This reflection builds on our recent discussion paper, summarising key arguments (Thurow, Grehan and Davidson, 2023). We concluded that Australia seems to lurch from crisis to crisis – yet, once the immediate situation has been dealt with, people beyond those directly affected tend to move on to other issues. This is a challenge the arts and associated scholarship can address as we need to keep reminding people of the importance of the climate emergency and the need for strategies to build resilience even when things seem momentarily calm. In doing this, we can help communities feel empowered in advance of unpredictable changes, rather than merely continually focussing on repair in the aftermath.
Why should we engage in such efforts? Recent trends in both scholarship and public life have moved towards ‘self’ resilience or self-reliance rather than focusing on considerations of the role societies and communities can play in working collectively to deal with challenges. We argue that, as a result, citizens are encouraged to prioritise their individual resilience rather than explore and build their relationships within and across communities. We believe that we need to return our focus to the idea of the collective in order to foster and develop strong relationships between and among people to ensure ‘group cogency’ (Thurow, Grehan and Davidson 2023, 14) if we are to have an effect in combating challenges such as climate change and its impacts on society.
We believe that the creative arts supply a very useful model for generating group activity and engendering a sense of the collective. However, we also note that if the idea is to use creativity to build resilience in communities who have already grappled with natural hazard trauma, then there is a critical need to be aware of timing when drawing on creative (or any) strategies to help build collectivity and resilience. It is vital when working with communities to be fully aware of the local context as well as of the people’s experiences and specific needs to ensure positive and productive relations.
Partnering with organisations who are already working on the ground or who manage data on local ecologies, such as the Bureau of Meteorology or the CSIRO, can provide a fruitful pathway to engaging broad sections of the local populace and to co-design useful strategies for building resilience.
The Creative Recovery Network has been a trailblazer in this space. They build ‘disaster resilient communities’ by bringing people together and using artistic practices to share, memorialise and even celebrate their experiences of disaster events. None of us would deny the power of human connection and connectedness in such circumstances, and this involves listening to stories and coming together as a group.
We argue that a more comprehensive focus on building community resilience skills is necessary as we face increasing challenges and threats from extreme weather. There is no better starting point than working in community with young people as they progress through school, so that they can build skills and strategies throughout their lives. While this is not the case at the moment in Australian schooling, we need to hold onto the idea that creativity has a key role to play in helping us navigate the dramatic change we are experiencing as the impacts of extreme weather become increasingly evident.
Given the complexity of changing climates and our inability to fully predict what will happen, we believe it is important to encourage artists to link with scientists to generate imaginative ways of understanding and translating what is happening, and how we as communities might deal with this. We acknowledge that there is already excellent work happening in the arts across the globe in dealing with these issues and that this work occurs in various spaces and modes including Avant Garde performance art, musical theatre, opera, dramatic texts, film productions, dance and installation work as well as applied community-based work that is essential for those who are in the rebuilding phase. See for example the work of Kris Verdonck and A Two Dogs Company (2019), Marrugeku (2015), David Finnigan (2023), Caryl Churchill (2016). Despite this, there is a need to generate more work in an array of formats to help audiences and communities process these key issues of our times and prepare for our uncertain futures.
One future-focused project supported by the Creative Arts Network that offered an amazing example of interdisciplinary but powerfully arts-led work was The Refuge Project, presented at Arts House Melbourne from 2016-21. This used enactment both to reflect on and imagine potential future scenarios, working with a range of frontline emergency services and the public to uncover options and build positive approaches (see Tait this issue for more detail).
Engagements such as Refuge open audiences to deep contemplation and rethinking of what actions are needed and what our responsibilities might be. However, we cannot reflect solely on human and human-to-human interaction. We must also take into account the relationships between human and non-human actors, as for example done by Manuela Infante and Marcela Salina’s one-woman show Estado Vegetal (performed since 2017) that deeply considers our complex enmeshed interrelationship with the vegetal kingdom and the varied concepts of time and emplacement that co-exist between species. However, some of the most affecting and powerful work of recent times that compels audiences to think about temporal progression and caring for Country in different ways has been created by First Nations artists and companies, encouraging reflection on futures beyond the spectre of collapse and decay, such as Marrugeku’s Cut the Sky (produced since 2015).
To address the climate crisis and corral our skills and expertise, increased funding for both education and the creative arts is necessary to open pathways for experimentation to expand storytelling, recovery and preparedness explorations. The work needs to link between fields of research within the academy and practitioners in community settings. We need to broaden modes of writing, representation and performance that are innovative and accessible, including VR, generative AI and other emerging technologies to keep planning and building a resilient future through the arts.
References
Thurow, S., Grehan, H. & Davidson, J.W. (2023). Performing Arts and the Climate Emergency: Horizon-Scanning the Futures of Practice and Scholarship. Australasian Drama Studies, October, 83: 12-23.
Susanne Thurow is Associate Director Research and ARC Laureate Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of New South Wales’s iCinema Centre, where she leads the climate aesthetics research program. Her interdisciplinary work rethinks contemporary arts through performative digital aesthetics, having co-developed multidisciplinary projects with industry partners, such as Opera Australia. Her latest book (Routledge, 2020) won the 2021 Alvie Egan Award and the 2019 UNSW Art & Design Dean’s Award for Research Excellence, Best Monograph.
Helena Grehan is Vice-Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow at WesternAustralian Academy of Performing Arts (Edith Cowan University). She has published essays and books on spectatorship, ethics, intercultural theatre, performance+politics and new media dramaturgy. Grehan is currently Lead CI on an ARC Linkage Grant to Digitise Western Australia’s Vulnerable Cultural Heritage. She is Deputy Editor of leading performance studies journal, Performance Research.
Jane W. Davidson is a Fellow of the Australian Academy for the Humanities, undertaking research in performance, musical development, intercultural engagement and music for wellbeing outcomes. She was Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (2011–18), and is currently Head of Performing Arts and University of Melbourne’s Creativity and Wellbeing Initiative’s Chair. Jane is also an internationally award-winning opera singer and director.
Main Image Credit: Photo by Dasha Urvachova