What

We invite applications* for six artists (actors, dancers, or musicians) aged 18 and above to collaborate with an international Indian team on an innovative artistic production dealing with climate change and its varied effects at the Buffer Fringe Arts Festival 2020. Artists interested in the subject of the piece or the artistic process of making it are especially encouraged to apply.

About

A Multitude of Drops emerges from numerous performance research and workshop projects around artistic responses to the climate crisis. The latter is a global phenomenon, but extremely local in expression. How do we address this in both a universal and specific manner? The proposed structure and process develops content researched and sourced with local performers about local concerns, so each performance in each place inhabits both the global and the local with equal intensity. The performance creates an ever-moving tide with a group of people who perform fragments of text and dance drawing on research material, literature, interviews and personal experience. The fragments have no beginning, no end: rather than pieces of one narrative, the performance offers multiple insights into the intricate web of climate change, enforced migration, displacements and loss of ecologies, community efforts and circumstances, and social, political and economic complexities.

This version of the production will be co-owned by the Indian and Cypriot collaborators.

Who

The core team for this innovative, collaborative and critical artistic project comprises:

• Vikram Iyengar, a dancer-choreographer, arts writer, curator-presenter, and an arts leader and connector based in Calcutta, India and working internationally.
• Lav Kanoi, an interdisciplinary academic undertaking doctoral research at Yale University jointly in the Department of Anthropology and the School of the Environment.
• Vicky Long, a multi-disciplinary artist, interested in how cultural practice can affect and effect change. Her studio practice – studiolong.co.uk – is based in Vauxhall, London.

How

We expect participants to commit to two-hour online sessions, twice a week, from early October onwards, as well as about 7-10 days of in-person rehearsal in Cyprus before the Buffer Fringe Arts Festival (between 3-5 December 2020). To express interest in this opportunity, please send in your applications by 13 September to rananindia@gmail.com as a single pdf containing:

• a short statement describing your interest in this project (200-300 words)
• your reflections on any one 'environmental issue' that concerns/interests/inspires you? (150-200 words)
• a short biographical note (100-150 words) or a CV
• links to previous work (if any)

Note: Even if we can't include you in the whole piece, we would still like you to participate in some form (attend some meetings, participate in consultations, attend the performance etc).  

* with apologies that this call for applications is in the English language alone