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      in Movies

      Diane Weyermann, Executive Who Championed ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ Dies at 66

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      A former public interest lawyer, she oversaw this and many other documentaries that addressed urgent social issues.Diane Weyermann, who oversaw the making of potent documentaries like “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Citizenfour” and “Food Inc.,” and in so doing helped change the documentary world from an earnest and underfunded backwater of the movie industry into a vibrant must-see category, died on Oct. 14 at a hospice facility in Manhattan. She was 66.Her sister Andrea Weyermann said the cause was lung cancer.“Diane was one of the most remarkable human beings I have ever known,” Al Gore, the former vice president and presidential candidate whose seemingly quixotic mission to educate the world about climate change through a decades-long traveling slide show became an unlikely hit film with an odd title, “An Inconvenient Truth,” said in an interview. “She was enormously skilled at her craft and filled with empathy,” he added. “It is not an exaggeration to say she really did change the world.”So did his movie. “An Inconvenient Truth” earned an Oscar in 2007, and Mr. Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize that same year, sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The film, which became one of the highest-earning documentaries ever made, was the second documentary made by the activist film company Participant, where Ms. Weyermann was a longtime executive, and hardly anyone in Hollywood thought it was a good idea. It was a movie about a slide show, after all.When the filmmakers screened it for a major studio in hopes of getting distribution, some of the executives fell asleep. “There was audible snoring,” recalled Davis Guggenheim, the director, “and when it was over one of them said, ‘No one is going to pay a babysitter so they can go to a theater and see this movie, but we’ll help you make 10,000 CDs for free that you can give to science teachers.’”Dejected, Mr. Guggenheim, Mr. Gore, Ms. Weyermann and others repaired to a steakhouse in Burbank, Calif., to brood, but Ms. Weyermann refused to be cowed.“Just wait till Sundance,” she said.“An Inconvenient Truth” received four standing ovations at the Sundance Film Festival, and Paramount bought the distribution rights.No one thought that a movie about a former vice president and his slide show about the dangers of climate change would make for great cinema. But “An Inconvenient Truth,” starring Al Gore, was a hit, and Ms. Weyermann was one of its early boosters.Eric Lee/Paramount ClassicsParticipant had been started in 2004 by Jeff Skoll, a social entrepreneur and the first president of eBay, with its own mission: to make movies about urgent social issues. A former public interest lawyer, Ms. Weyermann was running the documentary program at the Sundance Institute when Mr. Skoll hired her in 2005, though he was worried that Robert Redford, a friend and the founder of the institute, would be irked. (He wasn’t, and blessed the move).“From the start, Diane brought knowledge, relationships, context and industry insights into our team,” Mr. Skoll said in an email. “Participant was a small, burgeoning company at the time, direct film industry expertise was limited, and we had very little documentary experience.”Participant would go on to make over 100 films, including the features “Spotlight,” “Contagion” and “Roma” and the documentaries “My Name Is Pauli Murray” and “The Great Invisible.”“Diane built an incredible slate of films that have made a difference in everything from nuclear weapons to education to the environment and so much more,” Mr. Skoll added. “She was the heart and soul of Participant.”It was Ms. Weyermann’s job to find, fund, form and promote documentaries from all over the world, and she traveled constantly doing so.In 2013, Laura Poitras, the director of “Citizenfour” — the Oscar-winning tale of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who exposed the government’s widespread surveillance programs — was holed up in Berlin when Ms. Weyermann came to see her.“Diane knew I couldn’t travel to the U.S.,” Ms. Poitras said, because she was worried that she might be detained or arrested; during the course of her reporting, Mr. Snowden had become a fugitive and a cause célèbre. “She wanted to make sure I was OK, and I wanted her to see the cuts. I had hundreds of hours of film, and I told her right off, ‘I’m not going to be able provide any documentation’” — film studios typically require detailed written proposals — “and she immediately said, ‘We’re going to do this and I’ve got your back.’”“She loved being in the editing room,” Ms. Poitras added. “She had an amazing ability to see a film when it was really raw and be in tune with it and what the filmmaker needed. You wanted her notes; she always made the work better.”“A director’s whisperer” is how Mr. Guggenheim described her.The former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, left, and the journalist Glenn Greenwald in Laura Poitras’s documentary “Citizenfour” (2014). Ms. Weyermann, Ms. Poitras said, “had an amazing ability to see a film when it was really raw and be in tune with it and what the filmmaker needed.”Laura Poitras/Praxis FilmsIt wasn’t just the big box-office movies she supported, said Ally Derks, the founder of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. “It was the small, fragile films she nurtured too. She was in India with Rahul Jain, whose movie about pollution in New Delhi just screened at Cannes. She was in Siberia with Victor Kossakovsky” — the Russian filmmaker whose 2018 film, “Aquarela,” has barely any dialogue or human beings and takes an immersive look at water, from a frozen Siberian lake to a waterfall in Venezuela to glaciers crumbling in Greenland.In her New York Times review, Jeannette Catsoulis called “Aquarela” a “stunning, occasionally numbing, sensory symphony,” and took note of the film’s ending: a rainbow over the world’s tallest waterfall. “It feels,” she wrote, “a little bit like hope.”Diane Hope Weyermann was born on Sept. 22, 1955, in St. Louis. Her father, Andrew, was a Lutheran minister; her mother, Wilma (Tietjen) Weyermann, was a homemaker and later worked for a glassware company.Diane studied public affairs at the George Washington University in Washington, graduating in 1977, and four years later earned a law degree from the Saint Louis University School of Law. She worked as a legal aid lawyer before attending film school at Columbia College Chicago, graduating in 1992 with an M.F.A. in film and video.That same year, “Moscow Women — Echoes of Yaroslavna,” her short documentary film about seven Russian women, filmed by a Russian and Estonian crew, was screened at Ms. Derks’s festival in Amsterdam. She also made a short film about her father’s hands.Ms. Weyermann turned from making movies herself to helping others make them in 1996, when she became director of the Open Society Institute’s Arts and Culture Program, one of the billionaire investor George Soros’s philanthropies, now known as the Open Society Foundation. She started the Soros Documentary Fund, which supported international documentaries that focused on social justice issues. When she was hired by the Sundance Institute to set up its documentary film program in 2002, she brought the Soros Fund with her. There she set up annual labs for documentary makers, where they could work on their films with others, creating the sort of community that documentarians craved.Ms. Weyermann, left, with Ally Derks, center, the founder of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, and the movie producer Elise Pearlstein at the Women’s March at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017. Laura KimIn addition to her sister Andrea, Ms. Weyermann is survived by a brother, James. Another sister, Debra Weyermann, an investigative journalist, died in 2013.When Ms. Weyermann became co-chair, with the screenwriter and producer Larry Karaszewski, of the foreign-language film category for the Academy Awards in 2018, they promptly changed the name of the category to “international feature film,” pointing out that the word “foreign” was not exactly inclusive. “Diane had a way of cutting through everyday nonsense,” Mr. Karaszewski said.In a 2008 interview, Ms. Weyermann was asked if she thought it was asking too much for a film to make a change in society.“When films are made solely for that purpose they fall like a lead balloon,” she replied. “What I love about film is it’s a creative medium. It’s not just ‘Let’s focus on an issue and educate,’ but ‘Lets tell a story, let’s tell it beautifully, let’s tell it poetically. Let’s tell it in a way that isn’t so obvious.’” More

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      in Music

      Review: In ‘Sun & Sea,’ We Laze Away the End of the World

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      Seemingly sweet yet insistently ominous, this opera installation turns a sandy beach into a spectacle of a changing climate.In May 2019, as the art world raced through the first preview day of the Venice Biennale, a tiny number of us set off for a naval base in the northeast corner of the city.There, inside a damp storehouse commandeered as an ad hoc pavilion for Lithuania, we ascended a scaffold and looked down on a startling sight: a large sandy beach. Beneath us, children played with buckets and shovels; dogs dozed and yapped; and a cast of more than a dozen sang of delayed flights and exploding volcanoes to a spare, insistently catchy electronic score.No one had pegged this as a highlight of the biennial. But it quickly became clear that it was a masterpiece of culture in a changing climate: a dismayingly rare subject for art, given its urgency. Three days later “Sun & Sea” (the title, like the music, is only superficially benign) won the show’s top prize, the Golden Lion, even as its three young Lithuanian creators — the director Rugile Barzdziukaite, the librettist Vaiva Grainyte and the composer Lina Lapelyte, working with the Italian curator Lucia Pietroiusti — hustled to secure funding to finish the run.Looking down from a mezzanine, you see the beachgoers sing solos or duets of a few minutes apiece, interrupted sometimes by errant children or a flying beach ball.George Etheredge for The New York Times“Sun & Sea” is now on tour, though the pandemic has not made it easy. The beach re-emerged earlier this summer in an empty Bauhaus swimming pool outside Berlin; in a warehouse in Piraeus, Greece; and in the orchestra level of an 18th-century Roman theater. It arrived this week at the BAM Fisher in Brooklyn, where its largely Lithuanian cast (some of whom have been with “Sun & Sea” since its first presentation at the national gallery in Vilnius in 2017) has been beefed up with New York-area supernumeraries who have substantially upped the beach’s tattoo quotient.Compressed into the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s black box theater, the opera has lost some of its vertiginous impact. And its reveries of carefree international travel have the slight feel of a prepandemic time capsule. But “Sun & Sea” remains one of the greatest achievements in performance of the last 10 years: wry, seductive and cunning in ways that reveal themselves days or years later. This is a performance that makes the extinction of the species feel as agreeable as a perfect pop song, and as unforgettable, too.The New York run is sold out, though standby tickets are available, and tickets are going fast for subsequent stops in Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Bentonville, Ark. Here it’s being performed for five hours each day, and ticket holders can enter at half-hour intervals and stay as long as they wish. (The score runs in a loop of a bit over an hour.)“Sun & Sea” looks at climate change nondirectionally, immersively, with the same casual unconcern as most holidaymakers (or, frankly, most legislators).George Etheredge for The New York TimesLooking down from a mezzanine, you see the beachgoers sing solos or duets of a few minutes apiece, interrupted sometimes by errant children or a flying beach ball. Two lovers debate what time to wake up to get to the airport the next day. An older woman reads the multilingual label on her sunscreen tube. A nouveau riche mother (the soprano Kalliopi Petrou, on a chaise longue) extols her recent Australian family vacation, the free piña coladas and the coral with its “bleached, pallid whiteness.”Only gently, distantly, do these characters perceive that the summers are a little hotter than before, that the waves are a little scarier. A young woman with a yoga mat and a self-help book (Nabila Dandara Vieira Santos, lying on a beach towel) marvels at the red sundresses, the green plastic bags, the fish-killing algal blooms: “O the sea never had so much color!”This episodic structure, as well as its repetition over hours, is central to the force of “Sun & Sea” — which looks at climate change nondirectionally, immersively, with the same casual unconcern as most holidaymakers (or, frankly, most legislators). Soloists often sing the same melody two times, once with banal lyrics about their day at the beach, and once tending toward the poetic, the cosmic, the climatic.George Etheredge for The New York TimesGeorge Etheredge for The New York TimesOne perpetually irritated beachgoer (the mezzo-soprano Egle Paskeviciene) sings an aria about tourists who won’t clean up after their dogs; later, to the same octave-leaping melody, she marvels that last Christmas “it felt like it could be Easter!” A corporate workaholic (the tender bass Vytautas Pastarnokas, in maroon swim trunks) sings steadily on the beat with the score’s pulsing monotone — first about the difficulties of relaxing, and then, later, about the “suppressed negativity” that pours out “like lava, like lava, like lava, like lava.”The whole cast sings an adagio Vacationers’ Chorus — “You should not leave your children unobserved!” — that’s reset, at the tail of the opera’s hourlong cycle, with Grainyte’s most poetic invocation of habitat change. “Eutrophication!” the beachgoers sing. “Our bodies are covered with a slippery green fleece; our swimsuits are filling up with algae.”Then the first chorus repeats. Fun follows on fear, fear follows on fun, neither with any great impact on the other. The world heats up, and the singers slather on more sunscreen. The forests burn on the other coast, and we queue for brunch with smoke in our eyes. Barzdziukaite, Grainyte and Lapelyte are among the few artists ready to engage with climate change at this scale, with this seriousness: not as a single coming disaster, but an entire epoch in which pleasures and disasters will bump up against one another and the end never comes.Through the audience’s omnipresent cameraphones, our critic writes, “this episodic opera gets further chopped into shareable snippets.”Jason FaragoGrainyte’s lyrics still invoke “our northern flatland,” a Schengen area idyll reached by discount European air carriers, though the beach at BAM has been New Yorkified in places: nestled in the sand, alongside a Lithuanian word-search booklet, are bodega takeout trays and a tote bag from the Park Slope Food Co-op. Not that the translation to New York has been seamless. BAM Fisher is the wrong venue for “Sun & Sea,” with the singers and supernumeraries crammed on too small a sandbar, pinned up against ugly gray walls.And the mezzanine is low, placing us too close to the singers and denying us the bird’s-eye — or drone’s-eye — view of the beachgoers so important to Barzdziukaite’s staging. “Sun & Sea” is choreographed to be seen overhead, from a forensic distance, as if we were sun gods looking down on our wayward creation. Yet that protective distance gets intentionally negated by new conditions of performance spectatorship: above all, by the phones wielded by the majority of spectators. (We might say that one working definition of performance art, as distinct from opera or theater, is that audience members are allowed to use their phones.)By placing us over the singers, Barzdziukaite sets up the perfect shot; she is, after all, a film director, and has used the same perspective in documentaries about habitat decay. First in Venice, then in Rome, and now again here, I watched my fellow audience members cradle their phones in their hands throughout the performance, as if compelled by the aerial view. They held them parallel to the stage below, so that the screen filled entirely with sand.By placing us over the singers, the artists have set up the perfect cameraphone shot.George Etheredge for The New York TimesBy design, then, this episodic opera gets further chopped into shareable snippets, or else merely into pictures we can scroll through later, as if they were our own holiday snaps. Though it’s a bit diminished at BAM, this overwhelming achievement of “Sun & Sea” endures: It brings our ecological disquiet and our technological derangement into registration, turning the opera’s endless vacation into our own. We have become new people, with new eyes and ears, in a new climate, and we are still just lazing away the days.Sun & SeaThrough Sept. 26 at BAM Fisher, Brooklyn; 718-636-4100, bam.org. More

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      in Television

      Late-Night Shows Are Teaming Up to Tackle Climate Change

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      Climate change may not be the easiest subject to laugh about, but a group of late-night hosts are teaming up in hopes of raising awareness about the issue and even finding some humor in it.On Sept. 22, seven of the network and cable late-night shows will take part in Climate Night, during which each of these programs will have a focus on climate change and produce their own original content on the topic.The shows that plan to participate in Climate Night are “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and “Late Night With Seth Meyers” on NBC; “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and “The Late Late Show With James Corden” on CBS; “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee” on TBS; “Jimmy Kimmel Live” on ABC; and “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah” on Comedy Central.Samantha Bee said in an interview that she could not recall another occasion during her tenure as a late-night host when so many of programs coordinated their efforts like this.“And really, what’s a more compelling cause to combine forces on than the climate, which we require in order to do our shows?” she said. “We need to not be submerged underwater in order to have successful late-night shows. The need is great.”The initiative is organized by Steve Bodow, a veteran late-night writer and producer and a former showrunner at “The Daily Show” and Netflix’s “Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj.”Bodow said in a phone interview that the event was organized to coincide with Climate Week NYC, which begins on Monday, and to call attention to the subject by having these shows focus on it simultaneously.“Climate change, obviously, is something we’re all dealing with,” he said. “We’re all talking about it. We all need to be talking about it. What if these shows all talked about it at once? It makes a statement that they’re all willing to do this.”Bodow said that his outreach to the showrunners and producers at these late-night programs was met with a spirit of cooperation, for the most part.As he explained: “Everyone, before committing, wanted to be assured that, really, we’re all jumping into the pool at the same time? If I jump, you’re not going to be standing at the edge of the pool, laughing at me and I’m all wet?”Each program, he said, will address climate change in its own segments and its own voice. “Some of the shows will really dive in all the way,” Bodow said. “They may have other ideas they want to do that night. But they’ll be doing some meaningful part of their show, at a minimum, and others will do even more.”Bodow said his request to each program was: “Please do your show the way that you do your show. The shows have different styles and vibes, and that’s how they’ll approach this. There’s plenty to talk about.”Bee said that, despite the inherently comedic tone of these late-night shows, they could still offer a constructive platform to address such an ominous topic.“It’s a really overwhelming conversation to have because so much has to happen, so urgently,” she said. “I do think that we, individually, each do a great job of breaking down stories in ways that are palatable. Comedy is a great delivery system for actual information.”She added: “And I expect, probably by the end of the show, we will have solved the climate crisis. So that’s exciting.” More

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      in Theater

      Lend Us Your Ears, and Don’t Forget Your Farm Boots

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      Seeing a play at Willow Wisp Organic Farm in Damascus, Pa., has a simple but highly recommended dress code: sturdy shoes.At the farm, which recently finished a run of a site-specific play about climate change, the boundless stage includes a courtyard lined with hydrangeas, greenhouses and a field of flowers. Over four nights last week, audience members trekked the outdoors there, walking from scene to scene, as the actors, musicians and stilt walkers performed in vibrant, whimsical costumes.The performance is the second installment of a decade-long series, “Dream on the Farm,” in which the Farm Arts Collective, whose home is on the 30 acres, plans to produce one play a year centered on climate change.“This is an intense and troubled time and as an organic farmer and theater maker, we’ve got to keep making work about this issue,” said Tannis Kowalchuk, the ensemble’s artistic director, who started the farm — which sits just across the river from New York — with her husband, Greg Swartz. (They sell their wares at the Union Square and Grand Army Plaza farmers’ markets.)Tannis Kowalchuk, artistic director of Farm Arts Collective, directed the show. She is also a co-owner of Willow Wisp Organic Farm with her husband, Greg Swartz.Jess Beveridge, left, and Annie Hat at a rehearsal in June. The show was the second of 10 annual plays about climate change that the collective is planning to perform.A rehearsal inside a Farm Arts Collective greenhouse on a rainy day. The collective is a group of artists and farmers. This year’s play transported guests into an “Alice in Wonderland”-esque fantasy in which two scientists, the astronomer Carl Sagan and the biologist Lynn Margulis, are brought back from the dead to help save life on Earth from the climate disaster. Audience members watch as Sagan encounters eccentric characters representing the atmosphere and the hydrosphere, as well as a man trying to find a way to escape the planet through space travel. The rest of the group followed the Margulis character on the other side of the farm. (The audience was split into two to avoid overcrowding.)At the end of the show, the audience of about 80 people received chilled cucumber soup made from ingredients grown on the land.Audience members walked from scene to scene, including through a corridor of painted fabric, essentially going on a walking tour of the farm.Audience members made their way to the next act.An assistant director’s notes and a snack from the harvest table.Waiting in the wings: Daniel Lendzain chilled out before making his entrance on opening night.It was the job of Simon Kowalchuk-Swartz (son of Kowalchuk and Swartz), to transport the musical instruments. The pianist Doug Rogers, left, also helped compose original music, and the guitarist Melissa Bell helped write the play.But the reality of the pandemic burst the fantasy bubble on Sunday after one of the people in the accompanying band tested positive for the coronavirus, despite having been vaccinated, and the arts collective decided to cancel the fifth and final performance.Kowalchuk said she hopes the play will be performed again, though. She has imagined bringing it to New York City, where the ensemble might be able to find a new stage in a park or botanical garden.The “Alice in Wonderland”-esque play posed a question: Is it better to look at climate change through a wide angle lens or a microscope?Marguerite Boissonnault played the character Fungus.Gregg Erickson played the character Hydrosphere.Cast members, including Hudson Williams-Eynon, center, in white, faced off in a tug-of-war.Williams-Eynon, Beveridge and the rest of the cast took a bow after a performance. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Bring Your Own Brigade’ Review: Some Say the World Will End in Fire

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      In her new documentary, Lucy Walker looks at California’s apocalyptic fires and finds more than the usual smoke and politics.A few times a year, I pull out our HEPA filter and begin reassuring worried friends and family members that, no, the city of Los Angeles, where I live, isn’t burning — or at least not yet. The air quality here is almost always poor, of course, but I tend to switch on the air filter only when the smoke comes, filling the basin and darkening the sky.“The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself,” Joan Didion wrote in 1967. It was two years after the Watts uprising, but Didion wasn’t writing about race and reckoning, she was creating a poetically apocalyptic image of the city and, by extension, California. Decades later, she returned to the topic, using a phrase — “fire season” — that now feels obsolete. In the age of enduring drought and climate change, the wildfires never seem to go out in the West, where so many burned in July that the smoke reached the East Coast.In “Bring Your Own Brigade,” the director Lucy Walker doesn’t simply look at the fires; she investigates and tries to understand them. It’s a tough, smart, impressive movie, and one of its virtues is that Walker, a British transplant to Los Angeles, doesn’t seem to have figured it all out before she started shooting. She comes across as open, curious and rightly concerned, but her approach — the way she looks and listens, and how she shapes the material — gives the movie the quality of discovery. (She’s also pleasantly free of the boosterism or the smug hostility that characterizes so much coverage of California.)Specific and universal, harrowing and hopeful, “Bring Your Own Brigade” opens on a world in flames. It’s the present day and everywhere — in Australia, Greece, the United States — fires are burning. Ignited by lightning strikes, downed power lines and a long, catastrophic history of human error, fire is swallowing acres by the mile, destroying homes and neighborhoods, and killing every living thing in its path. It’s terrifying and, if you can make it past the movie’s heartbreaking early images, most notably of a piteously singed and whimpering koala, you soon understand that your terror is justified.To tell the story of this global conflagration, Walker has narrowed in on California, turning her sights on a pair of megafires that began burning at opposite ends of the state on Nov. 8, 2018. (There was also a mass shooting that same day.) One started in Malibu, the popular if modestly populated (about 12,000 people) beach city that snakes along 21 miles of the state’s southern coastline and runs adjacent to a major highway; the other, deadlier fire ignited near Paradise, a town in a lushly, alarmingly forested pocket of Northern California and which, at the time, had more than double Malibu’s population.The contrasts between the areas prove instructive, as do their similarities. As Walker explains, Paradise is tucked into a Republican-leaning part of the state (though its county went for Joe Biden), while Malibu sits in reliably blue Los Angeles County. In 2019, the median property value in Paradise was $223,400 (per the website Data USA); in Malibu, it was $2 million, the city’s Gidget-era surf shacks supplanted by mansions ringed with imported palm trees and incongruously bright green lawns. But, as Walker finds, despite their demographic differences, each area has a history of going up in flames.Drawing on both archival and original footage — including some extremely distressing cellphone imagery and 911 calls — Walker is on the ground soon after the infernos erupt, riding shotgun with a fire battalion chief in Southern California and interviewing residents who managed to get out of Paradise alive. She jumps around in time a bit, shifting forward and back as she surveys the terrain, fills in the backdrop and introduces a range of survivors, heroes, scientists and activists. She seeks answers and keeps seeking, building on regional contrasts to create a larger global picture. (Three cinematographers shot the movie and three editors seamlessly pieced it together.)The story Walker tells is deeply troubling and often infuriating, and stretches back past 1542, the year that the Iberian explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo dropped anchor in an inlet now known as the Los Angeles harbor region. He named the area La Bahia de las Fumas, or the Bay of Smokes. For thousands of years, native peoples up and down the West Coast had built campfires, but also used fire to productively manage the land. In the centuries since, fire management has come to mean fire suppression at any cost. The problem is, as Walker methodically details, fire suppression isn’t working: The top six largest California wildfires in the past 89 years have all happened since 2018.That’s bleak, but I’m grateful to Walker for not leaving me feeling entirely hopeless about the future of my home and — because this movie is fundamentally about our planet — yours as well. Climate change is here, there’s no question. But, she argues, we can do much more than curl up in a fetal position. The problem, as always, is people. And when, a year after Paradise burned, residents in a meeting complain about proposed fire codes that may well save their lives in the next conflagration, you may shake your head, aghast. Human beings have a disastrous habit of ignoring our past, but Lucy Walker wants us to know that there’s no ignoring the fires already destroying our future.Bring Your Own BrigadeRated R for upsetting images and audio of people trapped by fire. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Music

      How Operas Are Going Green

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      During the pandemic, some houses have continued finding ways to make their spaces and performances more environmentally sustainable.The coronavirus pandemic has challenged day-to-day norms in the opera industry. But while addressing those challenges, some houses have found new ways to tackle another crisis with potentially broader implications: climate change.One of them is La Scala, in Milan, which will install solar panels on the roof of its new office tower in December 2022 while further digitizing operations to cut back on an estimated 10 tons of paper per year. The house has reduced carbon emissions by over 630 tons since 2010 through a partnership with the energy company Edison, which has been illuminating the theater since 1883 and now provides LED bulbs and smart lighting.Those initiatives are part of a growing movement across the music industry.The Sydney Opera in Australia has been a front-runner internationally, having already achieved its aim of becoming carbon-neutral three years ago and having built an artificial reef alongside the house’s sea wall in 2019 (where eight new marine species have since been identified).The Opéra de Lyon in France has reduced its consumption of electricity by 40 percent since 2010 and has joined forces with Sweden’s Goteborg Opera, the Tunis Opera in Tunisia and four specialized organizations to explore production methods in keeping with the principles of a circular economy.In Britain, a hub of cultural initiatives to combat the climate crisis, Opera North in Leeds has been working to reduce its carbon footprint since 2018. It now manages waste through a local company that drives lower-emission trucks and it will eliminate the use of natural gas in its new restaurant space, scheduled to open in October. In February, the theater will present its second set created entirely out of recycled or repurposed materials, in a production of Handel’s “Alcina.”La Scala has reduced carbon emissions by over 630 tons since 2010 through a partnership with the energy company Edison.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesThe pandemic has made environmental consciousness a more urgent and passionate issue. Alison Tickell, founder and chief executive of the London-based charity Julie’s Bicycle, which fosters action in the cultural sector against climate change, said that there was now “much less appetite for the lavish, over-the-top experiences” to which opera audiences were accustomed.“The production values and the idea of spectacle need to change,” she said. “Here’s a wonderful invitation to rethink it.”Lockdowns during the pandemic have also obliged opera companies to rummage through storage. In March, La Scala streamed a performance of Weill’s “Die sieben Todsünden” (The Seven Deadly Sins) in an ad hoc staging by Irina Brook that included an island of plastic bottles.Dominique Meyer, who was installed as the house’s artistic director and chief executive in March 2020, said that as a “flagship” in Italian culture, it had a major role to play in mobilizing the younger generation.“Everyone observes what La Scala does or doesn’t do,” he said. “It is a duty to commit oneself — for all theaters.”La Scala partners with the mineral water company Ferrarelle, which has its own certified system to recycle plastic, and the coffee company Borbone, which uses recycled filters.The theater, which has since 2017 hosted the Green Carpet Fashion Awards celebrating sustainable design, is pursuing the same agenda in its costume department by asking designers to work with recyclable fabric. It has also partnered with BMW since 2016 to make operations greener with a fleet of three BMW i3 electric cars.An ecologically sustainable infrastructure can also be economically advantageous given the opportunity to save energy and resources. Jamie Saye, senior technician at Opera North and co-founder of the Leeds-based consortium SAIL, which unites organizations across the city toward the goal of creating a zero-carbon future for its cultural sector, said that the pandemic-related constraints of the past year had forced the opera company to become “more innovative.”“We haven’t been able to go to a set constructor because they’re all closed down,” he explained. “We’re like, why weren’t we doing this years ago?”LED lighting above the stage at La Scala.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesOpera North will install solar panels this year and is working to reduce carbon emissions by offering employees discounted bus travel and tax breaks if they commute to work by bicycle.The issue of employing local artists is also a hot topic, given both the effects of Britain’s exit from the European Union and growing climate awareness. Mr. Saye said that while opera companies “exist to bring in the best” talent, a possible strategy could include allotting a “carbon budget” to a specific production so that if an artist must be brought in by plane, emissions would be cut back in another area of operations.On a more abstract level, freshly commissioned stage works have raised awareness. In 2015, La Scala premiered the Giorgio Battistelli opera “CO2,” a surreal tale about a climatologist, David Adamson (“son of Adam”), that found its inspiration in Al Gore’s 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” Four years later, the Scottish Opera in Glasgow unveiled “Anthropocene,” exploring the current human-centric, geological age through the story of an icebound expedition ship.One of three BMW i3 electric cars used by La Scala.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesFor Ms. Tickell, creating art about the environmental crisis is “as important as taking practical action.”“It’s how we breathe life into something that can very often be scientific or technocratic,” she said.Mr. Saye also believes that the cultural sphere has a leading role to play by helping people find an “emotional connection to climate change.” He cited as an example the image of a sea turtle with a plastic straw stuck up its nostril during an episode of the television documentary “Blue Planet II” in 2018, which set off a movement to ban plastic straws.Opera North has provided “carbon literacy training” to its staff members and, starting Tuesday, it will begin offering the workshops to the general public as online courses. Topics include the Paris Agreement’s goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.Julie’s Bicycle is taking the next step in social activism by exploring the intersection of culture and the climate emergency “through the lens of justice and fairness,” as Ms. Tickell explained, “also just in terms of who gets to enjoy this stuff.”“The environmental crisis with justice at its core,” she said, “needs to be at the heart of everything we do.” More

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