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OSUN Worldwide Teach-In on Climate Justice: Love out of the Ruins: Transformative imagining as resistance to reckless fatalism

When: —
Venue: Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square

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This event is a two-hours collaborative rehearsal/transformation of Zoe Svendsen's 5-minute collaborative play, Love out of the Ruins (commissioned for the 2021 Climate Action Theatre Anthology), which explores imagining worlds other than the “extractive, transactive, individualist, colonising, fossil-fuel addicted ‘high carbon culture’” that we live in, and proposes that “there is no single one-size-fits-all utopia, but many overlapping potentialities, complementary and conflicting – an ecosystem of utopias.” The event invites its participants to a conversation, a polyphony of imagining otherwise.
 
In this theatre workshop, led by various artists from METIS, the participants will collaborate with each other in response to the play to “create, imagine, build and make – in full knowledge that we don’t, can’t and won’t know ‘what works’ before we start, or even as we are making this attempt.” This collaborative theatre workshop hopes to create space for its participants to “imagine alternative futures” with real possibilities that have been excluded from our collective imaginations as naïve, unworkable or unlikely.  This event invites its participants to “a ritual – an invocation to conjure futures we would like to live in, in order to resee what is already out there.” The emphasis will be on doing and undoing text as a material to open up conversation about the world we live in, how we can imagine it and its futures differently beyond the given narratives of climate change towards the multiple layers, tissues and issues of climate justice.
 
The two-hour workshop will be followed by a 20-minute performance (starting at 3.15pm), open to a wider audience, followed by a Q&A between artists, participants and audience. Please book here for the public sharing.
“Activists often speak as though the solutions we need have not yet been launched or invented, as though we are starting from scratch, when often the real goal is to amplify the power and reach of existing alternatives. What we dream of is already present in the world.” Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark (2015 edition)

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Speakers
  • Lucy Wray -

    Lucy Wray (she/they) is a director, collaborative theatre maker and climate dramaturg whose work explores big political topics through intimate stories and encounters. She makes participatory projects with METIS, is an RSC Associate Learning Practitioner, Barbican Creative Curriculum Artist, and has worked as Associate Director for the National Theatre and Resident Director at The Almeida.​

  • Zoë Svendsen -

    Zoë Svendsen is director at METIS as well as an Associate Artists at the Donmar Warehouse, Cambridge Junction and the New Wolsey Theatre. As a dramaturg and designer she makes theatre performances exploring contemporary political subjects, including the Artsadmin Green Commission, WE KNOW NOT WHAT WE MAY BE (Barbican Centre, 2018), a performance installation imagining living under alternative economic conditions for a future beyond climate crisis. Zoë also works as dramaturgy to collaborate on the theatrical rethinking of classic texts for productions at the Young Vic, the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.