How do you tell a story about everything?
The hunt for a storytelling form that can hold the full complexity of the transforming planet
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Making art about climate and the environment feels to me like a continual hunt for the right form.
Some artists, I imagine, find a form that works for them, and then develop and refine it over many years. They zero in on a single genre or style, then slowly master the core elements of that style. For them, making a new work is about finding new content that fits their style - new ideas, stories, concepts, and folding them into that existing form.
For me, it’s the other way around. My central preoccupation as an artist is the environment, climate and global change, complex social-ecological systems, and the science and research that helps us make sense of them. The work I make is always - in some way or another - an attempt to animate these topics through performance.
Put it another way: I start with the content, not the form.
But climate and the environment is a notoriously hard subject to pin down through art. I’ve written in the past about how climate is too broad to be the subject of an artwork. Climate is the background to all the other stories we tell, it’s the context and the setting more than it is the story itself. Climate and the environment is everywhere, it’s everything.
How do you tell a story about everything?
What I dream about is a form - a genre, a structure, a shape - that can hold all the vast scope and complexity of the transforming planet. At the same time, that form also needs to contain all the things I want from a good work of art - joy, action, spectacle and a good soundtrack.
The tension between these two impulses is the engine that drives my art.
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I don’t think I’m alone here. I think all climate artists are hunting for the form that will allow them to express the complexities of the world in a rich and evocative way.
Gaia Vince found it in Adventures in the Anthropocene, where she travelled to a series of communities in different parts of the world and interviewed people navigating environmental change in innovative ways, then built the story as a set of profiles. It worked because it was a travelogue, a personal road trip through the new world that humans have created, which was also a road trip into Vince’s own perspectives and opinions.
Elizabeth Kolpert found it in her A to Z of Climate piece in the New Yorker, where she wrote 26 mini-essays themed around different letters of the alphabet. It worked because of the game she was playing - the reader wants to know, is it possible that she’ll find a climate narrative for each letter, while maintaining some kind of logical through-line through the story?
Lucy Kirkwood found it in The Children when she placed a classic kitchen sink drama in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster. It worked because the play drew the audience in with a classic love triangle hook, then gradually widened the aperture until the true stakes of the story became clear.
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In my work, I’m constantly testing out different forms, trying to find the perfect structure for the content I want to share.
For one project, I attempted to create a blockbuster piece of performance spectacle by weaving together interviews I’d done with 30 different climate scientists. In another, I used the last 75,000 years of human history as the spine for a story about how we can navigate what’s coming.
In Scenes from the Climate Era, I borrowed a technique from the interstitial chapters of The Grapes of Wrath, in which Steinbeck animates the world of 1930s dustbowl America through a chorus of overlapping voices. Reading the novel, the effect of these chapters is something like standing on the edge of a crowd of people, overhearing snippets of conversations, advertisements, stump speeches and arguments.
Owners with rolled-up sleeves. Salesmen, neat, deadly, small intent eyes watching for weaknesses.
Watch the woman’s face. If the woman likes it we can screw the old man. Start ‘em on that Cad. Then you can work ‘em down to that ’26 Buick. ‘F you start on the Buick, they’ll go for a ord. Roll up your sleeves an’ get to work. This ain’t gonna last forever. Show ‘em that Nash while I get the slow leak up pumped up on that ’25 Dodge. I’ll give you a Hymie when I’m ready.
What you want is transportation, ain’t it? No baloney for you. Sure the upholstery is shot. Seat cushions ain’t turning no wheels over.
Cars lined up, noses forward, rusty noses, flat tires. Parked close together.
Get ‘em under obligation. Make ‘em take up your time. Don’t let ‘em forget they’re takin’ your time. People are nice, mostly. They hate to put you out. Make ‘em put you out, an’ then sock it to ‘em.
Cars lined up. Model T’s, high and snotty, creaking wheel, worn bands. Buicks, Nashes, De Sotos.
I set out to write Climate Era in that mode - a script of choruses speaking from all the disparate corners of the climate sphere - as a way of bringing together all the conversations I’d been having with disaster risk specialists, green investors, environmental activists, renewable energy engineers, policy-makers, scientists and climate deniers.
The result was a set of around 66 snapshot scenes, each depicting a different corner of the climate world - the debates and decisions and questions that we’re confronted with in this strange moment in the earth’s history.
And it worked. In Belvoir’s production, director Carissa Licciardello and the cast and creatives turned that script into a show that connected. The show contained the climate content I was excited about, tangled up with the chaotic comedy, drama, music and dancing that makes a theatre show worth watching - the performance version of a social media doomscroll, as the Saturday Paper pointed out. The form worked.
But it failed, too. Scenes from the Climate Era was able to illustrate the scope and scale of environmental change partly by avoiding having any central characters or a narrative. Removing character and plot freed us up to shape the story around other elements (eg repeated images, themes, an emotional progression). But when you sacrifice character and plot, you remove two of the biggest elements that audiences hold on to when watching a show. In order to ensure the piece didn’t exhaust people with a constant parade of novelty, we limited the show to a strict 70 minutes.
In other words: by widening the lens, we had to reduce the scale.
Every form fails in its own way, but those failures become interesting. And some get you closer than others. In my heart of hearts, I really believe that there’s a structure, a form, a story that can contain everything, that can allow us to understand everything, to feel everything. Out of the productive failure of Climate Era, I can already start to see the outlines of the next form.
That form will fail, and the next will fail too, and each will reveal something new, some new unexpected possibility will open up, even while each closes down other potentials.
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We don’t have long, in this life - a few decades or so, if we’re lucky. If you’re an artist, you maybe get a couple hundred months at most in your whole life where you’re at the top of your game, where you can try to create something meaningful. Meanwhile audiences change, the artform changes, the world is transforming. You’re trying to hit a moving target while the ground underneath you is buckling.
& yet & yet - you have to believe that the next project, you’ll get it right. You’ll nail it. Form and content will align perfectly at last, and the whole thing will slide into place with one satisfying click, and there it will be - the real world, the true world, reflected for a moment in your art. Being for one moment a true wellspring for the inspiration. Blurring no expression, smudging no lines. You have to believe it’s possible, it’s possible for all of us.
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NEWS AND PROJECTS
It’s strange to be excited that I have no upcoming shows or presentations. In previous years, that would be a sign that things were not going well, that the wheels were coming off. This January, it doesn’t feel like that. There are some shows on the horizon for later this year - in Australia, the Philippines, Canada, the USA - but they’re not ready to announce yet. In the meantime, it’s time for me to put my head down and research and write, which is its own delight.
My partner and I did, however, begin the year camping in a hailstorm by the snowmelt river at Charlotte Pass in the Snowy Mountains. In the morning the crows outside our tent woke us by loudly discussing whether or not we were dead*, which was a kind of charming welcome to 2024.
*we assume
RECOMMENDATIONS
Nic Low - Uprising
I’ve been working on translating the Climate Era script to a New Zealand context for its Auckland Theatre Company show later this year, and so I turned to this book to guide me. Low is a climber and writer, and here he traces a series of walks through the New Zealand mountains, unpacking their Maori history and his own personal relationship with them. A beautiful intermingling of cultural history, nature writing and memoir, set in some of the most gorgeous landscapes you can imagine.
John Clark and Ross Stevenson - The Games
While in Manila over November-December, I found the classic late-90s mockumentary about the organising of the Sydney Olympics starring John Clarke, Bryan Dawe and Gina Riley is finally available for streaming. I’d forgotten how low-key it was - many episodes barely have a plot, it’s just the low-key good natured riffing of a group of brilliant comic actors at the top of their game. Real comfort food for a certain generation of Australians.
Fossil Rabbit - Pure Eroding Shores
My brother Chris creates languid, blissed-out soundscapes on guitar as Fossil Rabbit, and this is perhaps the best thing he’s ever done - a 25 minute reworking of All Saints’ Pure Shores, reconfigured as an ode to the slowly sinking beaches of the south coast of NSW.
Mary Lattimore - Goodbye, Hotel Arkada
I feel like I include Mary Lattimore in my recommendations every second month, but that’s because whenever she releases something, I can’t stop listening to it. This is a concept record about something, but it doesn’t matter what, as soon as I put it on, I forget whatever the story is and just fall into that echoing whirlpool of harp and half-heard murmuring vocals.
Mouse on Mars - Rost Pocks
It’s strange that although MoM are one of my all-time favourite outfits, my most-listened to record of theirs is actually this 2003 compilation of a bunch of EP and B-side tracks. I’ve come back to this record in a big way over the last couple of months, that bristling IDM complexity trimmed into glowing neon high-energy bangers. Bib is a chorus of frogs caught in a waterfall and it’s a kind of happiness, all by itself.
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As ever, you can get more background on my practice in my New Rules for Modelling series, or you can check out my website. And if you have any questions or offers that might make my life more interesting, feel free to get in touch.
Peace!