In 2021 we released The Gentlest Work, a show intended for live performance that became an online installation because of a global pandemic. We all have vivid memories of doing research and development for what became The Gentlest Work in 2019 amidst the sweltering temperatures of that summer’s heatwaves. The ten warmest years in the historical record have all happened in the time we’ve been working together as a company. Reflecting on all this, we felt our next show had to address the climate emergency.
Since then we’ve been developing new work that will have its first iteration in 2025 with when I will be a bird. To help us in this work we turned to our university partners, the Open University and Royal Holloway.
Our work on this show is part of a research impact project based at the Open University, ‘Mythic Storytelling and the Changing Environment’. The project explores how mythic forms of storytelling can become an access point to discuss our relationship with the natural world and the changing environment. The research project is led by Gentle Furies’ co-artistic director Dr Christine Plastow alongside Dr Marcus Badger, Senior Lecturer in Earth Science. As part of the project so far we’ve undertaken research trips to Penge, Liverpool, and Belfast, culminating in the research and development week (more on that below). We’ve been trying to understand local environmental issues impacting these areas and what mythologies and stories from these regions could relay to an audience. For example, the Irish mythological figures Etain and Midir, transformed into swans, tell stories of the origins of Lough Neagh remixed with its current plight of catastrophic blooms of blue-green algae
At Royal Holloway, we’ve been involved in their carbon literacy training scheme, led by Professor Sigrun Wagner, Gentle Furies trustee Professor Liz Schafer, and Gentle Furies’ other co-artistic director, Dr David Bullen. Carbon literacy is foundational knowledge about the climate crisis that empowers everyone – not just climate scientists – to make informed decisions that are positive for the environment. You can find out more at the Carbon Literary Project, who validate the training. More recently we have become a partner in the CoastARTS project connecting artists and academics working on arts-based responses to environmental crisis in the UK, Ireland, Norway, Spain, and Portugal.
Watch this space for more news on how our environment-focused projects develop.
R&D 2024 @ Battersea Arts Centre
In June 2024 we undertook research and development work for the show that has evolved into when I will be a bird. Work-in-progress material was shared with two audiences at Battersea Arts Centre. We made lots of discoveries that week, building on our OU-funded research and two further days of R&D we did in May at Royal Holloway. We realised that we were interested in animals, rather than humans, as the tellers of stories connected to the natural world. This allowed us to explore new perspectives on both the myths and the environmental challenges we had been learning about in our research. The challenge we now face is avoiding the trap of putting humans at the centre of a response to a crisis that affects so much more than just humankind (the brilliant Catherine Love writes about that here).
This was also an opportunity for us to work with a writer and performer we’ve admired for a long time, Annie Siddons, who joined the project as dramaturg.