How can we reconcile with the fact that it is our very cleverness, our humanness, our drive to create, to build, to connect, to expand, to reproduce, to make art that will, eventually, destroy us?
It started with two devised theatre makers situated 7,000 km apart. In 2019, Eric Rose, Artistic Director of Calgary-based Ghost River Theatre, and Nel Crouch, Artistic Director of UK-based Bucket Club, received a New Conversations grant to start a conversation.
Funded by the British Council, the High Commission of Canada in the UK, and Farnham Maltings with support from Arts Council England, the New Conversations program is intended to initiate challenging and inquisitive conversations, exchange ideas and practices and develop ambitious creative research and development projects that can offer first steps for artistic collaborations and productions between Canada and the UK.
What could be more challenging, more ambitious, and more universal than the topic of extinction?
Extinction Song explores the human experience of our planet’s sixth extinction event through a collision of original music, song, movement and animation. Both disturbing and very funny, a diverse ensemble of a large number of performers, choristers, and children will unhinge our collective climate anxiety in the most vital and preposterous of performances.
Drawing on Rose’s signature high tech, low-fi, highly visual aesthetic and Crouch’s masterful integration of whimsy and rigor, and bringing Downstage into the collaboration for their expertise in community-engaged theatre - the collaborators have imagined a big, kaleidoscopic, visual, music-filled explosion of a show. They want to give voice to what it means to be human right now. To create a space where both audiences and community participants can digest the knowledge of extinction and imagine ways to keep on celebrating humanness, to keep on living dynamically - and with hope, even on the precipice.
“We want the show to be scary and moving and very funny. We aren’t interested in preaching. We love the dichotomy of hearing “everything is fine” while reading FUCKED. We want to laugh at the absurdity of this dire situation. We want to laugh at ourselves for buying metal straws and bringing them on our yearly Mexico vacations. We want to weep or cringe or gasp as a child speaks to us of the end.
We want build participation into our process; to engage members of the community - youth theatres, choirs, tai chi groups, dog walkers, non-performers, professionals, and – especially – the young, as the people whose voices and futures are most at stake. Things will be built and destroyed, will multiply out of control, will loop and repeat.”
Extinction Song is a collaboration between Ghost River Theatre, Bucket Club, and Downstage. Currently in development, additional residencies will take place in 2020, prototyping in 2021, with the aim of premiering the work in 2022-23.
Producing and commissioning partners interested in this exciting new project should contact Eric Rose, Artistic Director of Ghost River Theatre, at erose@ghostrivertheatre.com.