CLIMATE CHANGE OPERA 2011-Present
artistic concept | production | funding | promotion
EARTH PATTERN POEMS
In 2015 – the year of the highly anticipated COP 21 climate talks in Paris – our responsibility will be sustaining the momentum from last year’s People’s Climate March and encourage even more people to participate in climate action. With Ban Ki-Moon stating that ours is the last generation to fight climate change, there is surely no better moment to bring in new voices and new stories to inspire climate action. CCO departs from the idea of articulating science through video art and will tackle one of the most pressing issues of our day – CLIMATE CHANGE. Given the immensity of this issue and the upcoming COP21 in Paris this December, this project requires an ambitious platform for expression. Visual Artist, Shaun Gladwell, will use the structure of a traditional opera as an audio-visual language to translate, so to speak, the emotional impact of the of the scientific research on climate change as observed by Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig and the research team at NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York
Pacific Undertow | Shaun Gladwell
METHODOLOGY
CCO consists of three phases. The introductory phase, which has developed and taken place over the past several years in New York, Sydney and London, melds science and art via the minds of Shaun Gladwell and Cynthia Rosenzweig who engaged in a dialogue, exchanging visual and scientific data. The second phase, which we hope will begin in March, will consist of gathering material and inspiration from Cynthia and her team, during Shaun’s artist residency at NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Finally, the third phase will be the designing of the libretto with a series of collaborations with dancers, choreographers, poets, singers, composers and artists. In the tradition of an Opera, the libretto will be a poem directly informed by Rosenzweig’s scientific research, written in a popular, street language.
A list of potential collaborators to be approached, some of whom Shaun Gladwell as previously worked, include:
Choreographers | Xavier Le Roy, Marquisa Gardner AKA Miss Prissy & Dimitris Papaioanou
Dancers | (Jookin) Lil Buck and/or G-Nerd, Akram Khan & Bianca Li
Composers | DJ Spooky, Nico Muhly & Matthew Hindson
Street Dancers (Jookin) Lil Buck and/or G-Nerd
Paul Miller AKA DJ Spooky
EXPERIMENTATION
CCO will be undertaken in the spirit of experimentation and add an emotional and comprehensive dimension to the Goddard Institute research through both kinetic (movement) and logocentric (intense scientific research) performance. In order to do this, the project will draw on the history of art and ideas about nature and earth, particularly from romanticism and match this with scientific realism.
There is an urgency for the realities of climate change to not only enter our current language, but to form its own powerful artistic language, a language inspired by science and our emotional world that must absorb and accept its findings, and then act accordingly. The operatic production will be a contemplation on climate research and will be visualized as the membrane to our collective mind and soul and the container of our heart.
Shaun Gladwell | Cynthia Rosenzweig in conversation Paris | image courtesy Corinne Weber
Hurrican Sandy | courtesy NASA
Lil Buck