Raging, Radical, Raw Humanity
Feeling all your feelings and channeling them into the creative action the world needs
Climate change and the election in the US, wars around the world, economic inequities and suffering can all feel like insurmountable challenges leading us into the apathy of feeling powerless and unheard, victimized and stuck.
I understand. Climate change terrifies me, so for years I turned away from it. At some point I realized that turning away made me a denier. Even though I had been doing social justice and environmental work for years, it was the fun stuff: intercultural exchange, planting trees, volunteering in community gardens. All good stuff, but it’s the stuff that gave me hope, and it was pleasurable. Somewhere during the 2015 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and leading into the 2016 elections, I realized I needed to turn toward the harder things that I’m afraid of and that make me feel hopeless: climate change and the crushing inequities of its effects in the world, Trump, and the colonialism, anti-Blackness, and misogyny that underlie environmental degradation.
The scientific data and the bad news are important to face. We are in a crisis. But at the same time, the rhetoric of doom and gloom leaves me—and maybe others—feeling paralyzed, feeling afraid, feeling really powerless. This is only more true today. In turning toward our fears, we can also make the leap of assuming that our artistic practices are relevant and find ways into action.
From Individual Intentions to Collective Action
While each of our individual actions may feel very small in the face of these enormous problems, they do contribute to change on a local level and guide us into collective action and support. Our creativity is a resource no one can take from us and we all have potential here whether we identify as artists or not.
What are your super powers, gifts, skills, and training?
What do you know how to do well?
What do you do when you don’t know what to do?
These are the core questions I return to again and again in my own life and in facilitating community learning and action. Starting from these questions, reflecting and honoring what you know will guide you into a space of intention and actions that flow from intention have power and sustaining energy.
What if you make the leap of assuming that what you already know, who are you right now is enough? What if you simply put this up against any problem to see what happens, what creative ideas and actions emerge?
Climate Gatherings
My climate justice activism started from the questions “what do you know, what are you good at and what if this could become a tool for taking action” instead of ignoring and turning away from the darkness which I will admit was more often my response. One answer that came to me during reflection was dance improvisation. I am a dancer and improviser and maker of things with wonderful collaborators. So I put climate change and dance together as my space of wondering and asking and research. What emerged was a series of community performances I call Climate Gathering that I co-created with several beautiful artists Michael J. Morris, Tonya Lockyer, Seth Moses Miller, Byron Au Yong, LROD, Dorian Ham, Marc Ainger, Oded Huberman, Tara Burns, and many others.
Climate Gathering performances start by asking folks what they know how to do. We send out a survey as part of the ticketing process that asks participants, “What would your friends or family members say is your greatest strength?” Audiences are kept small, groups of 10-20. I memorize their responses and integrate them into the piece, expressing those strengths in a poetics that applies them to survival.
You can do this for yourself, too. Maybe you’re a really great, nurturing parent, or a good listener, or you’re loquacious. Those are your superpowers. What if you simply bring those powers to the needs at hand?
Reach out any time if you’d like us to co-create a Climate Gathering with your community.
I created a free online version called Climate Gathering Redux that anyone can participate in for free today and on your own time. I’d love to hear your responses and share them out here and on social media with your permission.
Experience your own Climate Gathering workshop here:
https://climategatheringredux.webflow.io/
Climate Banshee
In the process of developing Climate Gatherings, a figure of raw humanity, rage, catharsis, sorrow and voice came into my practice and she is what I call the Climate Banshee. In an interview with the Wexner Center for the Arts I describe the banshee as:
“ a live, improvised state that I enter into, in which I am principally trying to do the impossible: to stay completely present at all times with climate change and to simultaneously attune to sensation, to bring it into the scale of my body. It’s a constant battle to stay present, and I create the vocalizations from that state of being.
As anybody who meditates knows, there's a human tendency to drift off, especially when confronting something hard to face. I’m not letting myself drift. I’m also not letting myself do the things I typically do as a performer to feel secure on stage and draw you in. I’m seeking to remain in flux, unstable, refusing the illusion of stability. The result is awkward and ugly sometimes, and cathartic.
The banshee is expressing the inexpressible. In this way, it is in the tradition of the prophetic. The banshee shakes things up, literally creating vibration in the room, and then the ability to make choices gives the audience some agency. It has a very strong emotional aspect. People experience their own grief, loss, and rage, which are appropriate shared emotions around climate collapse and crisis.
We have done the work now with enough people that I see the way this softens audiences into intention.”
UN Climate Talks Annual Practice of Paying Attention
Every November, since 2021 I’ve been creating a social media installation of the Climate Banshee during the UN Climate talks. The installation includes:
paying attention to the talks and reporting on them
adding to my climate journal in words and images
generating videos and images for social media
Follow us @climatbanshee and thank you to the venues who have supported and amplified this work over the years (Wexner Center for the Arts Ohio, Movement Lab NYC, and DanceHouse Melbourne).
Join Me Now on IG
I am running a new installation right now unfold as the 29th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change #COP29. Here’s a few samples for this wonderful Substack community and follow us @LivableFuturesNow on Instagram if you’d like to connect with these energies daily for a while. You are awesome and you have considerable power even in the context of an abject society and the wicked challenges of the moment.
Keep in touch, this is a supportive and creative community and can serve as a resource as you reach for what you are most called to do in difficult times. Feel your rage and sorrow, express them and also feel your hope and gratitude and love and express that too.
Your radical, raw humanity is a gift to the world.
Love
Norah