A dance about global warming.
Photo by courtesy of Jack Perla
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by Joan Hamilton
Environmental Expression Through Art Session
When people start dancing about global warming, you know things are bad. In the video shown in this session big cubes of ice hang from the ceiling, drip-drip-dripping onto the stage. A Cassandra character flops and flails to a modern instrumental score, while the rest of the company oozes about in smugly chic-looking couples. No one looks up. Only Cassandra knows the truth, and she's not getting her message across.
The 30-minute dance production, "On a Train Heading South," is a recent work of two San Francisco artists who appeared on this panel, choreographer Brenda Way and jazz pianist and composer Jack Perla. "The general population is complacent, self-involved," Way said. But Cassandra is hysterical -- "why should she be listened to?" The piece will be staged at the Joyce Theatre in New York City in October, and will arrive in other cities including Monterey, California, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and Anchorage, Alaska, in 2006.
"I used to think that politics was on the barricades, and that art should be in the theater," Way said. "But if we all aren't political now, we'll all be gone."
The third panelist, Linda Hogan, weaves stories around political issues and her own close observations of nature. A Chickasaw who grew up in Oklahoma, Hogan has studied Florida panthers, whales, and ants, among other earthly matters. Her writings include Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World and (with Brenda Petersen) Sightings: The Gray Whales' Mysterious Journey. Although she writes poetry as well as prose, she is fond of fiction these days because "Nothing works better than a good story. It changes a person in the heart and body as well as in the mind."
-- 09/10/2005 Sat
10am
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