The Seldoms in the world premiere of “Floe” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison/Photo: Liviu Pasare
Back when I first wrote about the impending premiere of “Floe,” The Seldoms evening-length dance theater piece about climate change, I referred to the subject—as did many back then—as the existential crisis of our time. That was in April of 2020, when “Floe” was slated to premiere in the Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room at the Art Institute. The elegant, wood-paneled palace to capitalism promised to be a fitting milieu for tales of catastrophic weather events buffeting the less fortunate and ice caps shrinking in the crucible of human greed.
The COVID pandemic postponed the production—longer than one might imagine. “Floe” will make its Chicago premiere this spring, running March 12 and 13 at the Dance Center of Columbia College. In the ensuing six years since its making, our national attention has become considerably strained: By the rise of authoritarianism and far right movements in the United States and abroad, pulled from the imminent climate crisis to regime overthrow in oil-rich Venezuela. Distracted from the repeal of the endangerment finding—rendering the EPA helpless to regulate tailpipe emissions—to renaming the Kennedy Center or the latest on the absurd rebuilding of the East Wing, or whatever the headline is by the time you read this. “It’s a kind of delusion,” says Carrie Hanson, founder and artistic director of The Seldoms. “This current administration is performing distractions. There’s a daily dose of some outrageous thing that goes viral. If we don’t have a livable planet, the rest doesn’t matter.”
And so, the time for “Floe” is, as it has been for decades, now. Hanson developed the piece in part through a residency with Houston-based arts nonprofit DiverseWorks and Rothko Chapel. Hanson and collaborators interviewed Houston residents in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. “We talked to people whose homes had flooded, we talked to a chaplain who does a lot of counseling,” Hanson says. And though those interviews took place in the last decade, she says, “I have strong memories of sitting with those people.”
The creative team also consulted with climate scientists. “Ken Dunton is a marine scientist at the University of Texas Austin,” Hanson tells me. “He’s been traveling up to the Arctic for thirty years, working with the Inupiat people. He tells the story of a family out in their fishing boats, two of the family members drowned because of changes to the weather there. It’s an example of where humans have to adapt to rapidly changing conditions with tragic outcomes.”
In the production, inflatable sculptures by Bob Faust resemble small icebergs and the soundscape by Mikhail Fiksel incorporates field recordings of wind and cracking ice. “You get a sense of the space of the arctic,” Hanson says.
Text by playwright Seth Bockley references “Moby Dick” and adds some levity to a heavy subject. But there is clear urgency and a call to action in Hanson’s piece, which is even more relevant now, when disastrous climate events are part of the regular news cycle. “I welcome all of us to ask, at what level can I be part of the solution?”
The Seldoms’ “Floe” at the Dance Center of Columbia College, 1306 South Michigan. March 12 & 13 at 7:30pm. General admission $35, students $10. Tickets are available at dance.colum.edu.
