A Dream Loud and Galvanizing

Creative Climate Action in the Wake of Global Crisis

Our View from Backstage.

Last year, MDC Live Arts kicked off its latest season of groundbreaking, genre-bending performances by talented artists from throughout the nation, and all over the world: ECOCultura, a series of performances for the planet—dynamic theater, dance and music events that spark action, advocacy, and dialogue around global environmental challenges and its impacts in South Florida.

With its historic practice of producing performing arts programs at the intersection of social change, MDC Live Arts brought an activist onto its team in order to deeply connect with related initiatives and leaders in the community. David McDougal, an experienced, accomplished, and passionate multi-issue activist based in Miami, came on as ECOCultura Community Organizer and worked eagerly and tirelessly to connect activists and the artists and projects of ECOCultura. He was instrumental to the production of this planet-centric season of action-driven, justice-seeking performances, workshops, and conversations.

As this professionalizing of arts as activism exemplifies, artists stand to benefit from the organizer’s swift ability to connect networks and movements around an urgent issue, while organizers, in turn, stand to benefit from the infectious and transformative magic and platform of socially-conscious art installations and performances,  creative forms that have the power not just inspire but empower and create real, material change.

Houston Cypress, Miwa Matreyek and Josh Fox

The future of our movements for justice and liberation, and the fight against global climate change, belongs to collaborative cross-pollination, movements and actions that break open all siloed knowledges, disciplines, and pursuits.

For this, artists and activists must meet and work in synchronicity, our future depends on it.

If you’re an activist, an artist involved in social activism, or simply a person moved to effect real change around the glaring and urgent injustices all around you, welcome.  We have something of an open secret to share, the truth of which we re-confirm in our community-engaged work each season:

Art can make for powerful activism. Artists have the ability to change the world for good.

Hardly surprising, right? Or maybe you’re thrilled and excited? Put off by the very notion that art can do anything but delight and decorate? Whatever the case, you’re still on the right track.

Art can be any and all of these things, depending on its context, who you ask, and the creators behind it. That art can create real and lasting change in the world may be no secret to some; to others a fact so obvious it borders on yawn-inducing platitude.

To others still, art’s power to effect change is at best a questionable proposition, the slippery slope down which serious political action swiftly slides into the world of consumer objects, collectible decorations with an edgy political twist for privileged elites with disposable incomes. And fair enough— especially in Miami, the favored subtropical playground for the glitz-and-glam winter vacations of the global art scene, we know all too well the storied uses of private and public artworks, even those with polemic critiques of the status quo, as props for glaring forms of racism like urban gentrification and other glaring forms of injustice.

Still, that art and artists have a central role to play within social justice movements is a notion we should shout from the very mountaintops, even if the closest thing to a mountain you have is the Mt. Trashmore of your municipal dump. Shout it even—no, especially—if you’re already convinced, such that nobody dares forget it, and those who need to remember it most, always do.

We must ensure our dreams of justice and liberation are proportionate to the magnitude of the problems we face in our waking life.

As activists and organizers, we must ensure our dreams of justice and liberation are proportionate to the magnitude of the problems we face in our waking life. This way, if the ‘tic’ ‘toc’ of the Anthropocene finally catches up to us, extinction won’t be our most belated wake-up call, for we’ll have been awakened long before, by a dream, no less, and one we dared to build together—something loud and huge and galvanizing, something less like the ticking of a bomb, and more like the ringing of the global alarm clock.

Compounded by centuries of extreme racial and economic disparity, and the recent rise of a global pandemic, the multiple and overlapping environmental crises besetting our planet demand equally multiple and monumental dreams—radical acts of the human imagination, newly utopian longings to match the feverish nightmare of climate change in our time.

If it’s starting to sound like we need artists in the room, that’s because we do. We are in need of big dreams, life-altering and transformative visions, even utopias

Who builds these better than artists?

Holoscenes, a performance and installation piece by artist Lars Jan, at Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus, in Miami.

Bringing an activist onto our team professionally helped us see even more clearly than ever before what is possible when the line between artist and activist blurs, when the inherent collaboration of the practice of live performance involves the merging of artists and activists.

We heard David reflect that as we as a community together can work to address the multiplying impacts of climate change. It’s critical that activists leading and implementing the work on the groundwork hand in hand with the best communicators – artists with their unique abilities to connect, to humanize, and to deeply engage. And artists need activists not just to connect them with the communities impacted by and working around the issues and their full range of the problems and solutions, also to further inform their practice, their work, and to connect and transform.

THE DREAM OF A BETTER WORLD: ART FOR CLIMATE ACTION

In MDC Live Arts and its programs and initiatives, David saw an opportunity for effecting deep and lasting change where it’s needed most, a chance to bring new and sustained visibility to the voices and needs of Miami’s most climate-impacted communities, activists on the frontlines of racial justice, immigrant justice, health justice, and housing justice work —all of which are so deeply central to the building of community resilience and addressing the harms and stressors associated with the climate crisis.

We are in need of big dreams, life-altering and transformative visions, even utopias. Who builds these better than artists?

As MDC Live Arts has a long history of producing year-round programs, initiatives and performances that push boundaries and defy convention, artists who spark the flame of change. Year after year, its performance series take on the most pressing issues facing the South Florida region through active, dynamic collaborations with leading local, national and international artists. And this year was no exception.

Despite some planet-sized twists in the plot like the rise of a global pandemic, MDC Live Arts’ ECOCultura series of performances for the planet made waves felt around the world.

FOR EVERY NEW DREAM, A NEW CRISIS

Just as we were getting ready for the spring season was about to launch—quite literally on the opening night for our biggest performance of the season— everything came to a sudden and screeching halt, our plans suddenly upended on March 13, the day Miami Dade College canceled all public events due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.

And just like that…

Photo courtesy: International Wow. Josh Fox.

The Miami premiere of Josh Fox’s “The Truth Has Changed,” and eight post-performance community forums featuring more than 15 of the foremost movement leaders representing Miami’s climate justice, environmental justice, immigrant justice, and housing justice movements…

Canceled.

That art and artists have a central role to play within social justice movements is a notion we should shout from the very mountaintops, even if the closest thing to a mountain in your general vicinity is the Mt. Trashmore of your municipal dump.

Just like our community, our field, and our world, we paused.

Disheartened and disappointed but not defeated, we soon found out: nothing would stop the groundswell of creative climate action for which we’d planned over months. Not even a global pandemic.

After some deep breaths, we got to work on alternatives, and just as quickly as we’d halted, we managed to regain our footing: a totally new virtual format, a new and even bigger dream for the age of COVID-19. Still fresh off the cancellation, and already we were back in action, buzzing with novel ideas and new solutions to every viral and virtual challenge that could lay ahead.

MDC Live Arts team

FOR EVERY NEW CRISIS, NEW DREAMS

In the blur of days that followed, the MDC Live Arts team worked hard from home to reboot and transform many of the events originally scheduled for a newly expanding and increasingly global virtual audience. Our ECOCultura Community Organizer almost immediately salvaged all the wonderful community-building work he had done forming bridges between the climate community and MDC Live Arts for the remote transition.

The next major performance of the season, and first big test of the new virtual format, was the sensational FB LIVE DEBUT of award-winning LA-based multimedia artist Miwa Matreyek’s “Infinitely Yours”,  presented in partnership with the Miami Climate Alliance and national partners the US Climate Action Network, Sachamama, and the People’s Climate Movement.

Miwa Matreyek, “Infinitely Yours,” 2020.

Miwa’s gorgeous, kaleidoscopic multi-media performance also launched our new post-performance conversation series: the now totally virtual, artist-led  Climate Chats, in which the artist-led a discussion on the themes explored by their work with influential national activists Carlos Zegarra of Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project and the Sachamama organization, and Keya Chatterjee, executive director of US Climate Action Network and author of The Zero Footprint Baby.

“For me, the problem isn’t that people feel fear and anxiety […] They lack the tools to cope. That’s why this piece is so important. It gives you tools to experience that anxiety with others, and acknowledge it. It’s through this process of group realization that we can start to imagine what it is we need on the other side of this crisis.” – Keya Chatterjee, executive director of US Climate Action Network, commenting on Miwa Matreyek’s “Infinitely Yours”

MDC Live Arts’ ECOCultura initiative deeply resonated, meaningfully challenged, and led to deeper inquiry around the impacts of the climate crisis, the need for action, and the resources for that action – including arts practice and tools. The MDC Live Arts team, related artists, and those touched by ECOCultura programming had space and inspiration to think critically and ask more.

Working with and learning from ECOCultura artists, provided an opportunity to love and embrace questions—to live them, as Rilke would say—precisely for what they are: invitations to go further, not a puzzle to be solved or wrinkles to be smoothed out, but ways to explore new paths, potentials and possibilities, crucial and timely openings for creative climate action in the age of COVID-19.

The conversation and community around climate crisis had been amplified and expanded through the lens of the live arts and the artists who envision it.

Photo courtesy: National Water Dance.

We are living troubled and uncertain times, but this also means the conditions are perfect for massive and transformative changes. Some are already taking place, and they are happening all around us. Protests and actions are being organized in unprecedented numbers. Deep, complex, intersectional critiques are being deployed to analyze the climate crisis, ameliorate its profound effects, and prevent a(nother) planetary catastrophe, all on more public and global arenas than ever before.

In this new era, climate justice activists must continue to align with the many groups leading the fight against systemic racism and other movements for social justice. And to collaborate with artists – our most powerful communicators – and facilitate the production of bold and impassioned work. In all, establish a new culture of powerful intersectional organizing steeped in action-driven creativity and wild utopian longing.

Our movements for climate and environmental justice must be art movements also, and our artistic pursuits, in turn, must remain in active, critical alignment with the global, national and regional fight against injustice and the struggle for liberation.

HAVING DARED TO DREAM AGAIN, A FEW MORE QUESTIONS STILL, MORE DREAMING

Looking back on the entire season, we’re still inspired by the high caliber of performances and events we presented, the many new cross-disciplinary partnerships and relationships we helped to foster and grow as a result of expanding our tent to include a practitioner of activism to augment our practice of the arts.

Still, what more can be done, for the urgent and pressing need to find ever-more impactful means to effect social change and transformation through dynamic cross-pollinations between art and activism, performance, and the new waves of social uprisings?

Photo courtesy: Pro Stock Media.

How can our work of sparking discourse across the community play a greater role in unlocking the climate future we so desperately need in Miami? How can performances and conversations like those of ECOCultura drive deeper engagement and public, collective action?

Even now, answers to these questions remain as varied as they are complex, slippery and elusive. Ultimately, however, the answers may matter less than the questions themselves, and the very act of asking.

We ask these questions, that is, because we’ve already glimpsed the beginnings of the answer, reflected each in the veritable impacts of the artist-activist collaborations facilitated by MDC Live Arts through its ECOCultura initiative of performances for the planet.

Nothing could stop the groundswell of creative climate action for which we’d planned over months. Not even a global pandemic.

We ask, also, with utmost urgency, as sea-levels continue rising, whole blocks flood after the mildest rain, and wildfires devastate our fragile ecosystems and its many endangered species. Not because we did not do enough, but because no matter what we do, the globally intersecting crises that today besiege our planet demand of us an even bigger dream than yesterday’s—a dream so loud, so global and galvanizing it can scarcely be ignored. At MDC Live Arts, we’re prepared to build this dream, and we hope you’ll join us again this upcoming season.