Monthly Archives: August 2017

Becoming Penguin, a Performance Walk.

King Penguin Couple. Photo credit David Stanley (Creative Commons 2.0)

King Penguin Couple. Photo: David Stanley (Creative Commons 2.0)

In your white shirts and black tails, in your navy-blue dresses or in wetsuits and flippers or anything ‘penguin’ from your wardrobe please come and join us on a waddle, a ‘becoming penguin’ performance walk. If you have nothing penguin in your wardrobe, come with a penguin state of mind and we will supply you with some penguin apparel.

As part of Still Waving: Climate Change Theatre Action Aotearoa, performance artist Catherine Bagnall will lead the walk from Parliament grounds up to Massey University Wellington, where the climate change play ‘The Penguins’ will be performed, along with other climate action plays from Aotearoa and the world. Walking from Parliament into the community symbolises the theme of Climate Change Theatre Action 2017 – that there are steps communities can take to act together and make a positive difference, even when governments won’t. And that every step, however small, is important.
It’s free to join the Becoming Penguin performance walk: if you then want to stay for the theatre action show, tickets to see the plays are available by small koha to Generation Zero and can be purchased from https://www.eventfinda.co.nz/2017/still-waving-climate-change-theatre-action-aotearoa-2017/wellington
To join ‘Becoming Penguin’, meet at the Cenotaph next to Parliament Grounds at 1pm on Monday October 23.
Catherine Bagnall is an artist whose work focuses on the edges of fashion studies and its intersection with performance practices. Testing the bounds of self through performative acts of ‘dressing up’, her research offers new modes of experience that use performance to explore the possibility of becoming ‘other’, a different species for example. In the context of questions about humanity’s relationship to the planetary ecosystem and how we categorise ‘other’ species, ‘Becoming Penguin’ explores ideas about the end of the Anthropocene and the beginning of the post-human world.
See more about Still Waving: Climate Change Theatre Action Aotearoa 2017 at https://www.facebook.com/events/163701054197372/
Still Waving is part of the worldwide series of CCTA readings and performances of short climate change plays presented biennially in support of the United Nations Conference of the Parties. CCTA is organised globally by the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, NoPassport Theatre Alliance, The Arctic Cycle and Theatre Without Borders. CCTA Aotearoa is brought to you by Massey University School of English & Media Studies, in partnership with Massey University Ngā Pae Māhutonga – the School of Design, Generation Zero, and Pukeahu ki Tua: Think Differently Wellington.

Still Waving: New Voices Climate Action Creative Writing Competition

Write, inspire and win! As part of our Climate Change Theatre Action 2017 event, ‘Still Waving,’ the Massey University School of English & Media Studies and Pukeahu ki Tua: Think Differently Wellington are proud to announce a climate action creative writing competition for new and emerging writers.

Prizes:

1st place – $300

2nd place – $200

3rd place – $100

 

Thematic guidelines

The creative writing competition aligns with Climate Change Theatre Action’s global theme, which is that “climate action requires a hopeful vision of the future”.

CCTA 2017 asks the question: “How can we turn the challenges of climate change into opportunities?”

We are looking for creative writing that provides hope, inspires positive action, and illuminates individual and collective solutions.  There is still time to change the course of climate change: it is not too late, but it will require a collective will the likes of which planet earth has seldom seen. How can you use your writing, your particular voice, to help people visualise, embrace and achieve that change? What specific images can we find to illuminate why people should care about the environment? How can we move people without preaching to them or becoming didactic?

Politics is a surface in which transformation comes about as much because of pervasive changes in the depths of the collective imagination as because of visible acts, though both are necessary. And though huge causes sometimes have little effect, tiny ones occasionally have huge consequences. . . (Rebecca Solnit)

Genre:

We are accepting five types of entry:

  • Twitterature (tell a story in no more than 140 characters)
  • Flash Fiction 100 Words (tell a story in exactly 100 words – no more and no less)
  • Poetry (any length up to 200 words)
  • Short stories of up to 1200 words.
  • Personal essays of up to 1200 words.

To enter:

Please email your entry in the body of an email to climateactionwriting@gmail.com by 5pm (NZ time) on Friday October 6, 2017.

Entry is open to all new and emerging writers. We take this to mean anyone who has not published a book.  By entering you agree to publication of your entry and your name in social media. You may enter as many different items as you like.  Please include your full name and the city or town you live in, with your entry.

The judge:

We are grateful to Dr Ingrid Horrocks from the School of English & Media Studies for agreeing to judge the Still Waving Climate Writing competition.  Ingrid’s creative publications include two collections of poetry, a number of personal essays, and a genre-bending travel book.

More about Still Waving:

Still Waving, our 2017 Climate Change Theatre Action Aotearoa event, will take place on October 23 at Massey Wellington campus. There will be plays, readings, a performance art installation, and of course the prize-giving announcement of the fabulous winners of this competition!  Still Waving is part of the global Climate Change Theatre Action 2017, which involves 50 selected plays (including two from our school) and more than 180 events in 41 countries. This is the second time we have participated in CCTA and we are delighted to be back! Check it all out at: https://www.facebook.com/events/163701054197372/