a moment in the vast eternity of time and space, something you can re-scale as big and overwhelming or tiny like an ant. Arrive into the moment as it is. People have been living in abject societies before this and we are not the first nor the last, but we are the ones that are here now and can become the ancestors we want to be, can be the resistance we will be proud to tell future generations about, can be our own guides and healers and heroes. Move with this, make noise, notice the sen- sations that arise as you bring your attention to the crises around us, the grief, the rage and let the words and sounds and utterances escape from your voice and body in any way you want. See what it is like not to edit them. Groaning is good. Manifestos, rants, and diatribes are welcome. Awkward, ugly, silly, transcendent, joyful in the liberation of accepting what is…share what you say. This is a climate gathering. This is a per- formance ritual. At the heart of the ritual is the Climate Banshee . She’s a prophetic fig- ure in a trance state not unlike a priestess or shaman--but coming instead from my own lineages in dance and sonic improvisa- tion, non-traditional Jewish practices, and Irish traditions of community grieving and collective ritual. Bebe Miller and Simone Forti’s mentoring of my early process guide me and I feel the presence of Eiko Otake, Joan Jonas, Diamanda Galas, and Pauline
The first performances to emerge from this process were a series of rituals that we’ve come to call Climate Gatherings. Climate Gatherings offer a poetic means of turning toward crisis and feeling into action and inten- tion. In the live work, small groups are brought together in an interactive installation of sound, light and video that comes alive through the charged, charismatic pres- ence and fleeting interventions of performers includ- ing the tuning twins whose unison movements provide ground, sound benders who are spatializing and pro- cessing all the sound, and the Climate Banshee . Partic- ipants are guided into different interactions, tasks or prompts, such as placing objects in the space, making offerings in sound or gesture, working together to solve a small problem, reflecting, writing messages in ice or chalk on the floor. Using consensual practices of interac- tive and participatory performance, we locate contem- porary rituals that exceed established religious traditions and that move people out of stasis and into intention, the ground of ethical being. They work, in part, the way ritual has always worked, because they help us bring the issues into scale of the body, our bodies while activating the mysteries. We create these experiences live but also, because this is arts activism, we seek a larger reach, with a version that’s an online installation you can visit on your own time and in your own space to practice turn- ing toward the issues at hand: https://climategatherin- gredux.webflow.io. We also share the scores as social media posts and other offerings. Score: An Issue of Scale Now if you can, take a deep breath with me and turn toward the darkness, the fears, the rage that are either cen- tral in your awareness or playing in the background as you are trying to do something else. Place those monsters somewhere in the space at a slight remove from you. A world on fire, fascism unmasked and flexing its violence all around us, increasing impacts of the climate crisis, fires, floods, transphobia run rampant, the sickening instabil- ity and uncertainty and confusion of the current moment. Turn toward it and as you tense against the magnitude of the issues, breath, move, place it in the space and move around it, observing it, understanding it as a thought, THE BANSHEE DEMANDS THE IMPOSSIBLE OF HERSELF, ATTEMPT- ING TO STAY PRESENT WITH BOTH HER IMMEDIATE SENSATION AND THE PLANETARY REALITIES OF CLIMATE CHANGE, VIOLENCE, EXTINCTION, SUFFERING OF PLANT AND ANIMAL AND FRIEND.
Musician Byron Au Yong works with audience to gather water and sounds during a Climate Gathering performance
vintage brass objects, animals, bells, and boxes to arrange. You are offered glass jars of melting ice and guided to add your water to the bowls on the floor creating pouring and dripping and clanging sounds that reverberate in the room and are picked up by several microphones running to lap- tops guided by custom software patches that other gentle guides use to bend and granulate and move your sounds viscerally in the room through an array of speakers echo- ing back the sensation of melting, ringing bells, and objects of extraction. Creaking sounds, quiet and whispered mem- ories are interrupted by the Climate Banshee entering the space barefoot, long red hair flying around her face. She is focused internally and begins to mutter into a mic, at times speaking, at times groaning, keening, generating an environment of urgent presence and failure to achieve the impossible, facing the magnitudes in her own body so that you can face them in yours. Like the bells and bowls and water, her sounds are bent and thrown through the space and the room vibrates rotating through the community that has gathered, hearts and blood and bodies of those present, stasis and catharsis mingling to generate intention.
Oliveros in this work as well although I claim no con- nection to their lineages beyond being chosen ancestors and guides. The banshee is expressing the inexpressible in the tradition of the prophetic, but she doesn’t know the future. The Banshee shakes things up, literally creating vibration in the room and creating space for ritual partic- ipants to experience their own feelings. In my most recent performance of the Banshee with audiences at a religious studies conference in Germany and again at a sympo- sium in the UK, audiences, Irish women in the audience, women who know the banshee figure deep in their bones, have called out for more, for workshops, for collective keening rituals and utterances so that we may all become banshee. Score: Becoming Banshee The Banshee demands the impossible of herself, attempt- ing to stay present with both her immediate sensation and the planetary realities of climate change, violence, extinc- tion, suffering of plant and animal and friend. It’s a con- stant battle to stay present. As you perform the banshee,
allow the vocalizations issue forth from that state of being. Don’t fake it. Don’t allow the drift of attention toward autopilot. Don’t let yourself do the things you typically do as a performer to feel secure on stage. Work without a net. To become banshee is to seek to remain in flux, unsta- ble, refusing the illusion of stability, refusing artifice. Her vocalizations erupt from bodily sensation and the deep wells of input she has received from others: memories of changing ecologies, personal strengths and stories, hope, grief, recovery, loss, and intention. This keening, raging, raw humanity is a state of being, awkward, sometimes ugly, cathartic. GATHERING T his is a climate gathering. The Climate Banshee enters the space where you have been gath- ering. Gentle guides have been offering ways into sharing with the 20 or so people in the space and small tasks to prepare the space, a tray with bits of chalk to pass around, piles of stones and
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