YWVC and Climate Change Theatre Action
We likewise want to ensure that young women’s voices are a part of international public platforms about climate change. In November 2019, YWVC hosted a Colorado event that was part of Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA), a worldwide series of readings and performances of short climate change plays presented biennially to coincide with the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP). One of YWVC’s CU students, Sarah Fahmy, chose two short plays that focused on women and climate change: The Butterfly That Persisted by Jordanian playwright Lana Nasser, a challenging piece due to both the subject matter and the poetic language that dramatizes an intense conversation between humanity and the Earth, and It Starts with Me by New York–based Canadian playwright Chantal Bilodeau, which not only further educated us on the interconnected realities of women in relation to climate change but also unleashed a powerful conviction through the students’ embodied voices.
A few weeks before the performance, we all went on a weekend retreat near Rocky Mountain National Park. We rehearsed for hours in a clearing outside our cabin on a rare warm fall day, a backdrop of the Rocky Mountains behind us. Being immersed in nature—the pine-scented air, a nice breeze that tossed our hair around, and the Earth beneath our feet—definitely helped the process and deepened our connection to the content of the plays. As part of the retreat, we invited the young women to find their own spot in the hilly woods behind our cabin and, using pen and paper, to free write on their feelings and thoughts about each of the plays they were rehearsing; Leela, writing from her perspective as a girl raised in India who had to move back to the United States as a young woman, penned what came above.
About the play It Starts with Me, Eliza Anderson, another of the young women, wrote, “In a world with seven billion people, it’s hard to feel as if you have the ability to make a difference; reading this play helps me feel as though I can.” Sofie Wendell wrote, for her part, about stopping the pillaging of our planet. “Yes, we have a right to be angry at all the past generations who have started and continue to destroy this Earth,” she articulated, “but we can’t be mad at the fact that old generations are not trying to preserve our future. … We need to embody this anger and make the changes ourselves because it is our future.” Another student, Lerato Osnes, wrote: “I am the one who can make change and help other people make change. It starts with me, a female in a male-dominant society and a minority in a white society.”
It’s important that the voices of young women are strengthened so they are able to advocate for a survivable future.
Olympia Kristl’s writing seamlessly intersected other life forms and ecosystems with her own embodied experience. “It starts with me… My feet stand on the ground, roots spreading down deep into the Earth,” she wrote. “I stand tall and strong like a tree, knowing that it starts with me. … I can see figures coming into view. They are my friends, the ones who are not afraid to think about the future. The ones that take a step with me. It starts with us.”
The young women performed these two brief plays as an ensemble at the Old Main theatre at CU for an audience of 150 people. Between the plays, they led attendees in a creative process of their own expression. We asked the audience to equally divide themselves into groups, and one of the young women guided each group in creating collective word clusters based on the phrases “Our vision of Boulder’s future includes…” and “Our vision of the World’s future includes….” The contributions were added to two posters. The first was presented to the City of Boulder Environmental Planning team heading up Boulder’s Climate Mobilization Action Plan. The second was taken to Madrid for the UNFCCC Parties Conference of the Parties (COP) just weeks after our event and displayed at a meeting on gender. We were told attending women were deeply touched by the messages expressed.
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