“Coal has always been both a creative and a destructive force. It is the tension between the two that makes the story of coal so compelling...” Barbara Freese

CLICK BELOW TO GO TO COAL: A MUSICAL FABLE'S WEBSITE:

www.coalmusical.com

Project

COAL is an unexpected, mythical, musical told through a global musical score combined with an inclusive grassroots engagement process that takes us to the heart of our current paradox - we are hungry for the power of coal, we love it AND it is killing us.

COAL is a musical unlike any other.  It is an experience, an event that invites us into a shared, imaginative response to our current global situation. COAL brings people together across many divides and catalyzes collective knowledge, response and engagement through musical performances, community dinners, dialogues, and creative workshops.

The story of climate change is often told through a despairing and overwhelming lens that results in the feeling that the way forward is beyond our control.    COAL invites human wisdom, heart, and courage back into the story and gives us the opportunity to be heroic together. COAL is a catalyst for collective reflection, value clarification and social action that moves us beyond notions of good and bad in the spirit of connection.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

There are many forces in the world that encourage us to be consumers of our lives and experience as opposed to active generators of our futures.  COAL creates spaces for interaction and exchange that honor the resources and creativity inherent in each individual and community.  COAL is a global-groove musical built by a professional team of diverse artists and will be in residence in each host city for several weeks at a time.  The performances will employ video, shadow puppetry, dance, music, text, costumes, stage design, 5-7 instrumentalists and 5 singers. 

MORE THAN A MUSICAL

The engagement elements of COAL elevate the expressions, resources and insights of host city participants and integrate global perspectives.  Elements include community dinners, creative dialogues, public and school workshops, cultivation of inclusive audiences, project fellows, satellite participation, energy transparency strategies, and partnership webs.

BUILDING PARTNERSHIP WEBS WITH EXISTING ORGANIZATIONS AND GROUPS

COAL works in partnership with a wide range of existing groups and institutions (civic, faith based, community, business, and more) in each host city to create a web of grounded and meaningful support.

PROJECT FELLOWS/LIFTING LOCAL VOICES

COAL will collaborate with an alliance of partner organizations in each host city to identify fifteen project fellows from diverse communities who will engage the critical issues related to COAL, personalize and localize elements of the project, introduce the project to their city/community, facilitate public and school workshops.  Fellows and COAL team members will convene for one weekend  every month over a six month period before and after launch performances in planning, evaluation, and contribution to performance elements. COAL will incorporate elements of local expression such as language, local food and other expressive forms. 

CURATED INCLUSIVE AUDIENCES

COAL curates audiences by bringing together a wide range of diverse community groups together with conventional theatre audiences to create an interactive event that weaves together many voices and perspectives into a dynamic collective experience.

FOOD-SHARING AND DIALOGUE

COAL performances will include the sharing of food in family inclusive settings and innovative creative dialogue strategies that value the creation of safe spaces where each voice is valued equally.

INTEGRATION OF MULTI-LINGUAL VIDEO RESPONSES

Integrated into the performance are video responses that are being created with people from many different communities throughout the globe and in many languages.  These video responses help to emphasize the global nature of the task at hand and lift many different perspectives into the creative exchange. 

CREATIVE COMMUNITY WORKSHOPS

Each city/community responds to the story/performance through creative workshops involving video, poetry and visual arts. This workshop process helps connect the mythical re-framing of our relationship with COAL to local situations and dynamics through a spirit of wonder and inquiry.  This creative process allows individuals and communities to further personalize systems and relationships that often seem impersonal and far away but which define our lives and futures. 

SATELLITE PARTICIPATION

COAL is committed to encouraging participation from individuals and communities that are unable to directly interact with the project through two approaches:  1) Interactive web-based crowd sourcing that allows people to contribute from many communities; and 2) A portable satellite touring multi-media storytelling presentation that is able to tour to small communities with an emphasis on reaching communitites in challenging divisive struggles.  

ENERGY TRANSPARENCY

COAL is committed to acknowledging how much coal, water and other resources are used in the development of this project including the performances. COAL is currently exploring partnerships with community groups who will design strategies for powering the show such as live bicycle power generation.

GOALS

• To engage personal and collective imagination to drive the culture change needed for a sustainable and equitable world

• Re-story one of the most vital relationships in human history and foster heart-felt engagement and meaningful actions that significantly reduce our dependence upon coal and other fossil fuels

• Create new opportunities for dialogue that move us beyond notions of good and bad and create a compelling new experience of socially engaged/relationship building musical storytelling/theatre that inspires and catalyzes reflection and clarification of shared values

• Collectively address contemporary economic/environmental equity issues facing our communities and invoke our resourcefulness and capacity for positive change through bringing people together across economic, cultural, racial, geographic and generational lines

• Create a new musical and artistic metaphors that inspire and engage collective imagination

• Create opportunities for people to feel themselves as generators/creators of their future as opposed to passive consumers/recipients

• Create new opportunities for cultural maturity and foster applied skills for collective solution making

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT- MOLLY STURGES

In 2009 I was awarded The United States Artists Fellowship- http://www.unitedstatesartists.org.  This award afforded me time and resources.  My response was to delve into issues around climate change and see if there was some artistic response that would be personally meaningful and could expand our dialogue, connection, and response to the major events occurring in these times. I wanted to contribute to a movement towards positive envisioning and collective insight as opposed to simply averting disaster.  COAL became a means to create spaces and opportunities for us to connect us to our shared humanity.

Frustrated by theme-based projects that oversimplify, the path to finding a starting point has not been obvious. Convinced that climate change is hard to relate to, I committed myself to creating a musical out of my belief that songs and story can foster the emotional connection so desperately needed in this conversation.

This is not a project about right and wrong—it is about what connects us to one another and to the communities with whom we share the planet. It is about what we must let go of and what we must carry with us as we create and remember regenerative relationships. I am not interested in projects that prescribe solutions but that lead us more deeply to our own personal and collective resources inherent in each individual and community.  I am interested in nuance, multiplicity, inquiry, dialogue and elevating a wide range of community voices.

COAL contains within it a predicament. The answer to our central social and environmental challenges may not be found in the current language and perceptions that dominate. Rather it may be found in our collective insight—and this is what I seek to create through this musical story, a deep interaction that brings us face to face with creating our shared future through our feeling, participatory creative exchanges, and shared reflection and dialogue. 

We stand at the center of a great many paradoxes.  Our short-term survival and long-term survival are at odds.  We need jobs, many of us are not surviving, families are being torn apart and the dominant notions of economic stability are based upon a system that directly challenges the survival of future generations.

Having worked with many communities around the globe I am aware of the myriad of worldviews and cosmologies that hold notions of climate change in radically different ways. I care about these differences and am committed to an elegant expression of this multiplicity that welcomes us into a textured global imagining of our future.

CONTACT: Molly Sturges, molly@littleglobe.org, 505-660-9473

VISIT THE COAL PROJECT WEBSITE (CLICK TO VIEW)

ABOUT ARTISTIC DIRECTOR/CO-COMPOSER

MOLLY STURGES is an artistic director, composer, and performer. She is the artistic director and co-founder of Littleglobe and is best known for her work integrating intermedia performance, community dialogue, and social and environmental equity and healing. She specializes in intergenerational, community specific, large-scale community engagement projects that integrate a range of creative mediums. Commissions include: The European Festival of Culture, The Stockton International Arts Festival, The New Mexico Arts and Social Change Consortium ( a partnership of local and national funders and community organizers), The Santa Fe Opera, SITE Santa Fe, The City of Evora, Portugal, The Lensic Performing Arts Center and more. Projects include guest artistic director with The Creative Center: Arts for People with Cancer (NYC); creator and director of Moment, a five-month project with homeless older adults for The EU Festival of Culture in Ireland, 2005; and Memorylines: Voces de Nuestras Jornadas, a community-dialogue opera commissioned by The Santa Fe Opera.

Current projects include creator/artistic director and composer for Lifesongs, a partnership with The Santa Fe Opera, nursing homes and hospice programs; Common Ground: TOC, an multi-year intermedia community capacity and arts project with intergenerational participants from two Eastern Agency Navajo communities and from the rural village of Cuba, NM; composer and director for SALVE, a music project with returning women veterans; and composer and artistic director and composer on RUTA, a new intermedia community bus opera. Sturges is a performing vocalist, recording artist, and leader of creative music ensembles. A recipient of numerous commissions and residencies, she has written and performed original music for a wide array of projects including music for dance companies, silent films, circuses and sound installations.

Sturges holds an MA in composition from Wesleyan University. In 2008 Sturges was awarded the United States Artist Fellowship in Music. In 2010 she will join the faculty of Art and Ecology at The University of New Mexico. Sturges has lived, studied and created projects in many countries around the world, she speaks several languages, and regularly teaches workshops and speaks on art and community engagement and capacity building.

THE COAL TEAM

The COAL team consists of professional cultural workers who stand out in their fields and are connected to the project through a sense of inspiration and commitment. The team, currently in development, includes active consulting writers/artists/producers:

ACUSHLA BASTIBLE (CONCEPT CONSULTANT / STAGE DIRECTION) is a multidisciplinary performance artist. As an actor, movement artist, and workshop facilitator, Acushla has worked in Europe and the United States, performing with Angel Exit Theatre (UK and Ireland), The Laboratory for International Theatre Exploration (NYC), Shakespeare Santa Fe, The Santa Fe Opera, Theater Grottesco and Littleglobe (Santa Fe). As a writer and director, she has created pieces for the Santa Fe Opera, Littleglobe, Theater Grottesco, Todi Arte Festival in Umbria and the Festival Internazionale dell’Attore in Naples.  With her own company, Angel Exit Theatre, she has been nominated for awards at the Dublin Fringe Theatre Festival. Acushla is an Artistic Associate with The Santa Fe Opera and the Artistic Director of Lifesongs, an arts-in-community project facilitating the creation of original musical works in collaboration with people in nursing homes and hospice care.  She is a graduate of Trinity College (Dublin), the Courtauld Institute of Art (London), École Internationale de Théatre Jacques Lecoq (Paris) and an alumnus of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab (NYC).  In her work in recent years, Bastible has often found herself ’dancing at the crossroads’ of live performance, new media, and music. She regularly works with Littleglobe.

GEORGINA H. ESCOBAR (playwright) is a native of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. She received her MFA in Dramatic Writing in 2011 and her B.M.S in Theater Production and Humanities in 2006. She is an alumn of the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting in New York City, 2000, and The Actors Center in San Diego, CA; 1998. After graduating from the University of Texas, she founded Fourth Wall Productions: an independent entertainment consulting company serving the music, theatre and film industry where she produced and launched the Vagina Monologues: Spotlight on the Women of Juarez campaign in 2004; starring Jane Fonda, Eve Ensler and Sally Field.  Her original work includes the Trilogy plays The Circuz (2010), The Ruin (2011) which premiered at Manhattan Rep 2011, and Ash Tree (2009), winner of the Kennedy Center Theatre for Youth National Award, 2011 and a Bonderman finalist in the same year. The same play was one of two US plays that received a Staged Reading in Copenhagen, Denmark and Malom, Sweden as part of the ASSITEJ Festival(Association Internationale du Théâtre de l’Enfance et la Jeunesse). Her book "Playwright As Enchanter" received publication from LAP Academic Publishing in 2012. She currently works at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center and is working as a translator for The Civilian's new Bogota Project.
 

DAVID GALLEGOS (COMMUNITY PRODUCER) has worked in a wide range of community settings as a facilitator, artist, and educator including senior centers, schools, clinics, hospitals and more.  He has produced a wide range of large-scale creative projects in the US and abroad and has run a number of large-scale arts education programs.  As a core artist and director with Littleglobe, David has worked with border communities, elders, and youth.  Gallegos is devoted to integrating health and wellness topics into all of his community work drawing on 22 years experience working with therapeutic somatic modalities.  In addition to his arts work he has worked as a health educator with the Boulder County Aids Project and has facilitated numerous individual and group seminars.

LUIS GUERRA (CO-COMPOSER) began playing music professionally at the age of 15 and has since gone on to play with musicians Marc Ribot, Kevin Hays (Blue Note Recording Artist), Barrett Martin (Screaming Trees), Peter Buck (REM), Jimmy Messer, Grooveline Horns, Coleman Barks, Bobby Shew, Dr. James Polk, Tosca Tango Orchestra, Orchestra La Tribu, Doug Lawrence, and Money Mark (Beastie Boys). He has also recorded and toured with Grammy nominated songwriters Alejandro Escovedo, Kim Richie, Patty Griffin, and is a voting member of the National Association Recording Arts and Sciences. He currently composes and produces music from his studio in Los Angeles, CA with a wide range of artists. His compositions have been featured on National Geographic News Watch, PRI's the World, NPR's Latino USA as well as numerous commercials, documentaries, and short films. Recent projects include writing arrangements and orchestrations for multiplatinum producer Jimmy Messer, composing alongside Molly Sturges for the musical, "COAL", composing for Fonografia Collective and composing for numerous aired TV commercials. Past commissions include music for the 2007 Grand Opening of the Miami Center for the Performing Arts, 2010 Circus Luminous, score for "Woven Songs of the Amazon", and score for "Haiti Burden of Aid". He also has numerous credits as both a session musician, producer, and educator. He is a mixing engineer and curriculum developer Empowerment Through Music that teaches music production to incarcerated youth He currently resides in LA.

DYLAN MCLAUGHLIN (VIDEO)is a digital media artist, focusing primarily on documentary and narrative photography and video. He is a Littelglobe team member on “COAL” and Garden II - House” and the current Turn the Lens programs in both rural and urban communities.  His work ranges from co-organization of the Attention Span 30 Second Film Festival, documentary and short filmmaking, to more experimental works and video installation.  He has installed a recent set of interactive video works at the Museum of Contemporary Native Art in Santa Fe, NM.  He is a recent graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts’ New Media Arts Program.  Visit his website for more info: www.invisiblelaboratory.com

MICHELLE ROOS (DEVELOPMENT)has spent 20 years in the field of Development raising funds for various fundraising with Individuals, Foundations & Corporations, as well as Government Agencies.   She has expertise in securing funds for projects and from funders in the United States as well as abroad. Roos also spent 5 years in the for-profit sector providing Business Development and Marketing services.  Most recently, she has been conducting 3-day workshops throughout the country teaching the essentials of successful grant writing. Roos holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.  Presently, she is a freelance consultant residing in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

LITTLEGLOBE (PRODUCING ORGANIZATION)is a Santa Fe based, non-profit consisting of a team of seasoned, professional artists, activists and facilitators from diverse cultural and artistic backgrounds committed to interdisciplinary, collaborative art projects that foster life-affirming connections across the boundaries that divide us. Littleglobe partners with communities around the world to create rigorous artistic works that empower and promote meaningful connections and capacity building.  www.littleglobe.org

•Additional Contributors:  Chris Jonas, Jamie Figueroa, Charles Gamble, Pete Yahnke, Henry Shukman, Valerie Martinez, Chris Galanis, Christinna Monmorunni

COAL ADVISORY TEAM

GAY DILLINGHAM is Co-Founder, former President and Chair of Earthstone International, LLC, an environmental IP company manufacturing recycled glass into an engineered "white foam glass" for surface abrasion, non-toxic cleaning technologies, agriculture products and soon-to-be building products. Gay served as Chair of the New Mexico Environmental Improvement Board for six of eight years of her tenure. The EIB passed historic greenhouse gas regulations in 2010. Gay owns a production company, CNS Communications, and is an award-winning producer/director. She is executive director of the Livingry Foundation, served two years as board chair for the New Mexico Association of Grantmakers, and currently serves on the boards of Santa Fe Community College, Bioneers (Vice Chair), New Voice of Business, and the World Security Institute.

TOBY HERZLICH is a facilitator and trainer with a focus on leadership, sustainability, organizational excellence, and culture change. Her work is directed toward developing leadership within progressive nonprofits, supporting values-based organizational transformation, using Biomimicry to guide social change, and cultivating visionary leadership among women and men. With a practice aimed toward the diverse needs of multicultural groups, Toby's participatory methods emphasize dialogue and collaborative problem solving to foster collective intelligence toward sustainable solutions.  Recent clients include the Bioneers, 1Sky Climate Change Initiative, Jewish Funds for Justice, The Biomimicry Group, and the National Hispanic Cultural Center Foundation. Toby is a Senior Trainer with the Rockwood Leadership Program and is on the faculty of the Center for Whole Communities.

ED GILBERT is active in the Bay Area arts community as Director of Gallery Paule Anglim (1988 -present) and has served on the boards of the Headlands Center for the Arts and non-profit gallery space, Southern Exposure, as well as the Arts Advisory Board of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.  He has served as a professional advisor to Creative Capital and maintains an interest in all media and styles, consulting with advice and support to a wide spectrum of artistic productivity:  painting, drawing, sculpture, film, video and performance.  He is closely engaged with art programs and students’ work at local art colleges U.C. Berkeley, the San Francisco Art Institute, CCAC, Stanford and San Francisco State.

MATT LAPPE is program officer at  the Alliance for Climate Education (ACE) where he focuses on science credibility and assessing the impact of ACE programs. After receiving BS and MS degrees from Stanford University’s Earth Systems program, he studied paleoclimate and environmental hydrology throughout Patagonia, Vietnam and Cambodia. Upon his return to California, he taught at a small charter high school in Mendocino County where he headed the science and social studies departments and founded the Sustainable Energy Education program (SEED). Before joining ACE Matt worked as a Policy Analyst for the Tomales Bay Institute. He is a presenter for Al Gore’s Climate Project, and an amateur cook. Matt likes to spend time with his brilliant siblings and be outside as much as possible. He can often be found climbing in the Rockies, snowboarding, backpacking and surfing unreasonably cold, big waves whenever he can get back to California.

VALERIE MARTINEZ is a poet, teacher, playwright, librettist, and collaborative artist.  Her award-winning books include Absence, Luminescent, World to World, A Flock of Scarlet Doves, Each and Her, And They Called It Horizon, and This is How It Began. Her most recent book, Each and Her, (winner of the 2011 Arizona Book Award) has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Open Book Award, the William Carlos William Award, and the National Book Award.  Her work has been widely published in journals, magazines, anthologies and media outlets including The Best American Poetry, The Washington Post, and the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Everywhere series. Valerie has more than twenty years of experience as a teacher, primarily at the college level.  For over ten years, she has also worked with children, young adults, adults, teachers, and seniors in a wide range of community outreach and educational programs.  She is Executive Director and a member of the core artist team of Littleglobe.  Recent projects include Line and Circles (art & poetry by 98 intergenerational members of Santa Fe families), Lifesongs (with elders in hospice care), Open Books/Artist-to-Artist (with youth in foster care), and Crosstown (a Santa Fe city-bus opera).  Valerie has a BA from Vassar College and an MFA from the University of Arizona.  She was the Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico for 2008-2010. 

MICHAEL MONTOYA is a professor of anthropology, Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California – Irvine.  He also is faculty for The Program in Medical Education for the Latin Community (PRIME-LC), in the School of Medicine.  He is the director of the Community Knowledge Project, www.communityknowledgeproject.org which is an experimental space for communities of all kinds to learn and engage in action together.  His award winning research examines the ways life-ways become embodied in individuals and groups. Michael has written about the social causes of chronic diseases and the problems of scientific approaches that exclude the voices of those most impacted by them.  His recent book, Making the Mexican Diabetic: Race, Science, and the Genetics of Inequality (2011) explores diabetes sciences as only one among many ways to explain who gets diabetes and why. 

SANJIT SETHI is Director of the Center for Art and Public Life, and the Barclay Simpson Chair of Community Art at California College of the Arts.  Sethi received a BFA in 1994 from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, an MFA in 1998 from the University of Georgia, and an MS in Advanced Visual Studies in 2002 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sethi has been an artist in residence at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada and a Fulbright fellow in Bangalore, India, working on the Building Nomads Project. Sethi continued his strong focus on interdisciplinary collaboration as director of the MFA program at the Memphis College of Art. His work deals with issues of nomadism, identity, the residue of labor, and memory. Sethi recently completed the Kuni Wada Bakery Remembrance, an olfactory-based memorial in Memphis, Tennessee; and Richmond Voting Stories, a collaborative video project involving youth and senior residents of Richmond, CA. Sethi's current works include Indians/Indians, the Urban Defibrillator, and a series of writings on the territory of failure and its relationship to collaborative cultural practice, all of which involve varied social and geographic communities.

JAMIE SMITH uses art as a tool to promote community education and dialogue around health and wellness, equity and social justice issues. Jaime has mostly worked with at- risk youth and in Native American communities as a program director, project coordinator, a collaborative core artist, activist and educator.  She strives to create community arts projects that are cultural and intergenerational bridges built on respect for community knowledge.  Projects include project coordinator for Eye Dazzler Project, co-author and researcher of The Healing Power of Our People –Sharing The Wisdom,  a Native American Guide to Diabetes Self Management, Director of the Native American Youth Outreach Project , and  Co founder of Wise fool New Mexico women’s circus troupe. When not at work on projectsshe can be found in various locations exploring the world on her Ducati.

SANDY WIGGINS has had a 29-year career in the real estate development and construction industries, and has worked with project teams through the development, design and construction of projects totaling over $800MM. In November 2001, he cofounded the Delaware Valley Green Building Council, an organization devoted to changing the way these industries work in order to regenerate the natural environment and leverage the built environment to improve human health and productivity. In January 2004, he founded Consilience, LLC, a consulting and development company with a mission to build environmentally, socially and economically sustainable communities by bringing together the principles of Green Building with other emerging development strategies that facilitate regeneration of the natural environment, improved health and increased social equity.

ZACK AVSHALOMOV (INTERN) is a musician, environmentalist, and entrepreneur with expertise in the online enterprise. He has performed across the country with artists including Chick Corea, Kurt Elling, and Billy Taylor, and is actively performing and recording in Los Angeles. On the business side, Zack works with non-profit United States Artists as Artist Relations Coordinator – assisting artists throughout the life-cycle of their crowd-funding projects in development, implementation, and outreach. Though born and raised in Santa Monica, CA, he received his Bachelor's degree in Jazz Studies and Environmental Studies from Ithaca College, NY. He joins the COAL Team ready to apply a versatile and fresh approach to problem solving at the intersection of his two passions: music, and the environment.