By: Kristen P Ahern
The UN Sustainable Development Goals costume. Photo by Felicia Young.
When crisis hit this year and threatened Earth Celebrations’ annual Ecological City pageant, they rose to the challenge and created a virtual pageant. The stunning design work and community engagement focus in Ecological City: Art & Climate Solutions Virtual Pageant 2020 inspired me to ask Felicia Young to be May’s #ConsciousHeroOTM !
This year’s pageant began as each year does with selecting the themes. Community leaders and experts present current environmental issues affecting the neighborhood at a community meeting that includes gardeners, residents, youth, and other members of the neighborhoods. Attendees then give feedback that Felicia curates into the overall goals and themes of the pageant. This year's new themes included Zero Waste, Carbon Sequestration, the UN Sustainable Development Goals and how they relate to local climate solution initiatives. Each theme is manifested into a new character for the pageant, using materials in the costume that reflect the theme of the character. Often people wear the same costume year after year and truly embody the character that the costume represents. Many performers that participate annually come to be known by the character identity instead of their name!
The Carbon Sequestration costume, check out Earth Celebrations’ Facebook page for more images of their pageant. Photo by Felicia Young.
The nine month long design and production process culminates in the theatrical pageant with over 500 artists, 50 partner organizations and 5,000 participants. The production elements are designed to be an aesthetically powerful expression and inspiring, visceral experience of the community, its sites, issues, struggles and achievements. As in a mainstream theatre design process, Felicia, as the director, and the artists-in-residence, such as visual art and costume workshop instructor, Michele Brody, develop design sketches that express the issues and concepts. Unlike the more hierarchical structures of many regional or commercial theatres however, Felicia’s entire process is collaborative, each artist considers opportunities to engage participation and leaves elements of the design open for improvisation and community input. Earth Celebrations hosts months of free public workshops where community members are invited to work with the artists creating the spectacular visual art, puppets, costumes, and performances. Artists are not set on a final visual outcome but require the participation of non-artists and Earth Celebrations embraces each costume, prop, or production element as a living representation of the spirit of the community that built it.
Environmentally friendly materials are integral to the development of the design and Earth Celebrations welcomes opportunities to learn about alternative materials. The Zero Waste costume was made entirely of materials that were biodegradable and compostable, including a kombucha scoby “leather” vest, grown in workshops from kombucha tea and a mycelium headdress grown from fungi (links are not the work of Earth Celebrations but included to provide more information about the process). The Carbon Sequestration costume needed to embody the materials that are key to sequestering carbon. Roots, mangroves, plants, soil and oceans were integrated into the look of the costume to communicate the importance of different sequestration processes working in concert. The crowning achievement of this costume (pun intended) was a molded kombu seaweed headdress, given seaweed’s important role in carbon sequestration.
These costumes are built in a series of free community workshops for three months, which began on February 29th this year, ending just a few weeks later after the March 11th workshop, when a lockdown of New York City shut down all in person group activities. Felicia and her team immediately transitioned their plans to digital workshops with artists live streaming from their homes onto Earth Celebrations’ Facebook Page and community volunteers taking project elements home. Some costumes had several artists and volunteers working on the various parts, continuing to engage a community even at a distance.
Cultures with deeply rooted public performance traditions strongly influence Felicia’s artistic practice in Earth Celebrations, such as her Indian heritage on her mother’s side including religious and cultural pageants local to the Vaigai River region in India. Another influence is the Nigerean Igbo masquerade tradition, particularly those that Felicia cites as a form of communal art in response to health or social calamities (read more about her influences and process in this interview in Cultural Organizing). Felicia is always "doing this work to respond to crisis" and never for a moment considered fully cancelling the pageant this year, it was always about finding a way to bring the community together in crisis regardless of the means.
To continue to engage the community in a time of crucial distancing, Ecological City transformed into a virtual pageant that included over 100 artist and performance videos created for specific sites and associated climate solutions. Felicia still wanted a way to engage the community the way the procession (typically five hours with a cast of around 500) normally would. Ecological City hosted a Parade in Place with about 50 participants as well as "Call of the Wild" which encouraged animal noises and drumming across rooftops, balconies, and fire escapes of New York City. Innovative community involvement and development is the cornerstone of Felicia’s work, whether or not meeting in person is possible.
Parade in Place on Zoom. Photo by Rachel Elkind.
The pageant streamed on Facebook while Felicia walked, masked, the original route through empty streets and past the locked gardens (gardeners are only allowed in right now for essential maintenance). Occasionally she was greeted by a gardener, everyone taking appropriate social distancing precautions, creating powerful visuals. The East River Park waterfront was the final stop, facing an uncertain future, death and rebirth of the park in the next five years as a new flood protection plan will begin construction soon. Felicia invited the East River Park Spirit character to appear at the park, her cape and dress embedded with the East Side Coastal Resiliency Design plan using photo transfer onto cotton. Felicia has previously invited this character to be a part of what she calls Creative Testimony, bringing the Park Spirit to city hall to advocate for the Community Vision Plan instead of the city's plan for the park.
Felicia's work is the perfect fusion of art and activism, her artistic practice is tied implicitly to her advocacy. After working at the Alternative Museum in 1987, she saw that only those within the arts community were being engaged to view the shows. So, she left the museum world to have a broader impact using arts as a method of engaging community and mobilizing action. Earth Celebrations first founded in 1991 to save endangered community gardens slated for destruction. By engaging the community in a fun project with ties to science, arts, and culture, they transcend the divisions between low income communities, activist organizations, and powerful people.
Following Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the NYC gardens that Earth Celebrations helped save are now seen clearly for their role in climate resiliency, absorbing flood water and sequestering carbon. NYC Community Garden Coalition evolved out of the successful Earth Celebrations’ creative partnership building and citywide garden preservation coalition effort in the 1990’s. Recently they received a federal grant towards more green infrastructure including bioswales, solar micro-grids, porous pavement, water harvesting ponds, pollinator gardens, and more. Earth Celebrations began as a community pageant but transformed into a massive, broad-based, coalition effort to benefit the community. Felicia Young’s participatory art demonstrates how the arts can bring people and partner groups together to have powerful, tangible impact on their communities, which makes her our #ConsciousHeroOTM.
Parade in Place on Zoom. Photo by Rachel Elkind.
Kristen P Ahern
Kristen is the founder of Conscious Costume and a designer, activist, organizer, and educator in the Chicago area.
