Crochet & Climate?
Right now, we want to offer crochet as a stress-relieving activity to keep us connected during distanced times. Here’s more about the bigger picture…
Big Why
We’re responding to the global climate crisis by looking for alternative ways to produce creative projects.
We want to help create solidarity between human labour and the labour of the environment.
We see sustainability as a shared cause between arts workers and land.
As a process-led collective, we think a lot about ‘how’. Collaborating on sprawling, interdisciplinary music theatre gives us the space to think and feel our way through our relationships to work. When we look at our four decades of collective experience in making, organizing, producing and promoting art, we feel sure that how we’ve been working is unsustainable - for humans and environments.
Is that even a question? Think of burnt-out arts workers and how everyone you know is hustling; single-use materials, and projects that happen once and vanish. If we can admit that we all need to take less, are enough of us asking, “Is my project worth what it uses?"
Frankly, we’re a little (no, very) depressed that every human now lives with the pressure to see themselves as an entrepreneur and a brand, and that our sparkly little businesses are supposed to keep producing at any cost. To wax agricultural about it - when do these fields get to lie fallow? We wonder if we can improve conditions for fields, and people, by slowing everything down and attending to process. As we work, how is our project considering the needs of the people we involve, and the materials and environments that support it?
We see connections between the pressures working humans face to stay ‘visible’, and the drive to make land produce. Living where and when we do, we’re of course thinking about development and extraction. But we also see how land can become a resource in our storytelling and our images –– how the environment can become a scenic backdrop to our personal ambitions. In a story about a human and a place, think about where your attention goes. Who are you rooting for?
We’ll be the first to admit that it can be hard for us to imagine binge-watching moss, or cheering for a mycorrhizal network. Others are excellent at this kind of thinking, and we’re trying to learn from them (Robin Wall Kimmerer, Jenny Odell, Robert MacFarlane, David Tracey, thank you!) Re-tuning our attention takes time, which brings us back to slowness…
We’ve been working on Mermaid Spring since spring 2017. Slowness hasn’t always been a choice, but we are learning its value –– making a little at a time, with what we can gather (read this article by Kidlat Tahimik for the rallying cry). Yup - ‘slow’ is also a brand, and currently very trendy. But as we hope we can show, we think complicated thoughts and mixed feelings are worth our attention.
The mermaids in our show live in Florida. We’re here. We stitch and imagine a connection. Our favourite technique, hyperbolic crochet, creates endless folds and complexity. The more you work at it, the further you are from the 'product'. This is an amazing idea to get into your hands.
