USA Projects

As a mother and artist, I want to create a piece that facilitates meaningful and heart-felt interaction around the current social/environmental crisis. COAL is a multi-lingual musical fable that acts as a community prompt for dialogue and response. It is a simple story about a grandmother who tells a boy, her grandson, about a magical rock with enormous power, a rock that contains both creation and destruction within it. The boy begins a journey that leads him through terrains of connection, reciprocity, wonder, possibility, addiction, desire, and consumption. Integrating both international and local responses to the environmental crisis into the piece through video shot in community workshops, the piece dimensionalizes our relationship to the energy sources that sustain us beyond simple notions of good and bad. I am seeking $6000 to pay for musical production fees and supplemental artist fees for the first draft of the songs.

Coal is the largest greenhouse gas emitter and is one of the most important and problematic energy sources on the planet. The story of humans and coal is mythic in proportion. Within coal we find heat, light, mobility and many forces that provide us with comfort, and yet it threatens our very survival. 

At the climax of the story the boy, out of control, in a flurry of expansion and failed efforts to find solutions for a dis-eased world finds both he and his grandmother ill as a result of the culmination of choices made and makes a desperate and chilling call for help.  He calls out to all of us.

A blackout silence follows and we find ourselves at the center of the broken-heartedness that humans experience at the knot which is the trade off between short term benefits and long-term survival.  

The piece is performed after a week-long residency in a host community where community voices respond to the story and the boy’s call for help from their own unique perspectives.  During performance, the boy is answered through integrative video responses that bring together global voices as well as responses gathered from the local host community.  This interaction structure creates essential spaces for collective imagining of our common future.

The story is told through a series of songs that respectfully draw from musical ideas from the ten top hard coal producing countries of the globe (China, USA, India, Australia, Russia, Indonesia, South Africa, Kazakhstan, Poland, and Columbia).  The content of the piece is simple and can be performed anywhere. It involves shadow puppetry, video and five musician/performers.

COAL reflects the local host community in several key areas:  language elements, contribution of local musicians, and responses as seen in the video response elements.  This aspect of mirroring a community’s response back to itself as part of a global dialogue is an important means of elevating strong community voices and weaving them into communication that is too often shaped by political and corporate voices.

COAL cross-pollinates a musical storytelling format with a community engagement approach that seeks to inspire us toward connection as opposed to motivate us out of fear. It is not based in a good/bad dichotomy. 

I have sought to develop a project based in nuance and multiplicity.  Having worked with many communities around the globe I am aware of the myriad of worldviews and cosmologies that hold notions of climate change in radically different ways. I care about these differences and am committed to an elegant expression of this multiplicity that welcomes us into a textured global imagining of our future. This project is not about right and wrong - it is about what connects us as human beings.

I am currently writing music in collaboration with Luis Guerra, finishing a draft of the script with writer Jamie Figueroa, and continuing on with a series of conversations - with people in coal communities, consumers of coal, coal scientists, coal activists from different countries, foundations, indigenous leaders, community members of different ages from many different communities and more.  

I expect to have the piece ready to pilot in the spring of 2011. 

I welcome your thoughts and ideas.  You can write to me at molly@littleglobe.org

www.littleglobe.org