This Friday, Glyndebourne Opera goes green with new wind turbine

Norman Lebrecht, ArtsJournal blog Slipped Disc, 1/17/12

On Friday Sir David Attenborough officially launches the Glyndebourne wind turbine. The turbine launch is a landmark development for the UK arts community and confirms Glyndebourne as the UK's first and only arts organisation to generate its own power using a large scale wind turbine. This is a ground breaking development and an important step for ensuring sustainability for Glyndebourne and the arts.  This year will see Glyndebourne's 2012 Festival as the first to run on wind power and the turbine (commissioned in December 2011) will allow Glyndebourne to generate 90% of its annual electricity requirements. The turbine provides Glyndebourne with the cleanest and most efficient natural energy with no fuel or waste related costs. Glyndebourne will work in partnership to deliver community engagement activities that focus on promoting positive environmental actions and educating local and regional groups on the benefits of tackling climate change.

            > VIDEO: Glyndebourne's wind turbine construction

Texas theater goes green, with web-only marketing and digital playbills

John Garcia. TheColumnAwards.org

Co-Artistic Director Chris LaBove of Second Thought Theatre in Dallas said: "Last year STT went green. We switched to purely internet based marketing and eliminated playbills in favor of digital projections. We used the money we saved to pay more to our artists as we strive to be a leader in production quality in the community. This year we are taking things one step further. Audiences will use their smart phones to either download the playbill to their device at home or scan a QR code to interact with the website and download the playbill to their device once they arrive. Other theaters tell you to turn your cell phones off. But not us. We want you to leave them on, in silent mode of course."

In India's 4th largest city, a flash mob dances to spread message of 'going green'

Deccan Chronicle, 1/10/12

Hyderabad has finally been bitten by the flash mob bug. Around 500 people, mostly college kids, came together at People's Plaza on Sunday evening, danced to a few numbers and dispersed after spreading the message of "going green". For the participants and spectators it was fun, spontaneous and novel. For the organisers, the theme was "dance with a cause". Aaryan Rajput says, "We wanted to let people know that dancing is not just about shaking a leg. We organised this flash mob to create awareness about saving trees, saving our planet and going green. We started with 20 professionals and there were 500 plus dancers and over 2,000 spectators. There were people of all age groups. We had been planning this for a long time, but we wanted it to be big, so we waited for the permissions." Theatre artist Ravi Raj says "When I was informed about the flash mob, I was excited because we were doing it for a cause called Go Green." After the performance, the group planted 400 trees at the plaza and encouraged people to plant trees across the city.

Commentary: As more artists embrace green issues, a cultural shift has taken place

Robert Butler, Intelligent Life magazine, Nov/Dec 2011 issue

From a sculpture by Antony Gormley to a dance piece by Siobhan Davies, more and more artists are drawn to the issues that arise from the findings of climate scientists. [However,] going green is not first and foremost about changing to low-energy lightbulbs, driving a Prius, cutting back on flights, insulating your loft or growing vegetables on your roof. All these are worth doing, so long as you remember the words of the British government's chief scientific adviser, David Mackay -- "If everyone does a little, we'll achieve only a little." Going green is more about absorbing the scientific consensus that has emerged over the last 50 years: resources are finite, the planet is fragile, our activities are having a dangerous impact on the atmosphere. To take this on board is to change the way you see the world. Even people who resent the sanctimonious tendencies of the greens can see that a great cultural shift has taken place; one that, in the opinion of Tim Smit, who founded the Eden Project in Cornwall, may turn out to be as far-reaching as the Renaissance or the Reformation. Does that mean that art-lovers and theatre-goers are in for many more gloomy, doom-laden paintings and plays? Perhaps not. The response from artists is moving rapidly away from the clich�s of collapsing icesheets and polar bears perched on lonely icebergs. More and more, playwrights, directors and artists talk about approaching this subject through ideas of resilience, survival, adaptation and improvisation. 

Commentary: Let's keep this planet & change Hollywood

Ezra Winton, Art Threat blog, 1/13/12

I stumbled upon what seemed to be a promising documentary called Greenlit, a film about sustainability and the film industry, made by LA insiders. [But] the ultimate message of Greenlit is doubly depressing. #1: Hollywood will continue to be one of the biggest polluting, most consuming and least sustainable industries on the planet and #2: Greenlit ends with text explaining the doc wasn't a "green film" and lists all the crap the crew consumed (including an alarming amount of air travel). So we can't make a sustainable movie about sustainability! After tossing aside this sad little film, I thought about real change and real commitment and people doing real, tangible, effective, monumental things that will actually help this planet and those of us who want to live on it for a lot longer. With this in mind, I bring you this week's Friday Film Pick, Earthkeepers, a great feature documentary that travels the globe (also not a green film, it has to be said) and introduces a small army of folks doing great things to sustain life and clean things up. After working in the film industry for nearly a decade, I can attest to the rampant attitudes and lack of policy that prevent things from getting better in the land of make-believe. Slow-growing mahogany wood sets are built, used once, and binned. Massive amounts of garbage, including recyclables and organic waste, accumulate every day of production and disappear into landfills. Trucks are left running, actors are picked up and driven around alone in vehicles all day long. Insane amounts of energy are used to make a dark studio a sunny beach or a sunny street a snowy night. The whole thing chugs along for the sole purpose of entertaining people and making money. And there is little alarm raised, with next to no protest.