Your cart is currently empty!
Category: Events
-
Kill Climate Deniers wins the Griffin Award, yo
In 2017, Kill Climate Deniers was awarded the Griffin Theatre Playwrights Award. This is a prize for an unproduced script which Griffin gives out every year, which is a really lovely thing to receive, a grand honour and a positive sign.
The best news, though, was that Griffin decided to double down on their decision and are actually producing the play, as the opening show in their 2018 season. So if you’re around Sydney in March next year, you can for the first time catch Kill Climate Deniers, in the Griffin Theatre in King’s Cross.
Meanwhile, good humans at the Garage Theater in Long Beach, California, have also taken on KCD and are doing their own production this September. I wish I could be there, but also, images and video from the production are pretty goddamn exciting. There’s a mania and a panic and it feels like things are accelerating rather than dialling back.
-
How to experience the Kill Climate Deniers walking tour
To celebrate the launch of the Kill Climate Deniers album, Clan Analogue and artists Reuben Ingall and David Finnigan have produced a special walking tour version at Parliament House in Canberra.
This is gonna be the best way to experience the Kill Climate Deniers album for the first time.
Here’s how you can take part:
- Download the special Listening Party version of the album from the Kill Climate Deniers Bandcamp via Clan Analogue. If you don’t download it beforehand, you can stream it from Bandcamp or by using the embedded link below. Parliament House has free wifi – but we don’t know how capable that wifi is.
- Download a copy of the walking tour map at the top of this page, or have it saved on your device.
- Grab your music-playing device (your phone, a walkman) and some headphones.
- Come to Parliament House in Canberra.
- Stand outside the entrance to Parliament House, put your headphones in, press play on track 1, and the rest will take care of itself!
The whole trip will take you around 35 minutes, and then, grab a cup of tea in the Parliament House cafe.
Entry to Parliament House, and the Listening Party itself, is all free.
WHEN: Whenever you like!
WHERE: Parliament House, Parliament Drive, Canberra ACT 2600
NOTE: This experience entails downloading an album and listening to it on headphones while walking through the public areas of APH. Participants are expected to adhere to the standard conditions of entry – see aph.gov.au for more information.
Walking tour map designed by Gillian Schwab.
-
How the Kill Climate Deniers playscript became an album
Kill Climate Deniers is a cross-platform project that started off as something clear and obvious and self-contained – a playscript – and has now splintered into a bunch of different forms on a bunch of different platforms.
What was, to begin with, an easy work to talk about and understand, has now become a strange, hard-to-define, cross-disciplinary beast.
So what I’d like to do is to explain where Kill Climate Deniers came from and how it came to take on the shape(s) it has today, and maybe that will help articulate what exactly we’re about to release in four weeks time.
Rachel Roberts in Kill Climate Deniers. Photo by Sarah Walker.
To begin with, Kill Climate Deniers was a playscript – a sprawling, action-packed play depicting the siege of Parliament House by 96 eco-terrorists, and the explosive counter-attack by the Minister for the Environment, who takes on the entire army of terrorists with a gun, a smartphone and a soundtrack of classic House and Techno from the late-80s / early-90s.
The script was developed with director & dramaturge Julian Hobba and Aspen Island Theatre Company, but financial considerations meant that the work just was not feasible to produce at the scale we envisioned. At the same time, there was a lot of interest in the work, from audiences around Australia and overseas. So we began to ask: how could we get the work out to them?
At that point, musician and sound designer Reuben Ingall made the suggestion that we adapt the work into a radio-play. With Aspen Island’s support, we brought together a group of actors and recorded the entire play as an audio work. But even as we did, the idea was evolving: from radio play to album.
Emma Hall and Rachel Roberts in Kill Climate Deniers. Photo by Sarah Walker.Rather than simply presenting the script as an audio experience, Reuben composed an entire album of original music, in the style of the soundtrack – four-to-the-floor dancefloor bangers drawing on classic House and Techno. We then sampled dialogue from the play, in the way that early dance music heavily sampled dialogue from films and TV.
The result is an album of original dance music, with dialogue from the playscript threaded through it. It’s a radio-play you can dance to, or a club album with a narrative.
The album was picked up for release by iconic Australian electronic music label Clan Analogue, home of artists such as B(if)tek and Deepchild.
The single off the album, Bolted, samples and cuts together quotes from right-wing commentator Andrew Bolt and his followers attacking the project, set to a pounding groove. This track has been remixed by artists including James Atkin (EMF), writer of 1991’s #1 hit You’re Unbelievable.
The album will go live on Wednesday 31 August, with a very special Listening Party event at Parliament House in Canberra. Participants will be able to download a special mix of the album and walk through Parliament House in a guided audio tour, taking in the music and the story in the location it is set. It’s a unique way to experience a fierce work of art AND connect with Australian democracy, all at once.
Image by JJ HarrisonFollowing that, there will be two album launch events in September, at Smiths Alternative in Canberra and Bar 303 in Melbourne, as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival. These events will see Reuben and I perform together, in a combination of theatre performance and dance party.
The album is one output of the broader Kill Climate Deniers project. The original playscript is also available as an ebook or a printed text, there is a short movie, a feature film script, and a live solo performance version.
At its core, Kill Climate Deniers poses a simple question: What happens if our political institutions are incapable of dealing with a threat on the scale of climate change? Is real political change even possible?
All of the forms in which the work has evolved are finding different ways to ask that question, to pose that challenge.
Is it possible to pose this kind of political / social challenge with an album of House beats? I think so. But I don’t know. So, we find out.
-
Kill Climate Deniers at the You Are Here Festival
On Saturday 16 April I was lucky enough to be a part of the You Are Here Festival, launching the Kill Climate Deniers project.
This is what happened:
First, the festival and I put together a conversation event at the Canberra Museum and Gallery. Journalist Ginger Gorman, legal theorist Mark Fletcher and artist Bernie Slater gathered to speak about the idea of taxpayer-funded political art. Kill Climate Deniers is an ideal example of this, but Bernie Slater’s work also frequently falls into this mode. The conversation was fantastic, a really rich and lovely discussion, with probably just the right amount of raised voices and threats of violence. Don Aitken (who wrote one of the initial posts in response to Kill Climate Deniers receiving funding) wrote a reflection on the event which is well worth a look.
Then that evening, I presented my solo performance (An Attempt To Perform) Kill Climate Deniers at the festival hub. Sitting somewhere in between a performance lecture and storytelling event, this is my effort to capture the whole blockbuster action story of KCD in a single hour-long event. The crux of the event, and the most wonderful thing to happen to me in a long time, was that the solo show was backed with a dance party, with Reuben Ingall in his Dead DJ Joke guise playing a set of classic House and Techno from 1988-93. And there was no gap, the live performance went straight into the dance party with no break. And the audience were totally on board for this nonsense, and the second Reuben kicked off with Unbelievable the whole crowd burst to their feet and went for it.
Life is good sometimes, and by sometimes I mean when Reuben is playing.
Now the outcome of all of that is that the Kill Climate Deniers website is launched, and the ebook playscript is available for download. Which is exciting, and if you feel the urge, you should get amongst it.
The next step is that the album will come out, with music by Reuben and words from the play, released through the Clan Analogue label mid-year.
Image by Sarah Walker.
-
Should projects like Kill Climate Deniers receive government funding?
When Kill Climate Deniers received government funding through ArtsACT in 2014, conservative commentators including Andrew Bolt criticised the project, and ACT Liberal Minister Brendan Smyth pushed to have the funding withdrawn.
Smyth’s comments have provided us an opportunity to begin a conversation about whether or nor taxpayer funds should go to ‘political’ art, and whether artists are compromised by taking government funding.
This discussion will take place in the Bite The Hand That Feeds You: Taxpayer-Funded Political Art conversation at the You Are Here Festival, featuring journalist Ginger Gorman, conservative commentator Mark Fletcher and artist / academic Bernie Slater.
Image by Steve Kaiser.
