What if art has everything to do with oil?
***This article first appeared on On Stage Blog on November 4, 2020***
“What if music has everything to do with oil?". This is the question Tanya Kalmanovitch, ethnomusicologist and world renowned performer, asked herself five years ago when speaking on a faculty panel at The New School on Arts and Climate Change:
“I was sitting onstage and the other people were very smart and clever people with smart and interesting projects…but then someone [mentioned] the Keystone XL pipeline and it wasn’t until that moment that I clued into that Keystone was carrying oil from [my hometown, Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada] to the Gulf of Mexico. I had heard of Keystone over and over again on the news and had somehow never connected it to the early circumstances of my life…”
With 3.3 million acres of wildfires burning on the West Coast, Hurricane Sally threatening the Gulf Coast and a global pandemic directly linked to environmental exploitation keeping the world in lockdown, the impact of climate change on our lives is becoming increasingly impossible to ignore. In previous decades, the larger fight for climate has been kept at bay by industrial oil giants, and disproportionate pressure has been placed on the consumer to change their lifestyle in order to save the planet from total climate chaos. In recent times, however, the public has gained increased awareness over who the real climate players are, and-- surprise!-- consumers are not the major culprits.
The past twelve months have been big in the public discussion of climate change. In December 2019, the New York State Supreme Court declared ExxonMobil “not guilty” of downplaying to shareholders the financial risks it faces from climate change regulation, despite evidence of misleading external reports. Youth have continued the Fridays for Future climate protests despite lockdown restrictions, and Democrat Socialists in congress have continued to champion a Green New Deal. For the first time in its 175-year history, Scientific American has backed political candidate Joe Biden, citing his plans “to protect our health, our economy and the environment”, further emphasizing that climate change is one issue the United States can no longer afford to ignore. High and low, organizations, businesses, and individuals are showing up and demanding sustainable change.
So, my question is: where are the performing arts in all of this?
It is probably no secret to those of you perusing this particular website that theatre can be a powerful tool for social change. Henrick Ibsen's A Doll's House sparked outrage in Europe for its depiction of a married woman's pursuit of independence, and the author was formally honored by First-wave feminist organizations of the time. August Wilson's ten-play century cycle forced White American audiences to face a truthful telling of the decades of the Black American experience which had been systematically excluded from the American theatre cannon. Brazilian theatre-maker Augusto Boal's method "Theatre of the Oppressed" galvanised the working poor and pushed local and city governments to hear their demands. The list is endless, from the Greeks to Hamilton, theatre has always been neck in neck with leaps forward in culture and social psychology.
So, where is the art about climate change? Where are the climate change plays? There are some (believe me I've looked), but not nearly enough considering the prevalence of the subject in our daily lives. Where are the climate change songs? I have yet to hear a song broadcasted over SiriusXM which contains lyrics spotlighting environmental injustice.
This analysis of lack is meant to be less of a critique and more of an expression of disbelief, in solidarity with my fellow artists. Climate change is here. It's on the news, it's on our minds, so why haven't we put our fingers on the keys or our pen to the paper? I know I have tried, but on those rare occasions when I gather the courage, I don't even know where to begin.
This brings me back to Tanya Kalmanovitch and her solo performance piece Tar Sands Songbook. In telling me of the journey that led her to create this work of documentary theatre, Tanya elaborated on the fateful moment when she made a personal connection between her work and fossil fuels: “I’m onstage and the thing that is dawning on me is the things [my fellow panelists] are talking about-- “tar sands” “dirty oil”-- they are talking about my life, they are talking about my family. And I wanted to know what was it that would keep me from making that connection”.
So began a years-long investigation into self and home, in which Tanya dedicated her time to confronting her personal connections to fossil fuels, climate denial, and how the stories we tell ourselves create “the lenses through which we see or don’t see certain things about the world around us”.
For Tanya, more so than most, oil was a prevalent part of her early life: “my step-father was one of the early engineers for the first big tar sands project in Ft McMurray. There were little jars of bitumen and its byproducts on the stereo console in the living room and on the walls there were pictures of upgraders and compressors, and I had never connected it [to my own story]”. She shares that by the time she was 14, she chose to become a professional musician to “get away from oil”, but the more she learns about herself and her artistry, the more she is brought back to her roots.
Since July 2016, Tanya has traveled back to Northern Alberta eight times, spoken to community stakeholders--family, local oil workers, and indigenous knowledge keepers--with the aim of gathering the images and stories which come together in her original solo show Tar Sands Songbook. With her violin, her voice, and a laptop filled with images and recordings from her childhood home, Tanya leads the audience through her personal reckoning with the influence of fossil fuels on her life.
Perhaps the most essential component of this project, however, is the call to action which comes at the end. Each installation culminates in a post-performance workshop which invites audience members to explore their own climate stories. Using conversation, storytelling, dialogue and group process techniques, this workshop “introduces participants to new ways of addressing issues about oil and energy transition through the lens of the arts”.
In 2020, in collaboration with Climate Action Canada, Tar Sands Songbook launched an ambitious ten-year campaign to perform and hold residencies in communities along the hundreds of thousands of miles of pipelines, truck routes and crude-by-rail lines that carry Alberta bitumen and its byproducts throughout North America. In this way, Tanya hopes to build a culture of community knowledge sharing around the human history of fossil fuels as it continues to evolve.
Though COVID-19 travel and performance restrictions have placed in-person residencies on hold, with the support of grants from the Canadian government and a dedicated team, Tanya has adapted the content of Tar Sands Songbook to Zoom and plans to launch her Zoom residencies in her current place of residence, Red Hook, Brooklyn.
“On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy turned my neighborhood [of Red Hook] into a disaster zone. Prior to that, I would always think “Why that town?” and “Why that street and not my street?”... At this moment... I could no longer believe that these categories of current events, and politics, and war, and climate change were things that were happening somewhere else to other people”. Tanya is eager to engage in conversation with her neighbors, a community on the forefront of the fight for climate and environmental justice. The dates of the upcoming Red Hook performances and residency are set for the first weekend in November, with the eighth anniversary of Hurricane Sandy in mind. When I first met Tanya, I was immediately intrigued by the scope and intimacy of her piece, and so, I am co-producing the Red Hook digital residency, through my eco-theatre project On The Hook.
“I don't believe that all art has to be about environmental justice, but all art is in some way because our lives are concerned with this. Whether we deal with it or not, we are living in relationship with it”. Tanya hesitates to be prescriptive about artistic content and rather urges artists to pay attention to their own experiences, look locally, and think intimately. It is this mentality of creation which really spoke to me, as an artist and citizen of today.
Oil is everywhere. Climate change is here. Whether we choose to acknowledge its impact on our daily lives is a choice. The reality is daunting, and when we attempt to make it into art, it is easy to get overwhelmed. Works like Tar Sands Songbook, which urge us to begin looking inward, asking difficult questions, and treating ourselves with compassion along our journey to reckoning, are exactly the types of climate art we need now.
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