What Do You Want To Talk About Feelings For?
Playing out with VR at the Dissonant Future Workshop at BOM, Birmingham 21st May 2022
Does this feel weird?
Asking about your feelings on climate change/breakdown/crisis (insert your preferred describer here)?
I mean, Climate Change is a topic. An important/impossible/boring/too depressing/(or insert your preferred description here) topic for sure. But feelings?
Climate feelings?
Why?
Why not action?
Why not something useful? Or helpful?
Why not something about how to get traction, how to get action, how to survive it, how to shut up already and.
Yeah. I know. It is weird. But here I am. Asking you to think about your deep, lived in your skin, feelings about climate change.
Because I have been banging on, on and off, about climate breakdown/climate justice forever. Or it feels like forever. But I’ve never been consistant. I have had times when I have not been able to think about it. I’ve felt to down about it. So I’ve decided to look away. I have had other periods of being, what? Obsessed really. Neither response has made me feel good.
If I was talking to you about my feelings, this would be where I would start, I guess. My inconsistent response makes me feel shit. Shit that when I can’t think about it, I feel like a terrible person. And shit that when I have thought about it, got galvanised about it, I still haven’t achieved anything useful…
I mean, I have written plays about this crisis. And I want to tell you that I stopped writing about climate breakdown because I solved the problem with my mighty words. You came to my play Ugly and you all got the message. And then we all rose up and healed the earth. You remember? It was a sweet moment. Since then, I’ve been living on my little Swedish island that sits quite near Agnetha’s (formally of Abba). We wave at each other across the water. Sometimes she shouts ‘hey, great work on solving climate breakdown with your bionic words’ and I shout back ‘you are so welcome Agnetha! Love right back at ya. And hey! Thank you for the music’. And then we laugh together because its a beautiful world and
I want to tell you all of this.
But it would be a lie.
Wouldn’t it.
My play did not solve climate change/breakdown/ecoside.
The scientists, outlining the very clear science, have not inspired international cooperation and a new course of action.
The politicians (the variety who care) have yet to find ways to gather enough momentum.
The direct action activists have yet to stop the country.
Collectively, we have not (yet) switched on an avalanche of unstoppable actions to save the future.
So why not?
I’ve been ruminating about this conundrum, on and off for sometime. Between the telly and theatre I write about a million other things. I find myself coming back to that question. How to make work about climate change that can connect and help.
And then the pandemic happened. During these 2 years I found myself invited into a conversation with a wide range of artists, academics, and practitioners, talking about our similar frustrations about how climate breakdown (as a problem that needs action to be resolved), fails to gain traction. Why do so many people look away? Yes, no doubt there’s the cynical manipulation of media and government. But hasn’t there always been that. Our collective hunch is that beyond that, it’s to do with feelings. Specifically grief. But perhaps other feelings too. We are sure there are a ton of feelings out there. But we think, that maybe the fear of dealing with these huge feelings makes climate change too much, too scary, too overwhelming, and so we turn away.
This conversation led to the creation of the Dissonant Futures Collective. Together we’re pondering - If we make a piece of work that is focused on the feelings people hold about climate breakdown, can we find ways to hold space for our griefs and in time, will this work help us sustain a response that leads to action?
Eventually, we want to create a VR experience that allows people to explore their feelings and grief about climate breakdown. We think that this might help activists who are feeling despair. We think it might help parents who are filled with worry for their children’s future. We think it might inspire and help us all articulate what it is we feel we’re losing. We think, if we can begin to admit to ourselves all the intricate feelings this huge head-fuck of a situation is causing, then maybe we will discover common threads amongst all our many responses? And when we find commonality, we are so often able to see ways to move into action.
Yeah. It’s a long shot. We can’t be certain. Yes its complex and we have a ton of work to do, to make all people (not just white, cis, het and neurotypical) feel like they can dare to share, when they have been historically ignored, spoken for and over and violated. We know this is a massive task. But also, on another level, it’s very simple too. It’s a decision. To follow a hunch, that if we start talking and listening about feelings, then something incredible can happen.
We’re starting with workshops across the UK this spring and summer. During this period we will be spending time talking and listening to participants about their feelings (and sharing ours) re climate change.
We will not be telling people how to feel. We will not be telling you the correct ways to think. We will just be sharing where we are at and offering to listen to where you might be at too. We have an awesome VR experience to share with participants too. When it works. To be honest its in beta, so sometimes it glitches out. If it works, we’ll be asking participants to reflect about how it makes them feel to experience it. If it doesn’t work, we’ll just spend longer on the other awesome stuff instead (crafting responses to feelings, doing yoga and guided meditation, writing, drawing, creating a manifesto, doing not very much at all other than thinking - there’s a menu to choose from. We won’t make you do anything). And then, the collective will go away and work on honing all of these conversations and creativity into a response. Not a warning. But a memorial. A capturing of the sounds and words and ideas we have all made together. In the autumn we’ll be returning with this sound memorial, to all the cities we’ve visited and we hope that we can find ways to keep the conversation going from there.
That’s it.
We think this could be the beginning of a conversation that finally does help us all to find our voice, to feel heard, to find our ways of engaging and becoming part of the murmuration of millions that is needed to reimagine and then enact a new world into being.
If you’d like to come share where you’re at with us, Dissonant Futures Collective have workshops happening in Glasgow, London and Bradford over the coming weeks. Next up is our Bradford event this Sat, 28 May 2022 12:00 – 15:30 BST at Common Space. COME. Its FREE. Just sign up via https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/loss-found-workshop-common-space-tickets-338844662507 AND we are providing free pizza for lunch too.
So.
How do you feel about that?
x
Experimenting with the Shape Of Us VR experience at BOM, Birmingham
PS - You can follow the Dissonant Futures Collective’s adventures here on twitter: https://twitter.com/DissonantFuture?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Website coming soon…
PPS - During the Loss and Found workshops we are gratefully collaborating with The Shape Of Us https://en.theshapeofus.de (find them on twitter too @HeartWire_ ) who have lent us headsets and access to their awesome, beta, VR experience. Thank you, wonderful folks. x