RSC AND GOOD CHANCE PLACE CLIMATE AND CONSENSUS CENTRE STAGE
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The RSC and Good Chance today announce details of a specially curated programme of public events inspired by the themes of Kyoto; a world premiere and major new co-production between the RSC and Good Chance, from the award-winning team behind The Jungle.
The Kyoto Conference asks the question; What does it take to agree? On saving the planet, on living together, on just getting stuff done?
The two-day Kyoto Conference (5 - 6 July) features creative and participatory events inspired by the messiness of agreement, negotiation and hope that collided at COP3 in Kyoto. The programme includes:
- a film by award-winning visual artist Cornelia Parker
- an interactive climate negotiation game by David Finnigan
- specially commissioned performances by musician & activist Love Ssega
- a panel discussion featuring Baroness Ashton and Stephen Kunken from the Kyoto cast.
- and a People’s Assembly with artistic provocations.
Public art
Audiences can drop in to watch Cornelia Parker’s film The Future (Sixes and Sevens) which explores the response of Primary School children to their future, playing daily from 18 June – 13 July, and Ebrahim Nazier’s new public artwork, commissioned by the RSC, Somewhere / Nowhere (27 May – 18 October); a three-part installation exploring the past, present and how we work towards a more sustainable future.
Bookable Conference events
Interactive sessions across the two Conference days include Future for Beginners; a hands-on simulation game by writer and theatre-maker David Finnigan in which participants are challenged to ‘save the world from catastrophe in 80-minutes’. Set on a small island peninsula in the lead up to a major cultural festival, participants are invited to work together to negotiate challenges and make decisions in the face of a world changing climate shock.
Inspired by the themes of Kyoto, The People’s Assembly offers a space for democratic discussion and debate, with provocations in the form of short dramatic readings from David Finnigan’s Scenes from a Climate Era. Featuring guest contributions from Lord Deben, former Environment Minister and Chairman of the UK Committee on Climate Change, The People’s Assembly explores the question; is there such a thing as a democratic way to disagree? And if we really listen to one another does agreement come quicker and easier?
From Love Ssega, renowned artist, songwriter & producer, comes Assembled; live performances and interactive installations which explore the artistic and civic role of the ‘Town Crier’, asking us what public unity and assembly means to us, today. Love Ssega’s multi-disciplinary performance pieces have been commissioned by the Philharmonia Orchestra, the National Gallery, the Serpentine Pavilion and MoMA PS1 in New York with Slow Factory.
A panel discussion will include contributions from Baroness Ashton and Stephen Kunken from the cast of Kyoto. Panellists will tease out the theme of reconciliation, negotiation and diplomacy in the context of our current 'golden age of disagreement'. Discussion will ask how deeply fragmented opinions can be reconciled, whether we find agreement more difficult to come by today and what we can learn from the miraculous moment when the world came together in Kyoto.
Gemma Stockwood, Kyoto Dramaturg and Creative Director of Conference said;
‘Kyoto tells the story of a miraculous moment of agreement. From the earliest stages of developing the play, we had a vision for a creative and discursive space to sit alongside it to allow audiences to grapple with what the Kyoto Protocol says about the messiness and hope of agreement in our time now, a time that so often feels rife with fragmentation and polarisation - hence Conference was born!
'We are thrilled to give Kyoto audiences a chance to explore creatively how we find our way to understanding other people's perspectives, and maybe even shifting our own. We are delighted to be working with such a vibrant mix of artists, performers and experts on a thought provoking programme to inspire audiences - and hopefully help us all to take a step towards one another.’
Jacqui O’Hanlon, RSC Director of Creative Learning and Engagement said;
‘Theatre is a brilliant medium for igniting curiosity, debate and reflection. In our Creative Learning and Engagement work, we provide a creative space which can spark meaningful conversations about the issues that matter most to our audiences today.
‘In collaboration with our co-producers at Good Chance, we look forward to audiences joining together to debate and reflect on a range of different perspectives, some of which may challenge their own world views, in an effort to better understand one another and work towards a more hopeful future.’
For additional information and to book, visit rsc.org.uk/kyoto/kyoto-conference
Premiering in the Swan Theatre from 18 June – 13 July 2024 with Press Night on Tuesday 25 June, Kyoto reunites the creative team behind the multi award-winning hit The Jungle; which began life in the refugee camps of Calais in 2015 and went on to become a sell-out hit in the UK and internationally. Written by Good Chance co-founders, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson and directed by Stephen Daldry (Stranger Things The First Shadow, Billy Elliot, The Inheritance) and Justin Martin (Stranger Things The First Shadow, Prima Facie), this breathless and gripping tale recounts the fateful hours of tense negotiation which led up to the historic signing of the UN’s landmark climate conference in December 1997.
A limited number of ‘In Conference’ seats are available for every performance of Kyoto, giving audience members the opportunity to become delegates within the play. Audiences who book to sit here may be asked to participate in some interactions with performers and may at times be asked to temporarily move from their seat.
For further information and to book tickets, visit https://www.rsc.org.uk/kyoto
ENDS
For media enquiries, please contact: Kate Evans (Head of Media Relations) on 07920 244 434. Email: kate.evans@rsc.org.uk
LISTINGS INFORMATION
Kyoto
A co-production with Good Chance
Swan Theatre
Tuesday 18 June - Saturday 13 July
Press Night: Tuesday 25 June at 7pm
Tickets from £15
‘It’s not a negotiation, it’s hand to hand combat.’
11 December 1997
The Kyoto Conference Centre, 5am
The nations of the world are in deadlock. 11 hours have passed since the UN’s landmark climate conference should have ended. Time is running out. And agreement feels a world away…
Their prize: the world’s first legally binding emissions targets. Their obstacle: American oil lobbyist and master strategist, Don Pearlman.
From the writers and directors of the universally-acclaimed The Jungle comes this timely and fast-paced political thriller placing you right at the heart of the historic 1997 Kyoto climate summit.
Global in scale and personal at heart, Kyoto is the breathless, gripping tale of a moment when, finally, the impossible seemed possible.
Somewhere / Nowhere
Monday 27 May – Sunday 13 October
Somewhere / Nowhere is an installation by artist Ebrahim Nazier which explores re-use, re-imagination and radical change in relation to sustainable futures.
Sitting across three areas of the RSC foyers and constructed from a selection of familiar, ‘household’ items and less familiar theatrical objects, the three installations; Past, Present and Future explore different possibilities that might open up to us depending on how fast we do certain things, or take certain actions in relation to how quickly nature evolves to counteract – or adapt to what we are doing.
The Future (Sixes and Sevens)
Tuesday 18 June – Saturday 13 July
Free, no booking required
Cornelia Parker’s The Future (Sixes and Sevens) is a multidisciplinary work which asks a class of primary school children to answer questions about their hopes and fears about what they imagine their future to be like. The film’s title makes reference both to the idiom ‘at sixes and sevens’ (meaning confusion and disarray) and the 1964 TV documentary Seven Up!, in which 7-year-olds were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up.
Kyoto Conference
Friday 5 – Saturday 6 July
“Time is running out. And agreement feels a world away.”
What does it take to agree? On saving the planet, on living together, on just getting stuff done?
A programme of creative and participatory events reflecting the messiness of agreement, negotiation and hope that collided at COP3 in Kyoto - when in a moment of miraculous unanimity the world stood together.
Future for Beginners
Friday 5 July, 11.45am & 5.30pm
Saturday 6 July, 11.45am & 5.30pm
Cost: £12
Can you save the world from catastrophe in 80 minutes?
Come and take part in a fun, interactive demonstration of the process of agreement in this scenario planning game from David Finnigan, who explores the intersection between science and art in his work.
On a small peninsula, five towns are preparing to make a comeback. Unjustly forgotten by the world, the community is about to launch a major cultural festival to revitalise the area.
In the hours before the opening ceremony, a tropical storm strengthens into one of the strongest storms in the decade, heading straight for the town. Now, in the face of a world-changing climate shock, the leaders of these sleepy peninsulas need to put on the show of their lives…
The Future for Beginners is a hands-on simulation for up to 30 players. Working together over 80 minutes, players negotiate challenges and make decisions to create an unforgettable cultural event in the face of catastrophe.
Panel Discussion
Saturday 6 July, 10.15 - 11.15pm
Free
Panellists will tease out the theme of reconciliation, negotiation and diplomacy in the context of our current 'golden age of disagreement'. Discussion will ask how deeply fragmented opinions can be reconciled, whether we find agreement more difficult to come by today and what we can learn from the miraculous moment when the world came together in Kyoto."
Guest panellists include Stephen Kunken from the Kyoto cast and Baroness Ashton LG, GCMG, PC the EU's first High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security (2009-14). Baroness Ashton has negotiated in crisis situations from Kosovo to Kyiv and is an expert in 21st Century diplomacy.
Assembled: Love Ssega
Saturday 6 July, 4– 4.30pm & 6.45-7.15pm
Free, no booking required
A specially commissioned performance by Love Ssega to explore the artistic and civic role of the ‘Town Crier’, asking us what public unity and assembly means to us, today. The performance will spark off The People’s Assembly and give food for thought for discussion.
The People’s Assembly
Saturday 6 July, 4.30pm - 6.30pm
Free, booking required
A space to have artistically inspired, stimulating and perhaps even difficult conversations that help us to understand and learn from our varied perspectives about climate change and our responses to it.
The People’s Assembly will be a facilitated democratic discussion picking up on themes explored in Kyoto, with short dramatic readings from David Finnigan’s Scenes from a Climate Era to inspire and provoke conversation. Scenes from a Climate Era is a play composed of short vignettes exploring the impact of climate change on all our lives, by award winning Australian playwright David Finnigan.
Biogs:
Baroness Cathy Ashton. As the EU's first High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security (2009-14), Baroness Ashton has negotiated in crisis situations from Kosovo to Kyiv and is an expert in 21st Century diplomacy. Her book "And then what?" takes readers behind closed doors in some of the most tense and high stakes political negotiations of our time.
Catherine Margaret Ashton, Baroness Ashton of Upholland, LG, GCMG, PC is a politician in the British Labour party. She is the current Chancellor of The University of Warwick. Her previous roles in office include; High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, First Vice President of the European Commission, Leader of the House of Lords and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department for Education and Skills.
David Finnigan is a writer and theatre-maker from Ngunnawal country, Australia. He writes plays, creates performances and develops games at the intersection of science and art. David produces performances and writing that explores concepts from Game Theory, Complex Systems science, Network Theory and Resilience. David has worked with climate and Earth System scientists from institutions including University College London, the Australian Academy of Science, the Wellcome Trust and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He has been commissioned to create work for the World Bank, the Wellcome Trust, Chatham House and Nesta UK. David is a member of Australian science-theatre ensemble Boho and an associate of Coney (UK). David is a Churchill Fellow (2012), an Australia Council Early Career Fellow (2014-16) and an Asialink Fellow (2015). He has been a resident artist for the Battersea Arts Centre in London and Campos de Gutierrez in Medellin, Colombia
Ebrahim Nazier strives along an unconventional creative path to make spaces that enhance the environments they inhabit. He is a spatial designer, musician, filmmaker and seamster who emigrated to England from South Africa in 2011. Growing up in a creative household, Ebrahim became accustomed to the natural state of spaces, objects and materials. He nurtures this awareness as a designer, treading lightly in the environments in which he creates his work.
As an architectural technologist, Ebrahim spent a decade working in commercial, industrial and residential architecture in Cape Town, London and Birmingham. His expertise in spatial design and construction remains with him across disciplines in his theatre and installation work. From 2015-2021, Ebrahim held posts as Head of Technical Design and Head of Workshops at the Birmingham REP where he designed technical structures for a multitude of productions including One Love: The Bob Marley Musical, Nativity! The Musical and What Shadows. He has also designed sets for REP productions GrimeBoy, Scenes from a Brummie Iliad, Foundry Festival and Romeo and Juliet.
Since departing from his role at the REP, Ebrahim has also worked as a designer with Friction Arts, Cloud Cuckoo Land, Fox Rocha, Lynnebec and Artists On The Edge.
Cornelia Parker is one of Britain's best loved and most acclaimed contemporary artists. Always driven by curiosity, she reconfigures domestic objects to question our relationship with the world. Using transformation, playfulness and storytelling, she engages with important issues of our time, be it violence, ecology or human rights.
Cornelia Parker lives and works in London. Over the last three decades, she has presented numerous major commissions and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally, including a career retrospective at Tate Britain (2022); at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2019); Westminster Hall, Palace of Westminster (2017); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2016), The Whitworth, the University of Manchester (2015), British Library, London (2015), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2010), Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru (2008), Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2007) and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2006).
Parker was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts, London, made an OBE in 2010 and a CBE in 2022. She was elected the Apollo Awards Artist of the Year in 2016, and the following year, awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Manchester. In 2017, she was appointed as the first female Election Artist for the United Kingdom General Election. She was made an Honorary Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 2021. Her works are held in public and private collections around the world including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Fundación “la Caixa”, Barcelona and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Cornelia Parker is represented by Frith Street Gallery and Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, and Wilde Gallery, Basel/Geneva.
Love Ssega is a London-born musician and performing artist of Ugandan heritage. His environmentally-focussed work was shown at United Nations COP26 and featured by The New York Times for Climate Forward. His site-specific performances and multimedia work has exhibited at the National Gallery, Hayward Gallery, Serpentine Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery and MoMA PS1, New York. In 2022 he founded arts-led clean air campaign LIVE + BREATHE. As a pop artist he has performed globally, from Glastonbury to Zandari Festa Seoul and played across BBC Radios 1, 3 and 6Music. Love Ssega was recently awarded a European-wide Fellowship by the Allianz Foundation in Berlin. In 2022 he was awarded the Arts Foundation Music For Change Fellowship and was Philharmonia Orchestra’s Artist In Residence for 2022-23, premiering his piece PANGEA: Act 1 at Royal Festival Hall, London last summer.
Website & Social Media:
https://www.lovessega.com/
https://www.instagram.com/lovessega
https://twitter.com/lovessega
https://www.youtube.com/lovessega
NOTES TO EDITORS
The RSC is supported using public funding by Arts Council England
The work of the RSC is supported by the Culture Recovery Fund
The RSC is generously supported by RSC America
RSC £10 Tickets for 14-25s supported by TikTok
The RSC Acting Companies are generously supported by The Gatsby Charitable Foundation
New Work at the RSC is generously supported by Hawthornden Foundation and The Drue and H.J. Heinz II Charitable Trust
Assembled is presented in cooperation with the Allianz Foundation
Good Chance would like to thank the following for supporting Kyoto
The Dandu Foundation
The Ian McKellen Producer Grant
The Linbury Trust
The Crucible Foundation
Jessica Foung
The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) creates exceptional theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, London and around the world, performing plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, as well as commissioning a wide range of original work from contemporary writers. Our purpose is to ensure that Shakespeare – and theatre as a whole – is for everyone, and we do that by unlocking the power of his plays and live performance, and with our learning and education work throughout the UK and across the world.
Good Chance creates ground-breaking, heart-thumping “theatre that shakes hands with the world” (Sunday Times). Through theatre and art, they bring people together and create surprising stories to spark new conversations and encourage action on complex urgent issues of our time: migration, polarisation and the climate crisis. Central to its work is the development of artists who have been displaced, to be an integral part of the UK’s creative ecosystem.
Arts Council England is the national development agency for creativity and culture. We have set out our strategic vision in Let’s Create that by 2030 we want England to be a country in which the creativity of each of us is valued and given the chance to flourish and where everyone of us has access to a remarkable range of high-quality cultural experiences. We invest public money from Government and The National Lottery to help support the sector and to deliver this vision. www.artscouncil.org.uk. Following the Covid-19 crisis, the Arts Council developed a £160 million Emergency Response Package, with nearly 90% coming from the National Lottery, for organisations and individuals needing support. We are also one of the bodies responsible for administering the Government’s unprecedented Culture Recovery Fund, of which we delivered over £1 billion to the sector in grants and loans. Find out more at www.artscouncil.org.uk/covid19.
TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. Our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. TikTok's global headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore, and its offices include New York, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo,
