Chantal Bilodeau – författare

In Inuit mythology, “sila” means air, climate, or breath. Bilodeau’s play of the same name examines the competing interests shaping the future of the Canadian Arctic and local Inuit population. Equal parts Inuit myth and contemporary Arctic policy, the play Sila features puppetry, spoken word poetry, and three different languages (English, French, and Inuktitut).There is more afoot in the Arctic than one might think. On Baffin Island in the territory of Nunavut, eight characters – including a climatologist, an Inuit activist and her son, and two polar bears – find their values challenged as they grapple with a rapidly changing environment and world. Sila captures the fragility of life and the interconnectedness of lives, both human and animal, and reveals in gleaming tones that telling the stories of everyday challenges – especially raising children and maintaining family ties – is always more powerful than reciting facts and figures. Our changing climate will have a significant impact on how we organize ourselves. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Arctic, where warming temperatures are displacing entire ecosystems. The Arctic Cycle – eight plays that examine the impact of climate change on the eight countries of the Arctic – poignantly addresses this issue. Sila is the first play of The Arctic Cycle. With its large-as-life polar bear puppets, the play is evocative and mesmerizing, beautifully blurring the boundaries between folklore and science.

Forward was partly inspired by a ten-day sailing expedition around the Svalbard Archipelago, located halfway between Norway and the North Pole. Spanning a hundred years and thousands of kilometres from the sixtieth parallel North to the top of the world, Forward presents a poetic history of energy development in Norway from the initial passion that drove explorer Fridtjof Nansen to the North Pole, to the consequences of decades of our addiction to fossil fuels. A blend of theatre and electropop music, the play progresses backwards from 2013 to 1893, and zeroes in on close to forty characters whose day-to-day lives illustrate how the choices we make often have unintended consequences. Woven through this history is the passionate love affair between Nansen and sea ice, embodied as a character in the play. Expressing herself only through song, Ice, who has waited for millennia for the arrival of her lover, is bracing to meet her destiny. A relay race through time, where each generation passes the baton to the next, Forward takes a compassionate look at the legacies we leave behind, and at what we are willing to do for love.

Ultimately, Forward is about climate change. It’s a story about how an Arctic explorer fell in love with Ice (embodied as a character in the play), and unwittingly opened up the Arctic for development. A story about people having good intentions that led to unintended consequences. A story about who we are in all our glorious imperfection. But Forward is also a story of hope. It is an invitation to collectively grieve for what we lost, for what we continue to lose every day, so that we can forgive ourselves. It is a reminder that if we come together as a community, we will find a solution.

Forward is the second play of the Arctic Cycle – a series of eight plays that examine the impact of climate change on the eight countries of the Arctic. The play takes its title from Nansen’s ship Fram, which is the Norwegian word for “forward.”

With a foreword by Una Chaudhuri, a professor at New York University who studies the geography of drama, and an introduction by Tael Naess, a Norwegian writer and playwright.

The third play in the award-winning Arctic Cycle on the impact of climate change

Harveys suck. Whether hurricanes or Hollywood producers, Harveys are overpowered forces primed to prey on vulnerable people and ecosystems. Harveys especially prey on women, including the woman in No More Harveys, who flees her abusive husband and heads for Alaska to reunite with friends – and instead encounters the wonder of whales. In turns funny, insightful, and moving, No More Harveyspresents a world dominated by colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy where the problems that plague our communities, be we women or whales, share the same gnarled roots.No More Harveys is the third play of the Arctic Cycle, a series of eight plays that looks at the social and environmental impacts of the climate crisis on the eight Arctic states. It follows Sila, set in Canada, and Forward, set in Norway.