Source: The Conversation – Canada
As an artist who explores associations and disassociations of culture and nature, I am playing with sunlight in performance in the hot Montréal summer. This is an extension of a body of collaborative research creation work.
My project this summer, Halo Event, thinks of sunlight as a material and as something that’s alive. This isn’t a new framework: the belief that natural phenonmena are alive, or animism, is as old as human culture, and has more recently been articulated in schools of contemporary philosophy.
Creative efforts to shape sunlight are as old as human culture, evidenced in the variety of ancient structures built around solstices by Mayan, Druid, Indigenous and prehistoric populations.
Our relationship to the sun, to ecological entities, matters. It matters because those relationships affect how we shape ecologies, how we consider our impact and how we respond to the increasingly real pressure of climate change. These are inherently cultural questions, which artists are uniquely equipped to address.
Canada and climate change
This summer has been particularly hot because of global warming. Canada is warming at about twice as fast as the global rate: a 2 C increase globally means a 3 to 4 C increase for Canada.
The biggest contributors to global warming are major corporations and companies, many tied to fossil fuel industries, which operate internationally.
Resistance to global warming takes particular forms in North America. Aside from provincial initiatives, like Québec’s 2021 ban on future fossil fuel projects, Indigenous resistance to fossil fuel infrastructure expansion has had a proven, consistent and dramatic effect.
In Halo Event, I worked with sound artist Kathy Kennedy and performance artist Laurence Beaudoin Morin on a short piece in response to the sunlight passing through giant foyer windows at QUAI 5160, my local Maison du Culture, on the St. Lawrence River. The light is reflected and redirected by static and motorized mirrors in my own design, assisted by Kris Hodder.
‘Angles of Consequence’
Like many site-specific visual and conceptual artists, I don’t see location as a blank canvas or an empty stage, but an entity in dialogue with the performance, unfolding within it. Last summer, I invited six artists to create in response to sunlight and site, as part of a larger project called Angles of Consequence.
Varied shiny objects in Angles of Consequence behave as scenographic pieces and performance props: they are meant to expand the space of the performance, articulating its themes and meanings.
In one project, in response to the legacy of Indigenous resistance, I invited artist Sabina Gamez to create a performance along the path of the cancelled Energy East Pipeline that would have run from Montréal to New Brunswick.
Gamez, who is Colombian and works with themes of Indigineity and celestial forces, worked with designer Carolie Delisle and project research assistants to create a large apparatus to channel sunlight through a circular path. She wore this, with a ring hung in front and behind her, from a frame on her shoulders. Gamez orbited a remote location along the pipeline path, an area lush with birds and insects, reflecting sunlight through a lens at circles of fabric at standing mirrors.
In post-show interviews after each performance, audience members remarked at the power of the sound, as well as the wonder and wildness of the remote site. They also expressed curiosity about the piece’s installation and costume design. One visitor said:
“The sun made me feel happy, and the performance made me feel light and flickering.”
Refinery as performance site
In considering a negative form of climate impact, I invited dancer Lucy Fandel and performer-designer Isabella Leone to create a performance in response to a Suncor refinery in Montréal-Est.
They spent weeks biking out to the remote location, creating a 40-minute dance piece performed in coveralls dyed to match the refinery infrastructure, wielding security mirrors and pocket reflectors.
Again, the site played a major role: audience members remarked on how the site invited a contemplation of scale, and how difficult it was to access. “It kind of made you have that new perspective on how strange we’re acting … doing all these contortions to not look at what we’re doing to our planet,” said one audience member.
Several visitors came away from the performance with an appreciation for petroleum as a precious, intense resource.
Art in response to fossil fuel project ban
In a creative interpretation of the role that site plays, I asked a group of three artists, Bastik, Oriana Confente and Mila Figuet, to choose a location and develop a performance there in response to the 2022 ban on fossil fuel projects in Québec.
They chose a wild, unmanaged area next to a shipping yard, the Boise Steinberg park. Their project invited audience members to wander through a landscape of mirrors and poetic audio musings on the processing climate grief, through the lens of the popular notion of “seven stages of grief” and climate research.
A visitor remarked:
“It kind of gave us the opportunity to reflect on things we are going through. And just having that space to share it as a community but also share it ourselves …Definitely touching, and made me grieve in a deeper way … Just seeing how we are connected forever, in a way, without realizing.”
Once having passed through the stages, the visitors were led by the artists through space as they reflected the landscape and people through mirrors.
At the end of a path, the artists prompted everyone to lay down on giant cloths treated with cyanotype, and hung the resulting solar prints on a clothesline to dry. Audience members watched as their own silhouettes, captured by the sun’s rays, developed in front of them, and became part of the landscape.
Manual for working with reflected sunlight
The initial season of performances has resulted in a manual for working with reflected sunlight, including safety and care guidelines, overviews of material qualities and forms, instructions on how to work with reflective material and strategies for collective site-specific performance.
Performances from the Angles season have gone on to be re-performed in other Montréal events, such as the Champs des Possibles FRAIStival.
I’ve conducted sunlight reflection workshops based on the project at Scenofest at World Stage Design in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, and screened videos of the performances online as part of Fall of Freedoms’ May Day Programming.
The playing continues, in the hopes of keeping us connected to ecological forces.
Meghan Moe Beitiks received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada. They work as an Assistant Professor at Concordia University, which has also funded this research.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/13/sunlight-is-alive-and-through-play-with-it-artists-reflect-on-climate-change/