In collaboration with FUNDarte, a Knight Arts grantee, Elizabeth Doud brings Climakaze to Miami. Climakaze is a three-day, participation-driven series of dialogues, performances and gatherings to connect the community, create awareness and incite action around the issue of global climate change. Aimed at artists, scientists and change-makers concerned about climate-change, Climakaze is a catalyst for environmental and social action through the arts.

Climakaze Miami.

Neil de la Flor: What was the impetus for Climakaze?  Elizabeth Doud: As an artist making work about climate phenomena and environmental collapse, I kept finding myself alone without a sense of community or greater connectedness to the larger climate movement, and what I like to now call systems change movement. I felt the need to have a network of peers and thinkers that I could turn to in order to better understand the work I was making, and with whom to share my work in local and global contexts. Not just as performance, but as thought.

Who’s making this work? How are they funding it? What are presenters and audiences thinking and how are they reacting? How do we not be overly didactic as artist-activists? How do we connect in efficient partnerships with other non-arts efforts of climate activism so that we as artists are adding value through our massively and importantly unique skill set? Questions like this kept me up at night, and I just thought, ‘we need to get a community started and network ourselves.’ Face-to-face meetings are irreplaceable for community building, and it was also essential for me that there be performance as a lead component.

FUNDarte has embraced this idea, as it fits into their profile of presenting artists from throughout the Americas, and also opens space for multilingual dialogues that reflect our region. So many of us are making our work in an isolated way, and at this critical juncture in the climate crisis, we can’t afford not to be networking and generating creative solutions collectively.

Climakaze is a container to try and address some of that.

ND: Climakaze isn’t just a performance platform. It’s a series of events, or dialogues, that engage the artistic community during the age of climate change. What is your hope for the symposium?  ED: The idea of the Climakaze Dialogues is to create a forum for real conversation and opening. A traditional symposium usually focuses more on presentation, where one ‘authority’ downloads their expertise to the group, and there ends up being little dialogue. The agenda is typically pre-set by a small group of decision makers beforehand, and there is little room for emergence.

Scott Perret, who is the lead facilitator for the event, has worked at the intersection of sustainability, systems thinking and theater for years, and has designed a flow for the conversation where the agenda emerges based on the urgencies and needs of the group. It’s very interactive. Our hope is that, through this kind of participatory dialogue, we can weave a shared vision and community from which collaborations and mutual support can grow.

We are doing this not only with face-to-face meeting, but with an excursion into the precious ecology of our region. This is important as a way to acknowledge the infinite creativity of the ‘natural world’, and to disappear the illusion of our separation from the environment around us that we’ve built up. Nature is a great performer. It’s a time-based exhibit of beauty and poetry and interconnectedness, so there is an amazing parallel with the work we do as performing artists. It will be wonderful to witness this as a group.

ND: Could you discuss the fine line between art and activism? ED: It’s been said that there are no poetics without politics, but I would add that the reverse isn’t true. Many political actions—including much of contemporary climate-action efforts—lack poetics, and therefore fall short of connecting with people emotionally. Political theater is not a new idea, of course, and there are many masters that were first and foremost theater makers, yet had profound political impacts on societies. The point is that those effects were only possible because they weren’t politicians, but artists, and that they were able to retain the poetic integrity of their work, which connected emotionally to audiences and moved their hearts and minds.

I can’t believe I’m doing this, but I have to quote Bertolt Brecht: “Art is not a mirror with which to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”

“We are Doing It,” 2015, Elizabeth Doud.

ND: Should artists blur this line, and why?  ED: Every artist will make that decision for themselves, I guess, and there are many who don’t want the ‘stigma’ of a political agenda attached to their work, as they feel it’s too polarizing, or they are believe that a work that is too political with always suffer aesthetically.

For the purposes of Climakaze, it’s fair to say that artists working at the intersection of climate change themes and performance are very keen to use their creative work as a means of direct action. This gathering will be an important opportunity for us to address the ways in which we can do this effectively and retain the aesthetic qualities of the work that make audiences want to connect.

Artists need to bring the best of their skills to the efforts of raising awareness and inciting action about what is happening to us. This crisis is almost too immense to grasp, and often overwhelmingly depressing, and the denial level among us humans is extreme, so this is not an easy job. If you are an artist, and as alarmed and heartbroken as I am about the state of our planet, I would hope you would be moved to create narratives, dances, murals, radio shows, cartoons, films, plays, street dances and operas that bear witness or respond to the largest catastrophe of our time in any way possible. And do it now.

ND: How did this three-day event come together?  ED: FUNDarte is the lead producer of the event, and we are partnering with Earth Learning and the Miami Dade County Auditorium. In terms of production, these organizational entities have bought into the vision and made it possible. All three partners bring their capital and expertise to the table. In partnership with FUNDarte, I’ve designed the artistic program, and Scott Perret and Joshua Cubista, both professional facilitators, along with Mario Yanez from Earth Learning, have designed the flow of the dialogues and excursion based on processes that they bring from their vast experiences hosting process-based conversations.

ND: What’s your process? ED: Our process will be about building participatory dialogue and tapping into the knowledge, wisdom and experience of the group as a whole, across the spectrum of the people assembled. There is only one meta-level topic, and the processes are designed to sense and surface what conversations related to that topic are most important to the community (i.e., across the system represented by those assembled in the room).

Mostly, we want people to come with a sense of curiosity and joy about being connected to a community of engaged creative citizens, with a willingness to contribute and share.

ND: What’s next for Elizabeth Doud? ED: This is year one of what we hope will be a three-year series of Climakaze Miami. Then, we’d love to take the model to other cities where this work is needed. New Orleans; Washington, D.C.; Havana, Cuba; Salvador, Brazil; Manitoba province in Canada…who knows?

I’m also currently working on an extension of my performance project, “The Mermaid Tear Factory,” which has been a multi-year creation of a site-specific work about a vigilante mermaid-sea goddess, ocean plastics pollution and ocean acidification. I will perform the next iteration of this work in July or August 2015 in Miami on various beaches.

Otherwise, I plan to get in as much surfing as I can before the ocean boils—for real. We (myself and my mermaid sisters and brothers) also think surfing is a good skill to have in South Florida as our sea level rises. Hang ten, Miami!

Climakaze runs from April 10-12, 2015 at the Miami Dade County Auditorium, Everglades National Park and Miami Beach Botanical Garden. Tickets to the full symposium (includes participation in dialogues, Everglades excursion, evening performances and lunch all three days) are $130; a one-day pass is $50; admission to the closing beach picnic is $20. To register, call 305-851-3342 or click here. For more information, visit climakazemiami.org. To learn more about Elizabeth Doud, visit www.sirenjones.com.