Floe – Chicago premiere by The Seldoms

Floe is a dance theater work by The Seldoms Artistic Director Carrie Hanson about the climate crisis: vanishing polar ice, rising sea levels, extreme weather, forced migration, the tension between denial and evidence, and adaptation and resilience. The work embodies the fragmentation of the global conversation on climate change as it veers from anti-science conspiracy theories to the very real and urgent impacts of global warming. Floe fits into The Seldoms’ interest in the environment, with a body of performance work that conceives a relationship to Earth and to all life on Earth based in stewardship and sustainability, pluralism, and justice—and the fact that the new normal is change.

Floe premiered in January 2020 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a community cast, who performed their own responses to climate change in pop-up performances, and grad students from the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies as audience guides, narrating their scripted climate research. In creating the work, Hanson learned from locals affected by the Wisconsin floods of 2018, the sea ice changes at the Arctic’s Beaufort Sea Lagoon, and Houston’s Hurricane Harvey, revealing that the body itself is the center of gravity in this human-caused climate crisis.

“We set out to make Floe because we believe that the fluent and articulate body is a powerful means to convey what is at stake in our warming world and a way to understand our culpability, fragility, and mandate,” Hanson said. “We thank all the people who shared their experiences and expertise; we aim to carry those stories forward as best as we can, perhaps revealing something about this climate emergency that statistics cannot express. While we initially created Floe in 2019, it remains relevant; indeed, climate change is more obvious and urgent seven years later.”