Meltdown, an Opera About Two Thousand Ice-Elephants Melting Every Second

Tjaša Ferme: Hey, theatre, science, and innovation fans. This is Tjaša Ferme, your podcast host for Theatre Tech Talks: AI, Science, and Biomedia in Theatre, a podcast produced by HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. Tune in.

Today, we're going to talk with David Cote and Hai-Ting Chinn. We'll be talking about Meltdown, which is a work of fiction inspired by conversations with Asa Rennermalm, and her lecture, “Meltdown in the Arctic: A Perspective from the Greenland Ice Sheet.” Okay. Meltdown, is this an opera, or is this not an opera, and is this an important question to ask, or not at all?

David Cote: I think the definition of what an opera is has expanded a lot just in the last twenty or thirty years. It's a four-hundred-year-old art form, and if you go to festivals like Prototype, which happens every January in New York, you'll see a range of things that, stuff that sounds like musicals, stuff that's like a concert. I think Hai-Ting is a classically trained opera singer, and only she can handle the demands of the piece. Does that make it an opera? Hai-Ting, is it an opera?

Hai-Ting Chinn: “What is an opera?” is such a good question. This is a piece that a classical singer is performing, singing the entire time, never speaking. In that sense, it is an opera. It only has one character on stage. In the opera world, that would be called a monodrama, but no one outside the opera world even knows that term. What is it? Everyone asks me when I say, "It's a monodrama," they're like, "So you only sing one note the whole time?"

Tjaša: It's a huge word in European theatre. There's festivals, yeah, yeah, there's festivals that are called Monodrama. This is just a more full, more technical term for a solo show.

Hai-Ting: That's a great clarification for the audience. It's not as familiar to American audiences, I think, although they do use that word at the Met when they put on one-person operas. Then on top of that, it's not something that requires necessarily a theatrical venue. It doesn't need fly space, it doesn't need sets, it doesn't need an orchestra. Although we did it with string trio, it could be performed with just piano. Is it an opera?

On top of all that, the premiere last night was produced by Sparks & Wiry Cries, which is an art song organization, and they are dedicated to producing, premiering, commissioning, preserving works that are for piano and voice, whatever that means. The fact that they co-produced it means that it was also in the form maybe of a song cycle, so a set of songs that has a narrative but is not necessarily acted out dramatically as a narrative. Yeah, open question. Is it an opera? I think audience decides.

Tjaša: Audience decides. I feel like, I love how you broke it down, and I'm like, "This sounds tour-ready." This sounds like the easiest piece to go and tour anywhere. You said you don't need set, you don't need fly space, you don't need an orchestra, you just need one performer, and basically one piano.

Hai-Ting: And video. I left that part out, but it is sort of a multimedia presentation.

Tjaša: Yeah. The video component was telling. It was almost like a partner on stage in some ways.

Hai-Ting: Absolutely.

Tjaša: It told the parts that sometimes you didn't, and sometimes of course, it supplemented, or gave us the undergirding of something, the undergirding data that you were talking about, drilling of the ice cores, the data of how quickly something melts. That to me was the most shocking part maybe of the whole piece.

It's super simple. You come on, you take a glass of water, you take an ice cube, and you drop an ice cube into a glass of water. Then you say that in the time, which is five minutes, that this ice cube will melt, in that same time, five tons, five million tons of ice on Greenland will melt.

Hai-Ting: Just on Greenland. Yeah, thank you to David for those calculations. We went around and around with that, trying to figure out a metaphor that would help quantify the billions of tons of ice that melt every year just in Greenland.

David: I had to use my high school mathematics to work that out. Of course, you're thinking, like, "Oh, wow. Well, that's from one of the worst years on record," but it's probably going to become obsolete now or in a few years, in terms of being too little millions of tons of ice that are lost. What you said about the video was very interesting, because Camilla Tassi, who designed the projections, was able to create such wonderful illusions and resonances in the video, which are so appropriate for a piece that really is about loss.

From that beginning, I don't want to call it a stunt, because in the world of the Glaciologist, it's a thing that she does, we decided at lectures. She does this demonstration of the ice cube. It's obviously a piece about loss, ice loss, loss of a mentor. There's ghosts sort of threaded throughout the piece in a sense, the ghost of, not literally ghost, but the ghostly memory of Olivia, of the ice that's lost, of our lives, the sort of anticipatory grief for our planet and for ourselves. Yeah, the video was just amazing, the way that it created all that poetic imagery.

Hai-Ting: Just the idea of something so powerful, the metaphor of the little cube of ice, I'm sure, is something that you, and working with scientists, and science communicators, and people working in science, in theatre, we're always seeking that really concrete metaphor for something huge. Thank you for mentioning that.

Tjaša: You guys nailed it. It was like a through line. It did not leave me. It was haunting me, like you say. Yeah, it was ghostly. I kept thinking about that and kept thinking about, oh, my God, what can I do? What can I do? What can I do? What can we do? Then also, I was like, "How much of a landmass is this? Is it like Manhattan? Is it as big as, I don't know, West Virginia?" David, can you come to aid? Do you have a visual representation of how much landmass this would be, five million tons of ice? How much is that?

David: Oh, gosh.

Hai-Ting: One of the things that we came across as we were trying to figure it out was a science communicator who says every minute or maybe even every second, it’s as though two thousand elephants made of ice were leaping into the ocean. That’s how much is melting. I’d have to look that up, but also, it changes every year because it’s just an average. The ice obviously builds up a little more in the winter and then is lost in the summer, but it’s the average over the years.

We never did the... How many Olympic swimming pools, how many elephants, how many—we never really came up with a satisfying way of quantifying it for individual human brains. I think that’s really telling, actually, that you can’t actually get your mind, just like big numbers and deep time, our individual brains really can’t get around them emotionally. That’s part of the problem, that we kind of give up because we can’t even figure out how big that is.

Tjaša: Two thousand ice-elephants jumping into the ocean every second or every minute.

Hai-Ting: It might be every minute. Yeah, whichever it is, it's like...

Tjaša: Yeah, that's a really powerful image that's also super telling. You're right, it's really hard to fathom these huge numbers, because we're so small, and earth or space is so disproportionately larger than us or any kind of comprehension of the space-time. It's all millions and billions of years. To human mind, that just like, we can't imagine it. Let's maybe go to the inception of this piece. I heard the diner story, but can you retell it for our audiences?

David: Well, you were there, Hai-Ting.

Hai-Ting: Oh, you weren't there, David. I've sort of written you into the history. That shows, it's a really great example of revisionist memory.

David: You incepted me into the diner.

Hai-Ting: I totally did. Well, Stefan is the great connector, Stefan Weisman, the composer of the music. He is a composer who went to school with Asa at Princeton, I believe, so has known her for years. Stefan and I went to a previous grad school program together. We were hanging out in the Catskills, and he was kind of telling me about this glaciologist that he knows, and I think he was partially telling me because I have always had an amateur's interest in science.

I had made a show with Stefan participated in, that was kind of vignettes of science lessons and lectures that I performed live on stage with demonstrations, and he wrote a couple of the songs for that. We were talking about that and he said, "I have this friend who's really interesting as a glaciologist." Either right then or a couple days later, she walked into the diner where we were having lunch.

She said, "Oh, Stefan, I was looking for you. I didn't have your phone number, but I knew that if I came to the Phoenicia Diner, I might find you." There we were. I got to meet Asa. She almost immediately started talking about her work in this way that just sparked my imagination. She's so poetic in the way that she talks about the expeditions and the work that she's doing.

Tjaša: Amazing. What happened next? What is basically the story, her story that you wove into this opera, into this one act?

David: I think it was during the pandemic, Stefan and Hai-Ting were like, "Hey, let's start another project. We have this idea of basing it on the experiences of this glaciologist we know." I was all for it, because when you talk about ice, an ice sheet, melting ice, you talk about climate change, it's suddenly you're in the realm of metaphors and symbols. I'm not as much of a science head, but I love big concepts and I love language, obviously.

It was just a wonderful opportunity. I would say that the next step were simply for all of us to just get on a Zoom with Asa and just ask her about her job, ask about everything, ask about what's it like, what the weather, the feel of it, the tents, the ropes with flags connecting to them. She would just tell us stories and tell us about what the work was like. I think a lot of snapshots sort of emerged out of that. When she talked about a pee bottle, I'm like, "Oh, that's kind of cool. Let's write about a pee bottle."

Tjaša: It was a magnificent piece. I love “Pee Bottle Song.” Yes.

David: Well, there's a story she told about the tents and the ropes, and one night during a storm, needing to use the bathroom tent. She followed the rope out. It might not have even have been night, but it was zero visibility, because of the snow. She came to the end of the rope, and where the bathroom tent was supposed to be, there was nothing. She's like, "If I continue going forward trying to find it, I could be dead."

She turned around and went back, and I think the bathroom tent had been blown over in the storm. That's just gripping stuff. It's like survival stuff that sort of gets my attention.

Tjaša: First of all, this is a dumb question, but do you know what kind of a toilet they had in the bathroom tent?

Hai-Ting: Oh, my goodness. I don't think that we actually do. We got so intrigued by the pee bottle that we stopped thinking about what exactly the bathroom tent was like.

David: Getting quizzed.

Tjaša: Like you said, this element of survival, to somebody that's never been to an Arctic expedition, you don't know these things. When you guys were talking about the rope, one rope was to the kitchen, and the other rope was to the bathroom, how cool, how inventive. It's like, do you have a red one to the kitchen and the blue one to the bathroom? Do you know?

Can we make it about how the patriarchy is messing up science?

Hai-Ting: No. All the ropes are the same color, and the flags are the same color, as far as I can tell just from looking at the footage. I want to piggyback on that survivalist question, and also, it ties into the previous question about genesis of the narrative that we go through in the story. We started making this while we were bored in our homes during the pandemic.

As things progressed in the world in the pandemic, I started feeling like we should make it about certain struggles, rather than just cool poetic vignettes about Arctic expeditions. I came back to the guys and was like, "All right, can we make it about how the patriarchy is messing up science?" I didn't put it in those words, but that was basically what was in my mind.

One of the things that has happened a lot over the history of Arctic expeditions is that groups of men have gone out, doing things that are both scientific and then "heroic," I'm putting air quotes, kind of like going out and doing extreme things in order to plant flags at the Poles, or claim bits of Arctic, or find capitalist trade routes through lands that are already occupied by other people. A lot of those missions have gone horribly, horribly wrong, as we all know from history.

One of the things that Asa talked about to us was how being a woman in the field in this day and age, it's extremely important to her that everyone feels safe and be safe in the Arctic. Not just women, but modern scientific explorers have set up all kinds of safety measures like ropes and flags between tents, and buddy systems, where you never ever go out on the ice alone. Obviously, GPS technology has vastly changed, and helicopters have vastly changed the experience of Arctic explorers.

The kind of macho attitudes that pervaded glaciology for years were one of the things that Asa talked to me about, especially when we had just a one-on-one conversation about the kind of hidden sexism in science. There's the obvious sexism in science, but then there are hidden things that happen, I think, maybe in all industries, but that were especially strong in glaciology, because you end up in these sort of extreme environments, where you're on an extremely small team. One bad actor can have a really, really negative effect on the whole expedition.

That's where the Arctic expeditions and survivalists kind of feeling tied into the feminist angle, that if we really look out for each other in a way that isn't so much about showing how strong man is against nature, but rather about safely going out together, supporting each other, and discovering what's actually going on.

Tjaša: I'm super curious, what are some of the examples of insane machoistic behavior in Arctic places?

Hai-Ting: I just wanted to say, I did find the podcast, this other inspirational podcast that I was talking about, which is called Cautionary Tales by Tim Hartford, and he did a series on the race to the South Pole between Roald Amundsen and Robert Scott. Robert Scott's entire expedition was lost in various ways, and I believe he left journals that they found later with the remains.

It was basically a case where Robert Scott's expedition was an English expedition, and they wanted to insist on doing everything in a very macho way. They refused to use dog sleds, because they considered it unmanly not to do their own pulling of sleds, or un-British, also, I think. They were a British expedition. Roald Amundsen was Scandinavian, and he used dog sleds, and he made it there easily in two weeks. They were out there for months on the ice.

They had also brought along with them new untested technology in the form of mechanical sleds for which they needed to take fuel. The first thing that happened to them when they landed on the ice shelf was they put one of their new mechanical sleds, which were like early snowmobiles, sort of, put one over the side, and it was so heavy that it immediately fell through the ice. Then it was gone. They didn't have it.

They hadn't thought about that when they pulled it out of the boat and put it on the ice. All kinds of things went wrong for them, but a lot of it was because of the way the expedition was funded, the way the British public wanted to see it, the way that they sort of consider themselves explorers, that they had to do everything in a certain way or it wouldn't be—

Tjaša: Manly.

Our ideas about the way the world should work sometimes disguise the ways that we can make things go wrong.

Hai-Ting: ... Manly, yeah. I don't know how much of that is a framing that Tim Hartford has put on it for Cautionary Tales, but it does bring a lot of those threads together and is a fascinating listen. In fact, I highly recommend that podcast, because it does tend to be about how our ideas about the way the world should work sometimes disguise the ways that we can make things go wrong. A great theme for the current moment, shall we say.

Tjaša: I definitely want to check it out. That sounds great. It also speaks to people being so concerned with how they will be perceived, and the propaganda that's just a part of any job. Everybody needs a press release, everybody needs some kind of documentation of their work. In those early days, it seems like they were like, "Oh, my God, there's a bunch of guys out there. Let's pump them up. Maybe there's a TV channel that really wants to follow what's happening."

Obviously, it wasn't possible to do this in the moment, but these men, I guess, felt some kind of a pressure. That, mixed with many circumstantial parts, created this situation, which was unfortunate. It's sad to hear of people losing the whole expeditions. That's crazy.

Hai-Ting: I think what you said about science and press releases, even though that was way before TV or anything of that nature, I think it's a great point about the science in general, that things that get published and reported are always the exciting, positive findings.

All the things that have either no findings or that contradict something that was exciting, those things don't get published. We end up with an understanding of science that is entirely warped by what looks exciting in headlines. Even scientific journals have that bias.

Tjaša: Totally. The story kind of weaves between Asa, the scientist, giving a lecture, and between being on the expedition, being in the midst of a storm in a tent, and dealing with everything and everybody that's come before her, and sort of like what's happening at hand, and her inability to really perform the work, which was they wanted to dig or drill ice cores.

Then like you said, there's also a through line of loss, loss of ice, loss that we are all dealing with in terms of climate change, grief. Then it also starts coming up that there's these missing women, or one specifically that you guys talk about is Olivia. Is this a real person? Is this a character based on somebody? What's the story behind it?

David: The character we wrote was a woman and was the glaciologist's mentor.

Hai-Ting: She was based, in some ways, at least our idea of her, we don't give a lot of detail, but she was based on a couple of prominent women glaciologists of an older generation, Ellen Mosley-Thompson and Regina Hawk, who both have, Asa has worked with both of them over the years. They're alive and well, and incredibly well respected as women in glaciology who started in a time when there were not a lot of women in glaciology.

Tjaša: Let's go back to Olivia, because in my imagination, what happens is that something happened, that she was molested by this Martin guy. Then I was like, "Oh, my God, this is an unresolved murder mystery. This Martin guy took her out on the ice and the woman is lost. Lost. What does that mean?"

Hai-Ting: I love that, because that was a version that we sort of wrote and maybe wrote out along the way, but I love that it still came across that way. I hope it didn't actually seem like that's what happened, but I think metaphorically, in a way, that's what happened.

Tjaša: I don't know. Like you said, there was a little footprint, a little fossil of an old idea in, and it was just enough to spark my imagination. Olivia was very present, not only in your text, but because of video design. She was very present visually. It felt like it was almost like it was a question posed to me, the audience, to care about her, and therefore what happened to her? Because there was this tie with violence over women, I thought that this was connected.

David: Yeah, I think as we were developing the piece, when we realized how all the threads that we were weaving were coming together, it was kind of exciting. It is also, there's also, of course, as a writer, you're just like, "Oh, is this going to come across? Is this going to work?" I think, yeah, there was an early version where there was like, maybe they were on the same expedition where she disappeared, but that just seemed, I think to us, just, we don't want to turn this into a murder mystery.

Yet, and we also want to, in a sense, we do hold back the information specifically, that probably the reason why she fell down a crevasse is because the ice shifted beneath her. The thing is, everything in the piece is connected. That's a kind of obvious thing to say that everything is connected, but male exploitation of resources, of people, of nature is how we got into this problem in the first place. I use that term hyper object.

The hyper object of climate change that we talked about earlier, it's so huge and people are so small, how do we wrap our heads around it? Sexism and patriarchy are also hyper objects, in a way. They're like, how do you grapple with them? How do you change them? I think on a very conceptual level, the Pierces, accusations against Pierce for his history of harassment and Olivia's disappearance and death are related, but—

Hai-Ting: It's like a metaphorical murder mystery. I think that one of the things that David does so beautifully is to weave in the emotional thread of what it is to lose somebody important. That personal loss is so related to the kind of global loss that we're all experiencing that we can't. I don't know, it's like when you lose someone, you lose, you're losing personally, one of those, I don't know, maybe one of those elephants who was the person that you loved.

Then if two thousand of them are jumping every second, it's like empathy, fatigue. Each of those individuals is beloved by somebody. Then how can you even encompass in your emotional space the loss of a whole environment?

David: Thank you. You wrote the best lyrics in the piece, in my opinion.

Hai-Ting: No, no. I write silly science lyrics, and this is why this was such great teamwork, because I'm not the emotional—It's also great gender role reversals, because I'm not the emotional guy. I'm like the, "Oh, I like the facts and figures." I find those really emotional. Then David's like, "No, I insist there's human emotion here." It works so beautifully together.

David: A lot of opera, new opera, old opera, of course, gets criticized for thriving on the suffering or death of women. Like Tosca, Violetta in Traviata, god, all the nuns in-

Hai-Ting: Everything.

David: All the nuns in Carmelites.

Hai-Ting: Any opera you can name, unless it's Billy Budd, which has no women in it. In that case, they've just used the stand in of the beautiful gay man as the suffering woman. All of them, every opera you can name.

Tjaša: As a counterweight, you then brought in some solos that were on a ukulele only, and one of them was “Pee Bottle.” Can we talk about writing those moments, deciding for those moments, composing those moments? How does this all... Yeah, I feel like maybe I call it opera because I was like, "Oh, my God, this is so sad. This is so heavy."

It just had this emotional caliber of an old opera, in some way. Then there were these beacons of light, these playful moments with ukulele that were silly, and goofy, and funny, and incredibly modern, and incredibly relatable. How did you create this balance? The back and forth?

Hai-Ting: The ukulele itself actually got into the show because Asa plays the ukulele, takes it with her to the Arctic. We were like, "Oh, that's great. We can have songs with ukulele, because Asa plays the ukulele in the Arctic." That's directly where the ukulele came from. Then...

Tjaša: Did you play the ukulele before, or did you learn ukulele?

Hai-Ting: No, I did not. I learned ukulele. Fortunately, there was a pandemic, so I had some time. The tradition of funny science songs combined with Asa playing ukulele is that that's where we got those. Then we really had a lot of back and forth about how many stupid ukulele songs could be in this serious piece.

Tjaša: Wasn't she too cold to actually strum the ukulele? Was she using...

Hai-Ting: That's what I thought. Then she was like, "No, no, it's fine, just keep it in a case." They have those chemical hand warmers also, they break and put in their shoes or their gloves. I think in the kitchen tent, where the common tent where they hang out together, there's a heat source from the gas stoves, the kerosene, or I don't know what they use. That's detail I don't know.

In the end, we just worked on the balance of comic and serious in order to, in the same way that scientists write silly songs to remember difficult concepts or to make fun of them, we try to bring that aspect of the scientific life into our show.

Tjaša: Last question. This is not a gotcha question, but I'm just curious about ice cores. Really interested in ice cores. They're just so beautiful and so phallic, and they contain multitudes. You guys were talking about how you can learn about climate through ages, how they're like tree rings, they contain information about what happened through ages. I'm just so curious what your experience was learning about these, what your fascination is with them?

David: Well, that's what the expeditions are all about, kind of getting these ice cores and safely transporting them back to be stored. They're metaphor machines. Yes, we say they're like tree rings, and they have the line, the farther down you drill, the further back you go. They're like time machines. I don't know. They have strata that you can study.

The glaciologist talks about stratigraphy, which is the art of, or the practice of reading the ice cores. I think they're fascinating, and yeah, they are phallic. That's kind of an interesting sort of quality about them too, I suppose.

Hai-Ting: They're phallic, but the holes they leave in the ice are the opposite.

Tjaša: Oh, good one. Good come back. Love it.

Hai-Ting: We wrote those lyrics using Asa's information, and then also, David did a lot of research on the internet. Then also, we had a particular children's book that I brought with us on, I was about to say on expedition, but no, on an artist residency that we went to together. The book, I had seen it in my local library, and it's called Meltdown. It's a book for, it's probably like a sort of K-12 book about glaciers.

Among other things, it just sort of gives an overview of what glaciers can tell us and how the ice cores work, the things that are preserved in them. I also want to say on this podcast, Asa does shallow ice coring, which looks at of the ice core and shows us how much melt has been going on over the last thirty to fifty years. Then there are stations on highest part of the Greenland Ice Sheet, and then also a big one in Antarctica.

All over the globe, people do this on various glaciers. Those, very recently, the oldest one was drilled in, it seems to be five million years old, which they kind of can, it's not that it has five million layers that they've counted, but they can match it up the way people do aging trees, they can match it up with previous cores. There's so much in there. They can tell what the temperature probably was on the earth because of how the ratio of water isotopes to other isotopes in the layers.

They can actually release bubbles of air that have been trapped in there ever since the snow layer fell, because once the snow turns into ice, two to thirty years after it falls, it congeals completely into ice, and it traps whatever air is there. That air, if you release it in a controlled container, you can analyze the gases that were in the atmosphere.

You can literally have air from two to five million years ago that you can analyze, and see how much carbon dioxide was there, how much nitrogen, all of this. This is part of how we know what past atmospheres were on the globe. Directly from, we're actually getting the air of the ice sheet, and analyzing it in a container.

Tjaša: Super fascinating. You can literally smell a dinosaur's breath.

Hai-Ting: Pretty much. Yeah. It's a tiny amount of air that we're taking out, but yeah, and also as we say in the show, you can see, oh, you can see, you can see evidence of natural phenomena, like there are layers of volcanic ash preserved in there sometimes when there are, depending on where the glacier is, whether the ash gets there. On the huge global events where the ash gets everywhere, you can see that layer in every ice core from around the world.

You can see evidence of, once there's nuclear testing, you can see nuclear isotopes in the layers. In various places around the globe, you can see the rise of silver mining by the Romans, because there's lead, extra lead in the glaciers, and that apparently got, those particulates got all around the world. Lead is a super cool one, because you can see the rise of Roman silver mining with the lead, and then you can see the rise of leaded gasoline all over the globe, because that lead got put into the atmosphere, and it settled on worldwide glaciers.

Then here's a great positive note to end on, you can see the lead levels drop after the US Clean Air Act in the 1970s. That's a great, we actually made a change, and you can see it in those ice cores when you analyze the lead levels. We can do good things.

Tjaša: Great. Thank you so much. This was awesome. I'm so excited that I learned something new. This is such a cool combination of theatre, performance arts, and science, a really nice handshake between the two. Thanks so much for your work, for sharing. If you have any last words?

Hai-Ting: Thank you so much for having us on and for creating science-art nexus, and for your art as well. It's incredibly important to do this work right now, because people need to know, and the normal information channels are getting muddied, shall we say.

David: I'd like to go to the theatre or the opera and actually learn something new. Yeah, thanks for having us on, and I feel like I learned something from this conversation, actually.

Hai-Ting: Me too.

David: A lot.

Tjaša: That's great. Me too.

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