By Rebecca Spence, Arts & Culture Editor
Sarah McCarthy had her first “goggles moment” one day when she was walking around at Purcell’s Cove.
“It’s beautiful there,” she says. “But then you look down and there are used condoms and tampon applicators.”
It was at this moment that McCarthy, a Halifax-based actor, realized that what we flush down our toilets ends up in our harbour, “landing among the ducks.”
Now McCarthy, 27, is embarking on a cross-Canada tour with the Goggles Project, a theatre troupe committed to attracting attention to the topic of sustainability.
“The goggles are a joke in a way because it’s saying we have to see through the refuse to get some perspective,” says Gary Markle, the group’s creative director.
Throughout the 20-minute show, the actors share their various goggle moments with the audience. From realizing that your own professors don’t know where their drinking water comes from to discovering that your university invests its pension money in unsustainable resources, each goggles moment was written from professor Tara Wright’s real personal experiences.
Wright is the co-creator of the Goggles Project and an associate professor of Environmental Science at Dalhousie. She commissioned a two-year study on sustainability in higher education back in 2005, which was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). After obtaining a second SSHRC grant, she was able to bring her research to life in an interactive, engaging medium.
“They’ve actually started realizing that if you do research and all you do is write journal articles, not a lot of your message is going to get out.” says Wright, 37. “So they started supporting innovative activities to get research out into the public.”
Although she wrote the background of the script, she says that the Goggles Project only came to life though workshops with Gary Markle.
“We’re modeling it after guerilla theatre,” says Markle, an assistant professor at NSCAD. “It’s a kind of theatre that can change how we think.”
By Oct. 1 the Goggles Project will have visited nine cities, where they will have performed 32 shows at 18 different university and college campuses.
The four-person cast performed their first seven shows right here in Halifax last week: one at the Nova Scotia Community College, one at St. Mary’s University, four at Dalhousie, and one at NSCAD. The actors found that the energy at St. Mary’s was “fantastic”, while the students at NSCC were “a bit too cool for school.” At Dalhousie, though, they were happy to be greeted by students who were open and receptive to their message.
“At Dal it’s been great to have people that are so interested in the subject matter,” says McCarthy. “People were actually listening.”
Mike Chandler, another member of the cast, agrees. “There’s nothing better than getting people excited about what you’re doing,” he says. “That’s really rewarding.”
Dr. Wright thinks that it’s important that the troupe performs in public places on campus so that they can reach people who would not normally come to listen to an environmental message. She also acknowledges that this kind of effort is about promoting a cultural change.
“You can tell people what’s wrong with the planet until you’re blue in the face,” she says. “But until people actually feel the message and feel that they need to change their life, then not a lot is going to happen. I feel that cultural change coming.”
The Goggle Project actors were all certainly attracted to the show’s environmental message when they first got involved this past July.
“I’m particularly interesting in doing theatre that has a social message behind it,” says Chandler, a Halifax-based actor and filmmaker.
“It seemed interesting to collectively create something that would embody a message that I’m completely behind. It was also a challenge. Something I’m interested in is how to translate messages and ideas into entertaining theatre.”
Sara Campbell, trained in Gaulier Clown, Lecoq Movement, and Physical Theatre, was already involved in the sustainable, organic food movement in Cape Breton when she auditioned for the Goggles Project.
Tyler Burns, who at 23 is the troupe’s youngest performer, loves that he has an opportunity to promote a good cause and engage with students across the country. He also thinks that theatre is great way to communicate a message.
“Something like a flash video would have been cool but wouldn’t have a person-to-person interaction,” he says. “To go around the country and interact with these people on a personal level, the message is going to get across a lot more clearly. It’s going to hopefully leave more of an imprint than a video would.”
So what is next for the Goggle’s Project once the tour wraps up in Vancouver?
“Broadway,” jokes Markle.
Actually, Wright hopes to be able to leverage more funding to do this tour again. She also hopes that the Goggles Project could go beyond universities and perform at workshops and conferences. This will mostly depend on whether she can get more funding from the SSHRC, which seems to be a reasonable possibility.
“The beauty of the Goggles Project is that you don’t have to let scholarly information just sit on a shelf,” says Wright. “You can actually bring it out for people and have them engage in it. That’s really our aim.”
For a complete tour schedule and additional information, visit www.gogglesproject.org.
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