Climate Gathering Redux

Audiences become empowered participants in creating sacred space

for climate justice

To turn towards the most pressing issues of our time

In 2021, the Wexner Center for the Arts commissioned a year-long residency

by ZShaw for digital performance research.

- created with support from M. Gajic, T. Olsen, M. Morris, and L. Rodriguez -

In this site - created with support from M. Gajic, T. Olsen, M. Morris, and L. Rodriguez,

ZShaw transforms her Climate Gathering performances into
a digital refuge for you to reflect, sense, and feel into action

The following videos, images, and written prompts draw on materials from the
live performances and audience responses from past events

We invite you to scroll, reflect, and feel your way into intention and action.

To begin, let's arrive.

Acid Rain

later seasons...migratory birds arriving later

third-degree smog alerts that kept us inside at recess

the first time I heard of climate change was around 2002 and my sister convinced me to do a collaborative project with her at university about raising awareness to the issue. little did we know then the speed and intensity of its unfolding...

Hair spray makes a hole in the ozone

watching our local brook erode and disappear

portage glacier used to be
next to the museum
and in portage lake.
now it is more than 3 miles up the valley and
far from the lakes edge.

I took pictures of the mountains outside
my house to document them
for my children

Feeling afraid
the mountains
would be gone.

Loss of the
Rainforests

Not enough snow to ice skate like
my parents did when they were young

expanding desert in China

Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth

It doesn't snow anymore, not regularly like it used to. and then sometimes it snows too much. the weather feels so much more chaotic than it once was.

The drought in the 80's when we couldn't water our lawns in Northern California.

no more snow in winter

My earliest memory was the extreme heat conditions of summers in Chicago during the mid-1990's where increased humidity caused many deaths due to suffocating temperatures.

In the car in the 80's, my dad suggested that one of us three girls should become a climatologists - that something big was coming down the pike. We laughed or ignored, as one does with parents but he was right, and while I am not a climatologist, I have found my way, finally, to a parallel road.

In 5 grade when we did diverse instrumental objects out of plastic material - it was in Switzerland

where we in school learned about the importance of
re-use of material- this was in the 80's- long time ago.

watching Planet Earth when I was little
and realizing how much of an impact climate change had in certain parts of the world and on certain species
even though it was not very felt by me at home

In grade school, when earth day became more elevated and institutions started recycling.

I have always been fair, so I have always burned. but in the last couple of decades, I have noticed that I can actually feel the heat differently - I can feel it moving through the layers of my skin, like electricity - and I burn much faster.

like many of my generation, an inconvenient truth was very illuminating for me.
but in retrospect,
the shift in how the sun feels on my fair skin.

In 2002 driving on the icefields parkway in Canada,
learning how much the glaciers had
already shrunk and how much they still will

Learning maybe in the 80s, as ocean swimmer and diver and lover of small anemone that rising ocean temps was a cause of coral bleaching and feeling overwhelmed

Tornados in the wrong month

The draught in the 80's when we couldn't
water our lawns in nor cal.

hurricane sandy

My earliest memory was the extreme heat conditions of summers in Chicago during the mid-1990’s where increased humidity caused many deaths due to suffocating temperatures.

coal country eastern sky

I was on a Sunday drive with my family as a girl and saw new highways being constructed through farmlands and forests, even then as a young girl, I was alarmed.

It was the Brisbane floods, 2011.

Visiting Brazil's Iguazu falls in 2006 and experiencing there being very little water and freaking out about this.

Experiencing summer on the West Coast becoming "fire season"

Hearing about An Inconvenient Truth on television and my parents’ denial of it.

The hole in the ozone layer and we needed to not use hairspray and carpool more.

The earth is getting warmer and the ice caps are melting

Winters without the snow I remember as a child

Is climate change something we can remember?
Isn't that part of the problem?
We're the frogs in the boiling water…

I remember my parents switching to non-aerosol hairspray because of reports that the aerosol hairspray was dissolving the ozone layer and the planet was warming

Listening to Rabbi Waskow speak about the devastating ways in which we are impacting our ecosystems.

Noticing how much quieter it was in the summer near my grandparents' old home. The cacophony of insects is just not there anymore. I thought I was misremembering until we found an old audio recording I made as a child in their backyard.

It is hard to pinpoint the first memories of climate change...

I remember being alarmed by all the news stories on the hole in the ozone layer, along with stories about acid rain.

My parents' accounts of colder and drier winters in the area where we lived before the hydro power station and a giant artificial water reservoir were built

I remember learning that aerosol cans had chlorofluorocarbons in a science textbook in grammar school and being sad for penguins

Raining summers

I learned about climate change when it was called the "greenhouse effect”

In my first few years of teaching at the high school level, I heard a lecture by one of my current colleagues, he was able to stitch together all of the details for me to understand how climate change overlapped with my scholarly work

The warming waters of Lake Superior, 1990s

I saw ducklings ensnared with plastic can rings and it made me want to be aware of what I was throwing away and how to not hurt our ecosystems.

I remember being told that there was a hole in the ozone layer when I was in grade school, and sometimes I would look to the northern sky to see if I could see a hole in the sky.

My intergenerational memories of climate change involve asking my grandmother about the weather when she was growing up, her description of the town we grew up in, the landscape I dug worms up in and wandered changing

Data delivered in a classroom at an age when I could hardly understand on a planetary scale

Getting a recycling bin for the first time when I was 8

Maybe not one of the first but one of the most impactful experiences was the polar vortex in Cleveland, OH and the subzero temps for two weeks straight and watching the city completely shut down.

Composting w/ my mom

The Flint water crisis

There were fewer and fewer fish where my family and fished in the summer

When I was a teenager, I visited New York City for the first time, after a day of walking around town, I got back to the hotel, looked in the mirror and saw my face and eyes covered in the dirt, metals, and pollution that fill the air in that city.

Credits
‍

Creative Director
‍
Norah Zuniga Shaw (NZShaw)

Online Interaction Designers

Mila Gajic

Taylor Olsen

Jeremy Patterson

Online content and dramaturgy

Michael Morris

Laura Rodriguez (LROD)

Performers

NZShaw, climate banshee

LROD, dancer

Tara Burns, dancer

Byron Au Yong, musician

Fede Camara Halac, live multichannel sound processing

Tonya Lockyer, ritual facilitator for audience participation

Intermedia Design and Custom Interactive Software (in Isadora)

Oded Huberman
‍

Set Design

Nadia Lauro

Special thanks to the Byrd Polar Research Center for the Antarctic expedition tent

Multichannel Sound Design and Custom Interactive Software for performances

Marc Ainger

Lighting and Costume Design for performance and video

LROD

Special guest directors and contributing artists for performance

Michelle Ellsworth, Ohad FIshof, Noa Zuk, Byron Au Yong, Claire Melbourne,

Tonya Lockyer, Brianna Johnson, Simone Forti, Michael Morris, Dorian Ham

Livable Futures Graphics

Rhys Gruebel

Taylor Olsen

Climate Gathering Photography

Seth Moses Miller

Production and Documentation for January 2020 NYC performances

Movement Lab, Barnard College

Director - Gabri Christa

Technical Director - Guy de Lancey

Production Manager - Allison Costa

Video Editing

LROD and NZShaw

Climate Gathering was created with support from the Wexner Center for the Arts,

the Greater Columbus Arts Council, Livable Futures Network, a project of the Global Arts

and Humanities Discovery Themes, Coca Cola Critical Difference for Women Grants, the

Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, the Collaboration for Humane Technologies

and community partners in Columbus, Ohio and Melbourne, Australia including the Champion
‍
Intergenerational Center, Flux and Flow Dance Center, Byrd Polar Research Center.

(c) 2023

Please scroll for this experience.

Climate Gathering

Turning toward climate change and injustice

Softening into the magnitude of the issues

Finding new ways into intention and action

Using a journal or anything you have at hand

Take a moment to meet yourself at the page.

Reflect, write, gesture, or draw