One half of the Ashden Directory is a magazine with news, interviews and comment; the other half is a database with detailed information on groups or performers and their productions.
Henrik Ibsen
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As you will see from the timeline, there have been many areas where the performing arts and the environment have overlapped, from this year's Hollywood blockbuster to Ibsen, Chekhov and beyond. But there are many more ways in which this dialogue can be encouraged.
In features and interviews for instance, you will find discussions on diversity, the oil industry, and enlightened sponsorship.
Vandana Shiva
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In an interview with Vandana Shiva, the distinguished physicist and activist says we need diversity in culture just as we do in agriculture, and argues that diversity in both these areas promotes local issues, democracy and human rights.
Jonathon Porritt, with 30 years' experience as campaigner, teacher, and running Friends of the Earth and Forum for the Future, reflects on the tricky area of how to communicate powerful beliefs through the arts without losing your audience.
Siân Ede,
Arts Director of the Gulbenkian Foundation, discusses what she might look for in a play that addresses these kinds of issues in the way Ibsen might have done, and concludes that, for her, the all-important issue is one of quality.
Ibsen, like Bernard Shaw, was a close student of the daily press. In the first of a series, What I Read, James Marriott from PLATFORM, discusses how he studies the Financial Times, to inform PLATFORM's work on oil.
Ted Hughes
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In our digest of online articles, Bill McKibben, who has written about climate change for 20 years, describes the sense of being in a strange dream and desperately trying to warn someone about something bad and imminent, but however hard he shouts, the other person, 'smiling, perhaps, with his back to an oncoming train', can't hear him.
It is the basic belief underlying this website that the arts play an essential role in awakening the public imagination. The arts form attitudes in a way that scientific argument cannot.
As Ted Hughes wrote, 'What alters the imagination alters everything.'
Robert Butler
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photo of Vandana Shiva by Nic Paget-Clarke
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