ZShaw (left) as the banshee during a Climate Gathering performance in New York City, photo by Guy DeLancey
[ID: Three crouched performers bathed in red light holding on to one another with a single white lamp and two projection screens behind them.]
The following is a series of short meditations and improvisation scores for living in turbulent times. Words and ideas are drawn from the resources of Livable Futures, a social practice project I have been co-creating over the past 10 years, these words are offered as embodied acts of resistance, connection, and imagining (I often write in community and am integrating here some language co-created with Michael J. Morris, Bhumi Patel, and LROD). Livable Futures fosters creative responses to conditions of crisis and uncertainty on a planet in need. Our work together has generated and supported 100s of artistic and scholarly projects, field courses, community workshops, performances and exhibitions, and a public idea archive. Our Substack community newsletter and podcast offer actionable ideas, focusing on artistic tactics in response to the intersectional issues of ecological, social, and algorithmic justice and foregrounding Black, indigenous, and queer feminist projects and practices. Our transmedia performance rituals offer immersive environments for healing, community connection, and facing into the magnitude of the issues with creative intention and support. Centering livability encompasses social justice and ecological ethics. It invites critically rethinking about who survives and who gets to thrive in our communities, including all biological and artificial life now and in the future. De-centering the human reframes progress in favor of a posthumanism that is neither anti-human nor solely about sustaining human life as we currently know it. I bring to these meditations my experience as an interdisciplinary artist, writer, dance improviser, teacher, and creative director for performance and technology projects grounded in practices of liberation and collaboration.
Arriving
As the tectonic forces of political extremism collide with the extreme events of climate change, we are left without any remaining illusion of stability. We are all literally dancing on unstable ground. Of course this is not the first time this has happened, and many in the world have already been living in abject societies and conditions far worse than what is now happening in the U.S. but that does not mean it doesn’t matter. It means we move in solidarity. We fight, we resist, and we learn how to make lives amidst the crumbling foundations. We take solace in the fact that we do not know the future. And we seek to make futures together through practical skills and poetic interventions, through sharing and gathering, and seeking peace in any of the ways we know how. We ask with each other; how do we locate resilience even as we fight the forces requiring it of us? What is a future? And how might we continue to imagine arriving at the unarrivable horizons of carbon drawdown, radical tenderness,[1] and humane technologies? What do we already know as artists? Might we enter the unknown of this moment with a powerful willingness to do what needs to be done? I sometimes have the privilege of working as a birth justice doula helping birthing parents prepare for the unknown of labor and we always start with one question: What do you do when you don’t know what to do? No answers. No list of prescriptions but instead, how can I support you in accessing your own deep wells of capacity and capability?
So many of our experiences exceed our ability to comprehend them, articulate them, or even fully grieve them. What if you simply put these things together: memory, strengths, your sensory awareness of what’s at stake, and your creative practices? In the days that are here and, in the days, to come, all your talents and strengths and capacities are needed.
Score: Radical Juxtaposition
What do you do when you don’t know what to do? How have you already navigated the unknown in your life?
What are you particularly good at doing?
Now take the leap of assuming that whatever you are good at—dancing, managing projects, decluttering, nurturing—whatever your greatest skills, they are exactly what is needed right now. Take the leap of putting your superpowers together with the issues at hand and listen for what happens next.
What if you move from there? Make from there.
Turning Toward
In 2015, in response to the uptick in violence and vitriol of the first Trump campaign combined with cascading extreme climate events, I felt called into facing the things that were most frightening for me instead of turning away or tuning out. I made the perhaps absurd leap of assuming that dance could do something about climate change, about misogyny, anti-blackness, about overlapping crises. Not dancing about those things (that would be instrumentalizing dance which is also good but not my thing) but using the intrinsic practices of dance improvisation and intermedia directly to address the issues at hand. Over the years of facing into the climate crisis, we have been developing a kind of score for moving out of paralysis and into action, arriving again and again into the current moment, turning toward what is, sensing what wants to be known, re-centering around voices that have long been offering alternatives, and feeling our way into motion.
Score: Softening
Turning toward the fear, the insurmountable problems, the crises
The first action is non-action, breath, sense, pausing, pacing
Softening into the magnitudes, sensing
What if you took this moment right now to accept the immensity of these feelings?
What wants to be said, moved, sounded, felt, heard?
Sense what wants to be moved and move from there.
Feeling into action, power, poetics, prose, intention, offering, voice, motion
What if you already know everything you need to know in your body now?
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 intention. 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 presence and fleeting interventions of performers including the tuning twins whose unison movements provide ground, sound benders who are spatializing and processing all the sound, and the Climate Banshee. Participants 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 interactive and participatory performance, we locate contemporary 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 turning toward the issues at hand: https:/climategatheringredux.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 central 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 instability and uncertainty and confusion of the current moment. Turn toward it and as you tense against the magnitude of the issues, breathe, move, place it in the space and move around it, observing it, understanding it as a thought, 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 sensations 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 performance ritual. At the heart of the ritual is the Climate Banshee. She’s a prophetic figure in a trance state not unlike a priestess or shaman–but coming instead from my own lineages in dance and sonic improvisation, 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 Oliveros in this work as well although I claim no connection 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 participants 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 symposium 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.
The Banshee demands the impossible of herself, attempting to stay present with both her immediate sensation and the planetary realities of climate change, violence, extinction, suffering of plant and animal and friend. It’s a constant 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, unstable, 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
This is a climate gathering. The Climate Banshee enters the space where you have been gathering. 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 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 laptops 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 echoing back the sensation of melting, ringing bells, and objects of extraction. Creaking sounds, quiet and whispered memories 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.
The Banshee’s words are mostly illegible but at times crystalize into messages, stories, recollections:
I went to my teachers and asked them:
What do you do when you don’t know what to do?
Crawl into the room
What do you do when you don’t know what to do?
Invite your friends into the process, bring materials, make a mess.
Create arbitrary structure to support you.
I have three things to say.
One, two. three. I have one thing to say. One, one, one, one. three.
You already know everything you need to know
in your body now.
This is a lecture on crisis. This is a climate gathering. This is a crisis.
Breathe. Bring attention to sensation.
Ohhhhhhhhhh. No. Stay present. Don’t fake it. Fire, fire, fiiiiiiiiiire. Rising waters.
500 years of colonialism burning in the skies. Floating in fetid flood waters. Soaking into our skin. Suffocating atmospheres. A history of anti-environment and anti- and anti- and anti-Blackness.
What’s your earliest memory of climate change?
Sense what remembering feels like.
What’s your earliest memory of climate change?
The Banshee already knows your memories and as she moves, responding to sensation and awareness of crisis, she recites your collective memories: I was in college in my environmentalism class… It doesn’t snow anymore, not regularly like it used to, and then sometimes it snows too much… A Sunday drive with my family as a girl, new highways being constructed through farmlands and forests. Even then, as a child, I was alarmed… Watching our local brook erode and disappear… The Earth is getting warmer and the ice caps are melting… Experiencing summer on the West Coast become “fire season”… My first memories of climate change are the constant deforestation that happened in my city from when I was a kid until I was 18 and the resulting change in temperatures that occurred over the years… Seeing the hole in the ozone during science class in 8th grade… Expanding desert in China… Tornadoes in the wrong month… I saw ducklings ensnared with plastic can rings. A storm about 10 years ago that blew out the power in my neighborhood…Listening to Rabbi Arthur Waskow speak…Parents’ accounts of colder and drier winters in the area where we lived before the hydropower station and a giant artificial water reservoir were built… An Inconvenient Truth… Later seasons, migratory birds arriving later…The Brisbane floods…Hurricane Sandy…
The Banshee retreats into a tent in the space, lit from within and amplified muttering…rising fear, rising temperatures, rising waters, rapid losses, rapid extinctions, rapid events, uncertainty unmasked…
Ritual attendants in the space give you tasks scrawled on bits of recycled paper and invite you into creating a trace of your experience in the space. The Banshee continues muttering from within the tent, but something has shifted. Now she knows your names and she knows your deepest secret superpowers, and she weaves them into the room in a sing song voice…Empathy… diving in and starting something from scratch… bringing different ideas together… I can read bodies… visioning a reality unknowingly needed… unexpected encounters – collaborative power with plants… reading a room… I am a connector…I’m a chameleon, I adapt well in new environments… making something out of nothing… patient strategic optimism… my superpower is my imagination… cool, calm, collected, and organized… introducing people who share common goals… forging brilliant connections… able to create happenings… complex problem solving, communicated simply… thoughtful diplomat leads with gut… holding space, words, and listening… facilitating safer spaces… spontaneous translation of feelings to words… deep listening…
You already know everything you need to know to get started.
Score: Resilience Motions
Take time today to simply notice where you observe cycles, repeated processes, and endings that are also beginnings in the world around you. How might you participate in these oscillations in a way that is both again and for the first time?
There is no single, final solution to climate change nor to fascist uprisings and unstable lifeworlds. Rather, there are countless processes that we repeat, reiterate, begin again, to which we return. Each repetition is also an opportunity to do it differently.
Take a walk and gather images or resilience around you. Create your own movement loops: A hula hoop goes round and round, a child bouncing on a trampoline, bells swinging in the wind, bubbling water and rising fireflies, the tapping of a woodpecker…
Resilience creates its own momentum, it is repetitive and oscillating motion, rocking, shaking, bouncing, the oscillation of sound as a microphone feeds back through the speakers, video loops, fractals unfolding, seasons.
Livable Futures reverberates with questions at the heart of present conditions, questions about futures, livability, instability, resilience, and connection. What are we called to do now? And as many have asked before me, how might we become better ancestors? We welcome you into our practices as podcast listeners, newsletter readers and online community members, as contributing artists, and friends. We hope the scores we have shared are helpful and can be taken up, adapted or serve as catalysts for creating your own. And the question we like to ask at the end of our performance rituals: What resources are you taking away from this experience today? How can you share them?
Livable Futures: https://livablefuturesNow.org
Interactive Online Version of Climate Banshee / Climate Gathering: https://climategatheringredux.webflow.io/
Wexner Center for the Arts Interview about Climate Banshee and Livable Futures: https://wexarts.org/read-watch-listen/qa-norah-zuniga-shaw
[1] Dani D’Emilia
This article appears in the Spring 2025 issue of In Dance.
