- Maëlys Renaud
Ebb & Flow: a dance festival to explore climate change and its impact on the environment
Heidi Duckler Dance brings its beloved Ebb & Flow festival back this upcoming weekend! I am pleased to announce that I’ll perform a new pole dance piece as part of this environmental performance art and dance festival, on September Saturday 10th and Sunday11th (3pm-5pm) at the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook, in Culver City.
Ebb & Flow is a free, site-specific community festival of local artists which integrates dance, visual arts, music and technology to explore climate change and its impact on the environment and, consequently, our health. The festival was inaugurated in 2018 and hosted annually since. Ebb & Flow has engaged community members, local arts, health and environmental organizations, and multidisciplinary artists.
Last June, I led a movement workshop with over 100 people at a guided hike organized by Walk Good LA and the Hollywood Climate Summit at Kenneth Hahn Park. While visiting the area, I discovered the Inglewood Oil Field. Even though the City Council adopted The Oil Termination Ordinance in October of 2021, the site-specific Ebb & Flow festival inspired me a piece to reinforce environmental awareness and the urgency to move away from fossil fuel as well as to imagine new possible futures.
While researching more on the history of the oil boom in today's nation’s seventh-largest producer of oil California - and particularly how it shaped Los Angeles - I learned that the state has never enforced buffer zones around wells the way states like Colorado and Pennsylvania do. The proponents of such new rules estimated that 2.7 million Californians live within 3,200 feet of oil and gas wells, which is often associated with an increases in the risk of asthma, heart attacks and premature births.
Drilling for Hope includes an interpretation of Goliath by French artist Woodkid: “This song refers to our individual and collective responsibility in creating a monster and in finding ways to defeat it”, the musician explains. The song creates a dystopian world where the industrial machines become more powerful than the workers in coal production, which resonates with the fossil fuel industry as a whole. The poem Earthrise by Amanda Gorman will then resonate from the hill and over the city of Los Angeles. The poem by Inaugural Youth Poet Laureate of the United States was initially read from stage at the Los Angeles Climate Reality Leadership Corps Training on Tuesday, August 28, 2018 and dedicated to Al Gore and The Climate Reality Project. Amanda Gorman wrote those beautiful words to inspire us to act: “So I tell you this not to scare you, But to prepare you, to dare you To dream a different reality (...)” (Stanza 7). I am excited to announce that the original music and the music arrangements are by BE612: the talented duo with multi-instrumentalist, producer and songwriter Eddy FDS and environmental expert and singer-artist Bénédicte Niel (read her recent interview on poleforplanet.com!).
Heidi Duckler Dance
Heidi Duckler dance creates place-based performances that transform non-traditional spaces, providing learning opportunities and engaging diverse communities, in the belief that the arts can change our vision of the world and of ourselves. More info on the website.
Ebb & Flow Culver City
September 10 & 11th 3-5pm
Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook Read more about the artists participating in this Ebb & Flow edition. You can support their work by joining the festival, and by donating when RVSP.