Can Puppets Help Fight NYC’s Climate Battle?
Behind the colorful stained-glass windows on East Sixth Street, past the heavy oak counter of the quiet juice bar, the first floor of Sixth Street Community Center in the Lower East Side is set up like a war room on a warm Saturday afternoon in late April. “ECOLOGICAL CITY: CLIMATE SOLUTIONS”, read the title of the giant poster hanging off the wall. After checking in at the entrance, volunteers are free to roam the room, browse the wall display of local ecological sites, or contribute to the finishing touch of giant canvas murals painted by local artists.
Between patches of canvas, wet paint brushes, and dangling ruler sticks, Manon Manavit frantically shifts between her phone and computer screen. On the latter, a spreadsheet details twenty performers including theater groups, dance companies, and local artists looking to perform in the flamboyant celebration down the Lower East Side this May.
“Between the puppet, puppeteers, the costumes and the volunteers we have roughly a hundred people,” said Manavit, “It’s all happening next week, and we have almost all of our positions filled.”
Ecological City: Procession for Climate Solutions is coming back in person after a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic. The parade consists of volunteers sporting giant puppets and elaborate DIY costumes will stop by 12 community gardens surrounding Tompkins Square Park and Sixth Street Community Center, finishing at the waterfront by the East River Park, which lies under construction.
The five-hour-long parade in May is going to feature a ceremony at each garden, boasting performances highlighting local practices such as composting, vertical farming, and pollution filtration, according to Felicia Young, founder and CEO of Earth Celebrations, the organizer of the event.
Earth Celebrations first founded in 1991 to save endangered community gardens slated for destruction. Since its beginning as a community pageant, the artistic activism group has engaged with local communities in efforts towards commemorating AIDS victims and preservation of community gardens. Most recently, the organization has featured in the city hall to promote community voices in the city’s five-year plan around the redevelopment of the East River Park.
“When you have a visual it’s very powerful.” said Felicia, “When you can have something that’s a character that can be presented, people are like, Oh, wow, she’s here with us, she’s here to support us in this effort.”
The battle against climate change and its existential dread, however, is often more intense than quirky masks and costumes. In the past month, a Colorado man died after lighting himself on fire in a Washington D.C. protest bringing attention to the climate crisis, 18 Climate activists were arrested outside The New York Times printing plant in Queens during a midnight blockade.
Nearly 10 years after Superstorm Sandy pummeled New York City, residents keep bearing the blunt of severe weather events. In 2021 alone, New Yorkers experienced blizzards that shut down the subway system, several record-breaking heat waves and in September, flash flooding that killed more than a dozen New Yorkers.
Activist groups such as Extinction Rebellion NYC has organized rallies gathered all over the city since the beginning of 2022, including the protest outside of the Queens printing plant. The group promotes acts of “peaceful civil disobedience”, blocking streets from near Madison Square Park to the Financial District, calling action to address the climate crisis.
“It’s very exhausting work,” says Mahayana Landowne, an organizer with Extinction Rebellion NYC, “because not only everybody’s working for very little, we’re also working against something that it’s hard to see results from.”
Comparing to traditional protests urging action from governments and corporations to address climate change, artistic activism offers an alternative approach. Behind the colorful costumes and celebratory scene, organizers explore a path to create sustained impact, with an activism message tailored to the city residents.
“Making a protest that looks like a performance is a lot of fun”, says Steven Duncombe, co-director of the Center for Artistic Activism and author of the book The Art of Activism: Your All Purpose Guide to Make the Impossible Possible. “If people can figure out that you are an activist, they will avoid you, they will not listen to you, because they think they’ve already heard what you have to say,” Duncombe added, “creative approaches to activism can change that.”
Even if you haven’t exactly heard of the term, artistic activism has a long history in New York City. The Aids Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT-UP, was formed in the late 1980s in response to the government’s handling of the AIDS epidemic. Through creative campaigns such as a queer parody of the “Benetton” Poster, and wrapping homophobic senator Jesse Helm’s two story house in a giant condom, ACT-UP generated widespread attention and media coverage.
In terms of climate change, Duncombe explains that artistic activists work similarly to present an alternative reality to the public. “A part of activism has always been a prophetic element,” said the veteran activist, “in which you conjure up a vision of the world that we want to inhabit.” Compared to traditional protests, which usually aim to draw attention to the climate crisis at the moment, artistic activism instead tends to focus on what could be, by providing a visual sense of direction and hope to what activism efforts are working towards, according to Duncombe.
Since 2017, as sustainability became a topic on theater stages, Arts and Climate Initiative, a New York based artistic organization, has been highlighting the global climate crisis through its live performance program Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA) and annual workshops. Through global partnerships, they have put on performances such as The Arctic Cycle, a series theater production already shown in addressing climate change in Arctic states.
“Our platform is really like an example where you can see the trajectory of our role in the climate conversation, ” said Julia Levine, a director and producer for Arts and Climate Initiative, “both from the arts side of having climate included, and also from the science and climate communication side of having artists included.”
In September of 2021, Levine helped organize Dispatch to the Future, a walk-through live performance in New York City’s Central Park, kicking off the three-month festival of theater productions around the world. The creative team behind the Central Park performance included international artists from Uganda and Canada, while the CCTA 2021 encompassed over 30 countries around the world, according to CCTA’s website.
To Levine, however, the span of collaboration her organization was able to achieve was hardly impressive. “It’s just like a space that the organization has carved out for itself out of necessity,” said the producer, “as an artist talking about climate change, and working on climate issues and like wanting to connect with others.”
Compared to traditional forms of activism such as parades and sit-ins, creative forms of activism tend to draw a larger crowd. “Artistic aspects provide a way for people who don’t normally get involved in activism into the organization,” explained Sewheat Halie, an NYU PhD student who is studying environmental justice activism, “It’s a way to meet people where they are.”
Inside Sixth Street Community Center buried in Manhattan’s Lower East Side’s tenant buildings and restaurants, attendants of Earth Celebration’s 10-week workshop leading to the parade included senior citizens living in the neighborhood, as well as a student volunteer from nearby New York University. “We’ve had little children, we’ve had seniors, we’ve had people for whom English is their second language,” observed Manavit of the over 100 participants who signed up for the preparation effort, “we even have a friend in Pakistan who reached out to us to show support.”
Just three blocks north, La Plaza Cultural de Armando Perez community garden on Ninth Street is booming with life. Hundreds of faces made from colorful plastic bottles and tin cans shake and shimmer on top of the metal fence. A stone-laid path circles around small planters and berry bushes, into an oasis of greenery.
In less than two weeks, the Earth Celebrations parade is going to enter La Plaza garden for a hip-hop musical performance addressing carbon and methane emissions. “The pageant points out that all of these community gardens are providing to the city for free urban climate solutions,” said Felicia, pointing out the solar panels hidden behind the plants, “They’re sequestering carbon. They’re filtering pollution runoff, they’re mitigating flooding.”
“A real problem with activism in general is that they assume if people just either understand what the problem is, or even imagine a future, they’re going to act to do something about it,” warned Duncombe. While the lively garden with the tarmac playground provides a lovely backdrop for performances, Manavit is not so worried about the climate parade having any direct impact on legislation.
“We’re not actually trying to get into the weeds about the legislation, we’re really just addressing it from an artistic standpoint of how this is going to affect people,” said Manavit, “we’re not necessarily going after politicians, the strategy is from the bottom up.”
For Levine, the Central Park walkthrough has generated most positive feedbacks centered on the emotional connection between the participants. “It was appealing more to people’s moods and attitudes, certainly their relationship to the park,” said Levine, “Also people felt a connection to one another–if it wasn’t collective responsibility, then certainly a sense of like, being part of something larger than ourselves.”
After a year of social distancing, Leveine is now preparing for a panel discussion in Anchorage, Alaska. The incubator, as part of Arts and Climate Initiative’s annual program, gathers artists, climate activists, and scientists alike, to discuss artistic solutions.
When it comes to the future, however, Manavit admits that community support alone could hardly help beyond the parade. While Earth Celebration received grants from Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) and Alliance of Resident Theaters/New York for the preparation effort, Manavit said the funding was not enough to build a sustainable model beyond the parade.
“In order to grow the nonprofit, you have to actually have our presence in the community and network with all these other organizations, all of that needs to happen on a year round schedule,” said Manavit. Apart from paying for the community center space and insurance, there was little money to hire a large production team, let alone planning for future outreach opportunities, according to the Earth Celebrations organizer.
“Come on over and join us!” Read the caption accompanying a video touring around Earth Celebrations’s workshop on Wednesday. Giant headpieces resembling the Empire State Building, twisting tree branches, and a giant lily flower sat around the room, where seamstresses are shown busy working on their dresses with floral motifs and fabric patches. It is less than two weeks away from when the costumes would parade down streets in the Lower East Side, and Manon stood against the tables, apparently discussing something that had gone wrong with the materials.
“This is the ecological city that we are imagining, now let’s make it a reality.” Manvit told me earlier, “That’s why it’s called ecological cities, because we’re creating the city in a fictional realm, and hoping that it will become a reality.”
