Blame Game linking responsibility for the European heatwave of 2003 to greenhouse gas emmissions in the journal Nature.
To read the article online, go to:
news@nature.com
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| Kevin |
I was looking at the story about Philip Cooney, the Chief of Staff to the chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, who removed scientific evidence from documents on climate change for the American government, making climate change sound less threatening. And I thought that would be a great story. There is this wonderful phrase ‘weasel words’. It’s very hard on weasels! But the idea is that the weasel can suck the contents of an egg and just leave a very small hole. It looks like it’s a normal egg, but in fact it’s been drained of life. This is what these people do with words. They drain the meaning out of them or they use words that drain the life out of the words beside them. That’s something that everybody gets cross with. Politicians every week, every month, every year, will be giving us a host of new clichés that we’re supposed to learn. That’s a drama to be told for us, for grown-ups. There are traditional folk tales about how the manipulation of language allows people to commit crimes.
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| Caspar |
Coming at it the other way: what’s the best play anybody’s seen in the last year or two on an issue which is either about politics or changing the world, or to do with the way the world is?
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| Peter |
I’ve seen one play, which was about the activists protesting against the building of the Newbury by-pass. It was the story of trying to stop the felling of the trees in order for the road to be put through. Mikron produced it, the people who tour their productions by boating down the canals.
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| Caspar |
There’s a good play to be done about that meeting after George W. Bush’s first election, when Dick Cheney, the Vice-President held a meeting to discuss US national energy policy, behind closed doors, with Exxon and others. We still don’t know what the key decisions were.
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On his tenth day as Vice-President in George W. Bush’s first term, Dick Cheney established a secret Energy Task Force, formally known as the Energy Policy Develoment Group. You can find out more about Cheney and the ETF on www.halliburtonwatch.org and about Exxonmobile’s funding of people denying global warming on Mother Jones online magazine.
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| Dawn |
If you wanted to get people writing plays about climate change, what sort of things could you do? Would you have a competition? Would you go to an established playwright?
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| Emma |
You could go to a theatre company or venue who did new writing, like the Royal Court or the Bush. You could commission a play, or have a competition and a prize for the best play. I’d be very careful about doing something very broad like ‘the environment.’ You need to put it in some sort of dramatic context, like the meeting with Dick Cheney or the summer of 2003. You could have one or two established playwrights spearheading it. I think you’d find that playwrights would be really excited about that.
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| Peter |
What about a play about an air conditioning salesman living right by the Thames. It would be that dilemma: ‘I really want to sell more air conditioning, but I don’t want to lose my flat to the floods.’ It’s that situation, where you have an action, the environment responds to that action, then you respond to that.
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| Caspar |
The classic problem here is that cause and effect are a long time away from each other. The current climate is heavily influenced by historic emissions. You can’t go into the guilty guy’s office. Not in quite the same way. It makes it much more difficult to dramatise. We’re not going to see the consequences of what we’re doing now for probably most of our lifetimes. Once you get into some discussion about the complexity of the science I think you have completely lost the drama.
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Mikron Theatre toured their play, If You Go Down to the Woods Today…tales from the Newbury By-Pass, about the road protests in 1997/98.
See Mikron’s page here on the Directory.
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| Kevin |
It seems a bit strange that we’re talking about how to commission or make this work happen. Artistic work happens because people feel the need to express something. And it seems a bit artificial to force it. So the question must be, ‘why aren’t people feeling this desperate need to express this?’ It must be because the consequences seem to be so far ahead. You never miss the water until the well runs dry.
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| Emma |
That’s why there are so many history plays, because we’ve now seen the consequences of these things, and so now the playwrights can write about that. You need to tap into a particular story or event.
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| Caspar |
It doesn’t need to be a very didactic kind of Brechtian play. Although I’m sure if Bertolt Brecht was around, he’d be writing plays about climate change.
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Around the table were:
Dawn Bishop
at the time of the interview: Policy and Programmes Officer
Youth and Community Education
Council for Environmental Education.
CEE was a membership body for organisations in England committed to good practice in environmental education and education for sustainable development. Following a withdrawl of CEE's core funding by the Department for Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs, CEE has now closed.
Emma Dunton
Executive Producer
Actor’s Touring Company
www.atc-online.com
ATC is a London-based theatre company whose recent project ‘theatrelab.net’ was an innovative collaboration between a playwright and young persons from schools and youth clubs using the internet, workshops and live performance.
Kevin Graal
storyteller, writer, educator
www.talkingtales.org
and on the Ashden Directory
Kevin is an experienced storyteller and educator with an extensive repertoire of traditional stories, riddles, songs and games from around the world.
Caspar Henderson
journalist
www.opendemocracy.net/climate_change
www.capefarewell.com
Caspar writes about climate change for many publications and online magazines, and was part of the recent Cape Farewell sailing which took artists and scientists to the Arctic to see and experience the effects of a warming climate.
Anthony Koncsol and Miranda Thain
Directors
Konflux Theatre-in-Education
www.konfluxtheatre.com
and on the Ashden Directory
Konflux are currently devising a play about climate change. Konflux is a York-based company most of whose work engages with environmental themes. Their target age is Key Stage 1 and 2, four to 11-year-olds.
Peter Rogers
new media artist
www.ecn.ac.uk/cee
Pete is currently leading the Climate Change Explorer project in partnership with Helix Arts, the Environmental Change Network at Lancaster University, and Dowdales School, Dalton-in-Furness, Cumbria.
Also present were Robert Butler, Wallace Heim, Editors, the Ashden Directory, and Patricia Morison, Administrator, the Ashden Trust
The Ashden Trust is not responsible for the content of external sites.
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"If Bertolt Brecht was around, he’d be writing plays about climate change." Caspar Henderson,
journalist
"Are you going in to educate children about something they could actively assist in putting right immediately?" Anthony Koncsol,
Konflux Theatre-in-Education
"Drama is the perfect medium for a story about a crisis, but you have to make it a personal story." Emma Dunton,
Actor’s Touring Company
"Climate change is an emotive thing. It’s looking at what we value and whether we want to preserve it." Dawn Bishop,
Council for Environmental Education
"What we’re not trying to do is just develop more empathy. There’s got to be something else." Miranda Thain,
Konflux Theatre-in-Education
"I use traditional stories. There’s a traditional story for every situation." Kevin Graal,
storyteller
"The one thing I’ve found that really grabs their attention is if you talk about how their area is going to be affected." Peter Rogers,
new media artist
"Do we go for planting the seed for children in the hope that in 20 years' time they will want to become actively involved? If that's not too late."
Anthony Koncsol,
Konflux Theatre-in-Education
"We're not going to see the consequences of what we're doing now for probably most of our lifetimes." Caspar Henderson,
journalist
"When we ask about how to get more issues in the media, people always come up with 'Eastenders'" Dawn Bishop,
Council for Environmental Education
"If you want to get children to understand how sacred the land is, you can tell them myths and stories. They'll remember it. They'll have that imagery in their minds." Kevin Graal,
storyteller
"The environment has this drip-drip effect. Nobody's quite sure how bad it really is. To get that into a play for adults is quite hard." Emma Dunton,
Actor’s Touring Company
"In our story we're playing with now, we're using the dramatic metaphor of the Inuits hearing thunder for the first time." Miranda Thain,
Konflux Theatre-in-Education
"There isn't a solution apart from some gut-wrenchingly difficult decisions." Peter Rogers,
new media artist
"Why aren’t people feeling this desperate need to express this? It must be because the consequences seem to be so far ahead. You never miss the water until the well runs dry." Kevin Graal, storyteller
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