GREEN

11th November, 2024

With only 5 weeks until the trip, we needed to make a show! We had been given a stimulus, Green, as a starting point for our performance. This was given to us by the students of Lorelei Caraman, who study a combination of English language and American literature at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iasi.

So where to start? What do you think of when you hear the word ‘green’?

This is what we came up with:

• Environment/climate, nature, gardens
• Electric vehicles
• Freshness, newness, growth, supernatural
• Health, pharmacies, sickness, medical
• Naivety, disgust, jealousy
• Politics – green party
• Brat summer
• Positive

Each person took one subject and went away to research the topic, with the idea of bringing back something we could then work on as an ensemble. It is no secret that I am incredibly passionate about the planet and climate change, and so I decided it would be a good use of my energy to focus my work in that direction.

Here are 3 facts that stood out to me from my research:

• The last decade has been the hottest in the last 125,000 years (Mulhern, 2021)
• Warmer autumn temperatures are causing plants and leaves to remain green long into the winter months resulting in damaged ecosystems and poorer growth (Price, 2024). Ultimately our ‘green life’ is dying because it is too green.
• Due to the bleaching of marine ecosystems caused by pollution, our ‘blue planet’ (the ocean) is actually turning green (Greenly Solutions, 2024)

Now how do you approach such a gloomy subject like global warming? It can be difficult to feel hopeful faced with such facts, especially coming from a younger generation that will ultimately witness the earth change even more vastly over the coming years. Knowing that our target audience was a young, passionate demographic we decided very early on that the performance must be hopeful, it must fill our audiences with hope. So that is what we did!

A gift

The easiest way to give someone hope; give them a solution. Following in the footsteps of companies such as Wizz Air, which is the company we will be flying with to Romania, they plant trees as a way of combatting their carbon footprint. We decided we would give our audiences seeds as a gift that they could plant, something that would give them hope and flower during the spring. I did some research and turns out most British wild and meadow flowers also grow in the Romanian countryside, this is because their growing climate (excluding the Carpathian mountain range) is similar to ours here in Britain. What better way to give someone hope than to give them the gift of life, give them the responsibility of bringing life onto this planet and brightening up our world. Now flowers may be small, and they won’t change the world; but it’s a start.

I have an idea! If we used seed paper we could make gifts for our audience members that they could then plant, the paper would decompose and the seeds then grow, but with the joy of having received a gift.

It became valuable research as I quickly began to realize that recycled seed paper (especially when made at home) was incredibly thick and therefore would be very difficult to fold or stick together in order to make something as a gift. So back to the drawing board!

I was certain that I wanted to make something by hand so I decided to use my skills in origami instead and experiment with some things:

My second idea; lotus flowers. A) Because they will link to the wildflower seeds we will give as gifts, B) it is the most efficient shape to hold a tealight or seeds and C) because our hosts name was Lotus and it would be the perfect way to show a token of our gratitude.

These ideas were put to a vote in class and it was decided that we would be making lotus’. Now this was decided, time to finish the rest of the show!