As the sun finally started to shine this week STA ventured out to catch up with Annemarie Dalziel to talk about her upcoming STA Top Spots funded performance “Green Tape” at the Southern Highlands Botanic Gardens this Saturday for Earth Hour.

Green Tape is a participatory performance that moves sculpture beyond static ideas of space and material into socially responsive activism. Green Tape activates a community space, the Southern Highlands Botanic Gardens, inviting people to pause, reflect and respond through interacting with an installed work of art and, during the performance on Saturday, through experiencing a Sybil Disobedients ‘action’ and through direct engagement with the audience themselves being invited to dress up and become part of the work. 

The Creel house created onsite from garden prunings is a symbol of shelter recognised around the world. It’s a created space where people can interact and think about or discuss current climate issues. 

The Sybil Disobedients emerged in response to COVID. The costumes ensure physical distancing and the slow gliding /spinning choreography draws attention to the agitprop-slogans on the skirts. In a series of street performance protests in 2020, Extinction Rebellion Wingecarribee discovered that the Sybil Disobedients calm and charm people. The gentle performers, striking costumes and slow, simple choreography regulate physiological responses to anxiety and trauma. Released from fight/flight/freeze responses, people seem to be able to talk, think, and feel about the terrifying ecological and climate issues we face, and imagine how to resist it.

Weaving together performance, conversation, participation and sloganeering, ‘Green Tape’ uses creative arts to draw peaceful and participatory attention to the climate emergency. COVID-safe, respecting the lives and health of those around us, it invites and encourages creative and imaginative response, the mesmeric choreography building hope, an antidote to sliding into despair.

Annemaree is also working on a project in which seven pairs of handknitted socks, so instantly accessible and infinitely layered with meaning become the vehicle to trigger conversations about difficult histories. In this case the experience of thousands of Scottish boat people who were forced to flee their homeland and come to Australia in the 19th century. Displaced and traumatised they came to be complicit in the colonisation of Indigenous land despite their own tragic stories. The socks hold complex, difficult and important memories with humour and subtle dignity.