Arts on tour – Green Touring Online Series
Imogen from APDGreen Conversations asked Arts on Tour Executive Director Antonia Seymour to answer some questions about their recent webinar series.
Arts on Tour recently hosted the 5-part Green Touring Online Series, an initiative designed to provide a platform and a community around fostering environmentally sustainable practices in the performing arts. The Series featured 10 speakers, all turning towards the climate crisis from a different place in the performing arts ecosystem. The sessions were Auslan interpreted and captioned, and are available to watch HERE. There were 400 registrations across the 5 sessions.
What inspired the Series?
Since launching The Green Touring Toolkit in 2022 I’m constantly thinking about how AOT can best contribute to change in this space, both in relation to touring and the performing arts more broadly. I was very lucky to be part of Creative Australia’s Creative Climate Leadership Program last year, run by Julie’s Bicycle. Having a week to connect with like-minded people and concoct plans has definitely helped me get clearer on this, and the idea for this Series (and 6 of the 10 speakers), were a direct result of CCL.
How did you curate the sessions?
I wanted to start with First Nations wisdom and principles and a big picture perspective in Session 1 (Lily Shearer, Pippa Bailey), then follow this with a practical session that demystified the whole process of getting started with a sustainability plan and using the free carbon calculator tool Circulate in Session 2 (Aimee Smith, Kim Jones). I also wanted the sequence of the sessions to follow the pre tour, on tour and post tour phases that The Green Touring Toolkit covers, so Sessions 3 & 4 (Bryony Anderson, Tanja Beer, Dana Spence, Grace Nye Butler, Chris Mercer) focussed on the process of making a work and included The Theatre Green Book Australia Session 5 (Simon Turner, Beatrice Jeavons) explored on tour and post tour topics, including emissions reduction in action and the pros and cons of offsetting. Generally speaking, it was important to me that the sessions were practical and grounded in real-life examples, so they felt inspiring and achievable, and that there was time for discussion and questions.
What did we hear about in the Series from a sustainable design perspective?
There were so many great ideas! There were discussions about the circular economy, and how the lifecycle of a set item or prop should be considered right from the beginning when a set designer is brought on board. Thankfully, many designers are now thinking about what materials and props are already available, and using that to inform the design, rather than vice versa.
Dana Spence from Belvoir St Theatre gave some great examples including one from their production of Holding the Man earlier this year. The set and some of the seating bank included several 1970s-style sofas, which the company sourced second hand. Rather than storing all these at the end of the production, the company decided ahead of time that they would store a few, give some away to company members, and donate the rest to charitable organisations. This meant that the sofas were returned to the circular economy as quickly as possible to maximise their value in the community.
Belvoir’s production of David Finnigan’s Scenes from the Climate Era was another example; a minimalist set, consisting of just a table and five chairs, all of which were sourced second hand. The production even included a ‘sand’ drop, which the production team was able to create out of existing materials and infrastructure in the Belvoir workshop (and the sand was actually breadcrumbs!).
Dana also talked about how production managers at Belvoir work with designers to identify and offer alternative materials or design solutions that have a lower environmental impact. This underlines the need for us all to develop our eco literacy around the relative environmental cost of different choices. As we get better at this, making low emission decisions will get easier and quicker and will become the norm. Less carbon usually means less cost, so often independent designers and makers are already making low emissions decisions, because they’re cost effective (think repurposing, reusing, borrowing, buying second hand).
Bryony Anderson from Terrapin Puppet Theatre is also finding innovative solutions, like replacing aluminium with bamboo that she has started growing and harvesting herself, and finding a locally sourced alternative to balsa wood. She also usefully described different frameworks for an eco approach to making: working with ‘pure’ materials (purity), thinking about the provenance, impact and end of life of materials you use and the objects you create (frugality), or changing as little as possible and returning it to where it came from (lightness of touch). She also shared some great phrases, like ‘material empathy’, in talking about her own journey towards more sustainable making. Bryony has also developed a traffic light system for tracking the environmental ‘cost’ of materials, to avoid getting bogged down in carbon accounting. NIDA has a similar system that Imogen Ross shared.
Chris Mercer and Grace Nye-Butler talked about how the Theatre Green Book provides a standardised, international framework and language for sustainability goals. They discussed how this is particularly useful when two producing orgs are collaborating on making a new work. Both parties can contractually agree to adhering to the ‘Intermediate Standard’, for example, set out in the Green Book, and it’s clear what each party is agreeing to in terms of the environmental boundaries for that production.
And following on from that, what about design as it relates to touring more sustainably?
Tanja Beer gave examples of ‘concept touring’ she has worked on – where the idea travels rather than the freight/people. Her project The Living Stage, which combines stage design, permaculture and community engagement to create a recyclable, biodegradable and edible performance space, saw her tour with the project solo, and work with local artists and community members over a length of time to create a new ‘living stage’. Similarly her design for Polyglot/Oily Cart’s When the World Turns was interpreted by a local designer for its UK presentations. This type of touring has so many advantages. Environmentally, emissions are radically reduced because less people and less stuff are travelling, and beyond this the legacy impact of the project for local artists and participants is so much higher than a traditional fly in/fly out tour because of the creative engagement and sense of ownership the localised project engenders. AOT is now thinking of this type of touring as a ‘high impact, low emission’ model.
An example of another model we’ve dubbed ‘no flight no freight’ touring is Terrapin Puppet Theatre’s The Paper Escaper, designed by Bryony and touring with AOT in 2025. The puppets and set are cleverly contained in a box set which packs down to fit in the back of a van. For this tour, given Terrapin had already eliminated the need for a separate freight truck, we set ourselves the challenge of eliminating flights as well.
More broadly, there is still a lot of work to be done to encourage Directors and producing organisations to incorporate the design needs of potential future touring opportunities into the initial design brief. Hopefully it won’t be too long before the environmental and financial wastefulness of not doing this becomes unacceptable, and a more sustainable industry standard is established.
What new/different touring models inspire you both here and overseas, and how is the touring industry changing the ways in which it tours?
AOT commissioned Pippa Bailey to write a report that features projects showcasing alternative touring models, Creative Adventures in Sustainable Touring. The title speaks to the fact that exploring new models is a creative challenge that can be expansive rather than restrictive. For me, projects that combine an environmental theme with sustainable practices are inspiring vehicles for change, such as Miranda Rose Hall’s A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction – a one woman show powered by bicycles and a community choir (UK). Closer to home, as discussed above, Belvoir’s production of David Finnigan’s Scenes from the Climate Era was eco-led, and the decisions made in the design stage, such as the minimalist set, mean this is another low emissions tour AOT will deliver in 2025.
There is definitely an increased awareness of the environmental impact of touring and a growing sense of responsibility to look for ways to reduce emissions. For Australian artists and companies the need to find new, less emission-intensive ways to tour internationally is a big challenge – we still view this as prestigious, profile-building activity, but is it justified, in its traditional form? Companies like Erth and Polyglot that utilise local artists and crew, and recreate sets locally, minimise emissions and increase the legacy impact of these projects.
What do you hope participants gained from participating?
I hope those that participated, particularly people who came to multiple sessions, feel more connected. Everything is more possible when we’re not doing it alone! I hope the real-life examples and the practical nature of the presentations was inspiring and motivating, and potentially useful when examples are needed to advocate for change inside an organisation. And hopefully if participants weren’t aware of the tools that were featured they are now. I am very grateful to the speakers who gave their time and expertise, and to all the participants who joined – there are many people doing great things in our industry, and many more who want to!
If you’re interested in being part of the conversation get in touch! You can email the AOT team on admin@artsontour.com.au and catch up on any of the sessions HERE.
Photo: The Paper Escaper, image by Darcie Richards, courtesy of Terrapin
Photo: Belvoir St Theatre, Scenes from a Climate Era (2023). Photograph by Brett Boardman
Image: ‘Resource Helix’, courtesy of Bryony Anderson/Axlebone
Antonia Seymour is an arts leader living and working on Gadigal land. She has a rich knowledge of the performing arts sector and the national touring landscape and is passionate about the transformative impact of arts experiences. She has held senior management roles at theatres and producing companies large and small and is currently the Executive Director of Arts on Tour, where she is committed to adopting low emission touring models and developing environmental sustainability initiatives such as this webinar and the award-winning Green Touring Toolkit, to support a sector-wide transition to low emission practices.