Vancouver-based theatre company gives climate crisis a starring role, wins $3K in inaugural awards

Artists Sidi Chen with The Only Animal theatre society captures natures sounds on tape. Photo by Peter Osnes.

A Vancouver-based theatre company is in the national spotlight for using art as a tool for climate action. 

The Only Animal Theatre Society has received two inaugural awards this month – the Rewilding Arts Prize from the David Suzuki Foundation and Rewilding Magazine, as well as the Green Award from the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres – in recognition of the company’s efforts to strengthen the bond between humans and nature through art.

While the company has existed for 17 years, founder Kendra Fanconi believes there’s more cultural appetite than ever for art that invites audiences to help make the world a better place.

“So many people are suffering from climate anxiety and climate grief and it doesn't really help to read more articles and get more terrified – people freeze up,” Fanconi told CTV News.

“I think what can help is what art does, which is to take people together collectively on a journey to new places, to transformation. I think that art – and theatre, particularly – has so many delights that we can offer. We have humour, beauty and magic, and we can bring those things to this very difficult, heavy story that we’re living through to help us process and understand a new orientation to it,” she said.

More than 550 artists applied for the 2022 Rewilding Arts Prize, but only six were selected.

The Only Animal is one of two B.C. artists that made the cut, and each will be awarded $2,000 and be profiled in Rewilding Magazine.

The other B.C. winner, Natasha Lavdovsky, is a multi-disciplinary arts who primarily works with lichen.

Fanconi describes Lavdovsky and her fellow awardees as eco-artists who use natural materials to create art independently.

“Our work is a little different in that we’re always working with different designers, we’re always making things together," she said.

One way the company is currently collaborating is through its three-year initiative “The Artist Brigade,” the Green Award-winning project selected by PACT.

As part of the initiative, The Only Animal selected 100 Canadian artists—whose disciplines include theatre, dance, fine arts, eco-arts, poetry, photography, filmmaking and video game design—to work with the company for a year to bring art to the climate crisis.

“The upcoming year will feature the commission of up to 10 artists of the Artist Brigade to develop their own climate art works, forming a working group within The Only Animal with ongoing mentorship and support as they go through the creative cycle,” PACT wrote in a news release earlier this month, announcing the winner of its first-ever $1,000 award.

Fanconi says the company’s goal is to invite audiences to fall in love with the natural world, which is why their shows rarely take place in theatres.

“We work to connect people to those natural places because we know that if they fall in love—you protect what you love,” she said.

The Only Animal is currently undertaking a production like no other—The Thousand Year Theatre—which is set to be complete by 3022.

Logistically, that means the company is working with silviculturists and other conservation biologists to build a forest full of species like Douglas firs, cedar and hemlock—plants that are equipped to survive the conditions of a shifting climate.

“We’re not just building a set that is going to end up going to the dump in a five-ton truck, we’re looking at how we can actually contribute to making the world a better place," Fanconi said.

“We’re planting a theatre that will come to its full maturation in a thousand years using the keystone species of our forest, but also to sort of plant an idea in our society that we can think a thousand years into the future and that humans can be a steward of that world to come.”