Interviews: Penny Chivas and Debra Batton

In late 2019, Glasgow-based dance artist Penny Chivas was in Australia visiting family when the bushfires broke out. "The air was so thick [with smoke], particularly in Ngunnawal Country (Canberra) — you couldn't see more than 20 or so metres in front of you," she says. 

The fires raged on for months. By March 2020, 19 million hectares of land had been burned, thousands of homes destroyed, and more than a billion wildlife killed.

This August, Chivas grapples with the history and legacy of the Black Summer through her dance-theatre work Burnt Out. "It feels important to bring my perspective on all this, as an Australian, to a country like the UK, that doesn’t quite seem to feel the same devastating effects of climate change yet," she says. 

The key word: yet. Due to the climate crisis, catastrophic natural disasters such as these are growing in frequency and scale. The future of humanity, says UN Secretary-General António Guterres, is at ‘code red’. The evidence is there for all to see, black and smouldering. Yet three years on, true progress has been stifled by ineffectual governments and the rapacious fossil fuel industry. In the most decisive decade of human history, our window of opportunity is closing. 

Zoë, Photo by Claudia Sangiorgi-Dalimore

In end times such as these, what can we do? Many shows at this year’s Fringe centre around this very question. Some seek to educate, such as Matt Winning’s stand-up hour Hot Mess, or David Finnegan’s blend of science and storytelling in his own account of the Australian bushfires, titled You’re Safe Til 2024. Others use the space to feel and reflect – the play The Kettling brings the drama of a climate protest to a fever pitch, while Shrimp Dance stages a heady blend of Butoh and ecocide.

Aussie circus company A Good Catch looks at the question from a slightly different perspective: maybe how we do it matters too. Their show Zoë sees three performers set out to embody and express nothing less but life itself, in all its forms. 

"There is a liveliness in a dog, a table, an imaginary creature, a molecule, and a virus," says Debra Batton, a performer and co-director of the company. "As circus artists, we understand this. We have relationships with apparatus and fellow acrobats; with lighting, sound and the groups of strangers who attend our performances."

The show explores the necessary entanglements of all kinds of life – both human and non-human – and its chaotic, beautiful consequences. As part of this thinking, much of Zoë’s choreography came together organically, in response to what Batton calls "the conditions of life". "We allow[ed] the show to emerge through skills training, discussion, play and the everyday," she says. "There [was] no line between the end of training and the beginning of making."

The value of play and discovery for its own sake in Zoë stands in opposition to what the trio term ‘the trans-species commodification of life that is advanced capitalism’. That is, the idea that our planet exists merely as a resource to be extracted, and that all living things within it – including humans – are measured in terms of their monetary value. "Nothing can exist for its own sake, for the wonder of it," says Batton, "including art!"

A circus rebuttal to neoliberal capitalism is "absolutely absurd", acknowledges Batton, and also wholly necessary. Zoë’s love letter to the planet and the inherent mess of living creates room for manifold possibility. Also known as: hope. "It’s the unforeseeable outcomes of each entangled encounter that casts new light and creates new shadows," says Batton. As we enter into a messy, chaotic month, entangled with millions of other in this city, that’s something to hold onto.