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FRANCESCA VELICU ON SUSTAINABILITY & ENGLISH NATIONAL BALLET'S GREEN TEAM
I joined ENB’s Green Team to learn more about sustainability and our environment, as I felt that I had a lot to catch up. I think if you are passionate about it or just a nature lover like me, it’s necessary to try and understand what you can do to protect it. I’ve learned already so much throughout our monthly meetings. I never thought about sustainability in the ballet world before so when the question of how to recycle our most used tools—our pointe shoes—was raised, I asked friends from different companies around the world and learned that no one really had an initiative like this. We were very intrigued and determined to find ways to solve this issue and many others. One very important side to what we do is communicating our goals and achievements to everyone in the company and outside. So, it’s nice to see that more of our colleagues are now more engaged into helping the environment :) To commemorate World Earth Day in April 2024, ENB’s Green Team led an all-staff meeting to talk about all our sustainability initiatives. At this meeting, we did a reveal of our pointe shoe bin- which had a glow-up! I painted the bin to represent nature scenes, in order to create a calming atmosphere in our Green Room, while reminding dancers of the good deed they are doing by using the Pointe Shoe Recycling Bin. For female dancers, one pair of pointe shoes will usually last around one week. As you can imagine, with 33 female dancers over the course of a year, we produce a lot of “dead” shoes! We have created an initiative to help prevent these dead shoes ending up in general waste – our Pointe Shoe Bin! Dancers put all of their dead shoes in our bin and it gets sent away for textile recycling. The cardboard in the shoes gets recycled into new products, such as newspapers and office products. The satin and other items get reused if in good condition. Any items that are too damaged would be recycled into many different items, office chairs, boxing bags, essentially anything that would be suitable for that particular material. We’ve also been encouraging the dancers to re-use their elastics and ribbons, which we’re seeing many of them do. This really helps to reduce waste and improves sustainability. As a touring company, we’ve also been collaborating with the venues that we perform in on sustainability efforts. Our goal is to continue recycling our pointe shoes everywhere we go! We’ve been campaigning for a new initiative and are really excited to begin a trial for one season of using Imperfect Pointes tights at English National Ballet. Imperfect Pointes makes sustainable dancewear from recycled nylon and they produced the world’s first planet-friendly convertible tights! Usually after a season, our ballet tights have to go into general waste, so it’s a big step for us to be using sustainable tights. We’ll use them for performances and can’t wait to show them off to our audiences! On-site at the Mulryan Centre for Dance, where we rehearse, we also have our amazing wardrobe department constantly working on costumes and designs. The creation and upkeep of costumes naturally comes with some leftover materials. We have recently introduced scrap-fabric recycling, allowing the team in the Atelier to play around with materials freely, knowing they will be recycled. All fabrics put into the scrap fabrics recycling bin be sent to a company called Robert’s Recycling. There, items are shredded down and the materials are re-used for items such as draft excluders, or filling for sports equipment, like punching bags. Collecting our scrap fabrics has had a really positive impact on helping to reduce the amount of general waste we’re using at ENB. As a Touring Ballet Company, it can be hard to ensure that we’re being as sustainable as we can while not at our rehearsal venue. As a result, we have a Touring Green Rider that we send to venues in advance of our arrival, which I think it’s really cool! The Green Rider suggests ways that we can be as sustainable as possible while on their site. Some examples of requests we make in this Touring Green Rider include: - We ask that information be made accessible for audiences regarding how to travel to the site via public transportation. - We ask that only food items that have been specifically requested to be chilled get chilled, in the hopes that this reduces the need for fridges. We also request that food provided is organic, locally sourced, and not in packaging, where possible. - We ask that lights in dressing rooms are not turned on before our arrival. - We are also committed to constantly reviewing the way we travel to our venues. If on tour in the UK, we will always aim to travel via train and coach. To learn more about the environment I personally started watching documentaries and trying online courses in my rehearsal breaks throughout the day! Also, anything from the TED Climate Podcast is very informative! I think as dancers, we try to be as healthy as possible to protect our bodies and have all the energy our job requires—and that is a good mindset to use when approaching the environment! Starting small with opening the conversation, setting goals for the company and taking them step by step, is a good place to start! Francesca Velicu Title photo by: Nicholas Mackay MAIA WELBEL ON NAVIGATING THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Maia Welbel (she/her) is a freelance journalist and dancer currently living on an urban farm in Berkeley, CA. We took the time to chat with her and ask about what motivates and inspires her to take on the climate crisis. You have an amazing hands-on and research background in farming and food sustainability. Is there a place and/or person that was pivotal in cultivating your relationship to nature? When I was little, my siblings and I would visit our grandmother on the farm where my dad grew up in a town called Sheldon in central Illinois. The sensory experience of being there contrasted so starkly from the urban environment of Chicago where we lived. The smell of damp hay, the colors of the woods in autumn, the fields that seemed to stretch on forever — I think I always felt a groundedness and peace there. My dad also talked to us a lot about how much the landscape had changed since he was a kid. He witnessed the transition of small-scale, organic farming to large-scale chemical agriculture in the Midwest firsthand. So I started thinking about the many injustices embedded in corporatized farming from a really young age, and basically never stopped thinking about it. Beginning in 2020, that same land gave rise to Zumwalt Acres, a regenerative agriculture community and agroforest that I now feel so lucky to consider a second home. What led you to pursue degrees in environmental analysis and journalism? At some point in high school, I distinctly remember deciding that I wanted to go into a career that helped people directly. For some reason I felt like my two options to fulfill that would be to become a doctor or try to solve the climate crisis, and medicine wasn’t particularly appealing. That line of thinking is obviously bananas looking back, but going into environmental studies ultimately was super aligned with my interests and ambitions. Writing was always my best subject in school and also called to me creatively, so I was fortunate to be able to study environmental analysis at Pomona College from a humanities and social sciences lens. My senior thesis ended up being essentially a work of longform narrative journalism about urban agriculture in Chicago. After I graduated, I decided I would apply to the one journalism master’s program I was most interested in (Northwestern had a climate reporting specialization and scholarship track), while simultaneously applying for various fellowship and jobs in environmental nonprofits. I got accepted into the program and decided to go. Working as a freelance journalist now feels like a dream in many ways. I get to do work I’m passionate about both in form and function. I also really hope that climate reporting as a field continues to grow and evolve so there are more work opportunities for creative, expressive, and empathetic writers. I think accessible journalism can be a vital aspect of climate activism. What is UneARTh? Are there any upcoming projects you’re especially excited about? UneARTh was founded by Sara Schroerlucke and co-directed by me and Maxine Patronik. The three of us met dancing in a company together in Chicago in 2018 have since become very dear friends, so working with them is such a gift. As an organization, we seek to empower and uplift artists of all mediums whose work is in service of climate activism. Right now in practice, that means we curate and produce galleries and performances; and gather resources, strategies, and platforms to enable artists in the UneARTh community to keep making impactful, sustainable, and fulfilling work. We are in this for the long run, and we share dreams of UneARTh becoming more expansive overtime. Maybe one day we’ll build a retreat center where folks can come make art in a restorative, communal nature space by day and sing and laugh together by a bonfire at night. A big tenant of our organization is divesting from the urgency around these things that capitalism teaches us to have. So we’re going slow but dreaming big! Two things I’m super excited about are the virtual discussion group we are hosting for Julia Cameron’s iconic workbook, The Artist’s Way. I’m also looking forward to the workshop series and performance we are developing for a dance festival about land justice and restoration at Zumwalt Acres this summer! What lesson(s) from your artistic practices do you feel are valuable for confronting the climate crisis? My personal artistic practice has taught me to be less precious about the things I create, whether it’s dance or writing or a different medium I’m trying. As much as I crave specific instructions and benchmarks to assure myself that I’m Doing It Right, I’ve also learned to recognize that the ambiguity is part of what makes it art. I think that can be applied in so many ways to confronting the climate crisis. The rhetoric around living a sustainable lifestyle or engaging in climate activism can veer a little bit toward perfectionism, and the all or nothing mentality that engenders is counterproductive. To butcher a quote from Anne-Marie Bonneau: we need lots of people fighting the climate crisis imperfectly, not a handful of people doing it perfectly. Do you have any favorite environment-related books/podcasts to recommend to readers? One thing about me is I alwayyyys have recommendations. Please feel free to Direct Message me specific requests at any time. But for now I will share a few books that I’ve found particularly impactful: Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer An Immense World by Ed Yong Rest Is Resistance by Tricia Hersey No Meat Required by Alicia Kennedy Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy Cora Cliburn, ACC Outreach Director (she/her) Title photo by: Ren Picco-Freeman |
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July 2024
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