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.