Frank De Block had been hard at work on the latest TIM, on sustainability, for several months. The reality of recent weeks has caught up with us, so that a "special" of it for young people, is already finished and online even before the original version has premiered.
In April, this version, "the stRate of climate" played in Leuven and Mechelen, among other places, via questions from the education system.
Ecology and climate are themes that have long been brewing and alive at Inspinazie.
For example, one of our first clients for longer-term series was Ecowerf in Leuven, for performances about avoiding and dealing with waste.
The house festival Improovelicious distinguishes itself from many improv festivals by not purchasing a battery of gadgets, keeping guest air travel to a minimum (as well as not putting on a festival every year), letting people tick that they want to eat meat instead of using a classic "vegetarian" checkbox, working with caterer Improvisio who goes for local anyway, etc.
Dilemma advice and exchange tips on self-harvesting fields, menstrual cups, sharing carts, or waste prevention have been a standard part of our locker room conversations for several years.
Wow, are we that saintly green with Spinach?
Definitely not.
We are less vegetarian than our rider lets on.
All told, we have masses of poorly selected imagery lying in all sorts of clouds eating up server energy. Yours truly is writing this blog while flying over the Alantic Ocean (while her facebook timeline is a digital climate march).
In short, ambiguity is not foreign to us and our operation is not yet climate neutral. But we are asking the questions and evolving at a rapid pace!
For example, we cover a lot of miles for our performances, and in the last two years the whole group has converted an awful lot of car miles into rail miles. Very proud and happy about that.
Or two players turned down an invitation to a free international workshop in Romania after weighing the payoff versus the ecological imprint of the move.
And even though we want to become even more climate neutral in our own actions, we especially don't want to be neutral in our view of climate. At least not neutral in the sense of indifferent or inactive.
Throughout the last few months, we had regular conversations within Inspinazie regarding neutrality and whether or not to take positions.
In many thematic performances, we clearly take positions. There is then much room for critical voices, obstacles and resistances. Yet we do stand for something. Just the choice of our themes show what we believe in. We want to be independent and able to be multi-voiced, but not neutral to infinity. Taking no positions as an organization, by the way, is also somewhat easy, even irresponsible or unfair here and there. Are you doing it because you truly aspire to neutrality, or is it because you don't want to offend anyone, and don't want to miss any revenue?
With the stRate of Climate, we want to contribute to climate dialogues that build bridges and lead to solutions.
We believe that everyone can contribute stones, and also that global warming requires big, fast and radical policy actions. That in doing so, it must be done with pretending that it is only legitimate to demand this if one lives like a sacred green bean oneself. That is such a transparent sand-in-eye-strewing tactic. Those many soothing and haughty responses to climate protesters young and old are completely beside the point.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez puts that razor-sharp here:
So, we keep trying along, going along.
Act NOW.
Handy that we chose such a veggie name 25 years ago though.
