🎭 The art of theater dates back to ancient times. We play out stories in order to express and explore our viewpoints, our feelings, our fears, and how we understand the world and perceive its beauty. Performance and theater engage us on a visceral, emotional level, opening us up to the immediacy of the experience while speaking directly to our emotional selves.
🌸 A few months ago, a play called Kyoto was presented on London’s West End. The play portrayed the negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol in 1995, one of the most important historical landmarks in climate diplomacy. During the play, there is no conventional separation of audience and stage; the audience is given badges with their country names and placed among the actors, who are playing the diplomats participating in the conference. Everybody is part of the action. The actors bring their explosive energy to the stage, making you feel like you’re part of the talks. Intrigue, despair, outrage, hope, fear – all felt from a skin to skin distance.
🎙️ Two special members of that audience, Helen Gilbert and Péter Kakucska, kindly agreed to join me on the podcast to talk about their experience of the play and share their unique perspectives. Helen is a leading scholar on indigenous performance and arts-based activism and Peter is a veteran UN officer with more than 20 years of service in the UNFCCC, the entity organizing the climate negotiations portrayed in the play. Through their stories, we learned about the real people behind these monumental conferences, we discovered the transformative power of indigenous performance, and finally, we explored how performance can be a powerful way of changing people’s minds and hearts for the better.
Thank you for tuning in!
The opinions expressed in this podcast by the host(s) and/or guest(s) do not in any way represent the official positions of FOGGS, katoikos.world, or any other affiliated organization.
