Update: the Queens Botanical Garden invited us to perform at their Climate Arts Festival on April 27th for an audience of 3,000! Check out coverage of this piece and my approach to environmental storytelling in Hyperallergic (!!!). Are you scared about the future? Do you feel climate despair? What’s your first memory of a storm? What’s a time you’ve leaned on a neighbor during a disaster? Do you think the world has ended, or has it just begun? Do you want to watch me play this cool Japanese synth from 1987 I got off E-bay? A Fun Play About How Scary Climate Change Is is a play about finding hope, not despair, in the face of climate change. It follows two swamp monsters who wash up on the beach, and a Seagull (who’s been to too much therapy), grumpy writer, neurotic makeup artist, and fabulous park ranger who band to return them home to their family (with plenty of music and dancing and songs about rain along the way). There’s also a lot of Japanese synth from 1987 that I got off ebay.
Rehearsal in the Queens Botanical Garden’s parking lot.
I wrote, directed, composed, and acted in this performance (with the help of 20 other fantastic artists), and performed in five community waterfront spaces across the city: Rockaway Beach (which was covered by the The Rockaway Wave and performed as part of the Amanda+James Coastlines Festival, where they picked five artists (one per borough, we’re Queens, pun intended!) to create public art about and on the coastline), Edgemere Farm (also covered by The Rockaway Wave), Gowanus Dredgers Community Boathouse, Hunts Point Riverside Park, and the historic La Plaza Cultural. We also made a fun mini-zine (send me an email and I’ll mail you one + stickers!!!). Along with Amanda+James, this performance is supported by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Brooklyn Arts Council. All performances were free, with food to remind of us of the places we performed in, zines and archival installations about climate organizing and justice around the corner, and a community talk back!
This play took place across seven different locations picked because of its simultaneous climate vulnerability and embedded climate organizing: the Gowanus Dredgers Community Boathouse (which is currently undergoing a rezoning contributing to extreme stormwater flooding, as well as community-based planning around environmental justice), the boardwalk and Edgemere Farm in Far Rockaway (which is the byproduct of racist urban renewal and segregated coastal storm surge risk, as well as organizing around federal climate funding), La Plaza Cultural (which is at high risk of resiliency gentrification and storm surge, as well as multi-racial organizing coalitions), and Hunts Point Riverside Park (on the famous Bronx River, which is at high risk of municipal storm overflows, as well as Bronx-based coalitional environmental justice advocacy), and the Queens Botanical Garden (next to the polluted Flushing Creek, fighting both a racist rezoning and casino redevelopment).
