(The theater group has never been officially affiliated with any of the annual COP meetings.)
climate meeting in 2015 that resulted in the landmark Paris Agreement.
Climate Change Theater Action, an initiative of the nonprofit the Arctic Cycle, was created to encourage theater-making that might draw greater attention to COP21, the U.N. Though Balogun is the only theater artist on the official COP26 schedule, he is certainly not the first playwright to grapple with climate themes. “We don’t talk about the communities who’ve been leading this fight for years.” “So often we don’t talk about the global South,” Balogun said. To that end, he interweaves his own story with that of the Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who campaigned against destructive oil extraction on behalf of his Ogoni people. “The goal is to make grass-roots activism accessible, and to represent people of color and working-class people,” he said. Climate action, in other words, is for everyday people with everyday concerns. Though at first it seems as if they are interrupting Balogun’s primary narrative about “emissions, emissions, emissions,” as he sings at one point, their interjections hammer home one of his central ideas: If the movement isn’t willing to prioritize someone like his Nigerian grandma, it’s missing the point. Throughout the show, Balogun fields phone calls from family members about issues seemingly unrelated to the central thrust of the play, asking him when he’s going to get married or why he left a bag in the hallway at home. “Knowing all that I did made me angry at the world for not doing anything,” the 26-year-old Balogun (“Dune,” “I May Destroy You”) said in a phone interview.
Not even landing the lead in a West End production (a long-coveted dream) of “The Importance of Being Earnest.” His growing anxiety made him feel as if he were living a real-world version of “Myth” in which society kept repeating the same old script even as the planet descended into chaos. Suddenly, nothing seemed more important than addressing the global crisis. The whole experience changed his life, Balogun said. The play itself called for him and the other actors to repeatedly run through the same mundane lines, to the point of absurdity, as their environment ruptured terrifyingly around them - the walls streaking with oil, the stove catching fire, the freezer oozing water. The actor Fehinti Balogun knows that theater can mobilize people toward climate action, because that’s what it did for him.īack in 2017, while preparing for a role in “Myth,” a climate parable, he began reading books about climate change and became alarmed by the unusually warm summer he was experiencing in England.
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