Plans for an opera inspired by Rye, composed by a world famous musician, are part of a creative festival of art and music announced last week. SongMaps Rye 2025 will tell the story of climate change locally and is a collaboration between local people, including the Tilling Green Residents Association, and StrongBack productions – an arts charity led by award winning composer Dominique Le Gendre.
For this week’s Rye News she shares her ambitions for the project and explains why tackling climate change is at the centre of the proposals.Â
On Friday October 18 as artistic director of StrongBack Productions, I joined Graham Ellis and Dan Lake of the Tilling Green Residents Association at the Rother Voluntary Action annual general meeting held at the Tilling Green Community Centre. If all AGMs were this big-hearted and celebratory of the very best of communities, what a different world this would be!
We shared a 10-minute spot to tell the gathered audience about the renewal of the Tilling Green Residents Association (TGRA) and about SongMaps Rye 2025, a StrongBack Productions project designed in collaboration with TGRA, science educator Lucy Bowyer and writer Sheena Morgan, to help build climate resilient communities in Rye through music, poetry and science. Our theme was: community cohesion, collective creativity.
Building on our experimental pilot project in 2023, SongMaps Rye 2025 explores aspects of the manifesto created during 2023’s workshops held with Rye residents and artists, to build community resilience to climate change via four strands of the 2023 workshops.
Why have we chosen to address climate when there are more urgent issues affecting Rye you ask? StrongBack is choosing to address this firstly because climate change is with us now, affecting our lives, and we will experience a whole host of significant transformations that affect every aspect of our lives for decades to come. Secondly, we all know, and I know from growing up in a newly independent island (Trinidad and Tobago) that is still finding and shaping its identity, that we can address change more effectively when we are part of a group, a community of like-minded people who wish to see our communities thrive. So here is what SongMaps Rye 2025 proposes.
The first strand of public programmes will offer a series of workshops to help communities connect to, care for and protect our environment with deep understanding and empathy. These will be environmental science and arts workshops with writers, artists and environmental scientists, taking place in schools, at Rye Garden Community Centre and at Tilling Green Community Centre. Poetry, music and arts / crafts workshops for children and young people will provide opportunities for performances in community events throughout the year.
The second strand will offer inspiration by creating opportunities for exhibitions and talks with leading practitioners across science, conservation, fishing, farming, architecture, the arts and environmental law. We also hope to programme music performances by artists engaged with climate change.
The third strand of creation will take place over two to three years as I compose an opera inspired by Rye: its natural and human and built environments, and preview sections of the evolving piece in 2025.
Our fourth strand of celebration will see StrongBack Productions participate in Tilling Green’s community events throughout the year. Expect to hear and read new poetry from the workshops, see art made of waste materials by primary school children, hear new sea-shanties and the sounds of drummers, and gaze in awe at the stilt walkers among you as our programmes seek to renew our connections to each other, the seasons and the natural world by reviving forgotten rituals and creating new ones.
Graham and Dan have invested the better part of 2024 into creating a year’s worth of events in Tilling Green for 2025. Their hope is that these activities will renew a sense of pride and re-invigorate the once vibrant community spirit. StrongBack Productions is delighted to collaborate with their vision for Tilling Green with our programmes that seek to stimulate us all towards collectively finding solutions as opposed to worrying in isolation. This autumn season presently sees us tackling the task of raising the support necessary to sustain the ambitions expressed in the SongMaps Rye manifesto and contributing to building climate-resilience in Rye.
Image Credits: S Benn , Dominique Le Gendre , Maria Nunes .