As the autumn leaves gathered in the gutters of Stockholm, a gang of artists, writers, performers and theatre makers set off on a journey into the dark. An underworld journey. A search for a new cultural language, capable of reframing the largest questions that the world is facing.
The Dark Mountain Workshop takes us into the shadows of climate change and resource scarcity, the fraying of the ecological and social fabric on which our current way of living is dependent.
What do we do, as artists, living in such a time? This was the challenge set out in Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto (2009) and taken up by the international network of writers, artists and thinkers which has grown around the Dark Mountain Project.
In 2015, Riksteatern – Sweden’s touring national theatre – has invited one of the authors of the manifesto, Dougald Hine, to create the Dark Mountain Workshop. A group of artists from within and beyond the stage arts in Sweden meets for a day a month to go deep into the existential terrain of ecological crisis: a terrain in which ‘climate change’ is not the problem, only the most alarming symptom of something else, whose roots go to the roots of our cultures.
Each time we meet, the group is joined by an international guest, someone whose work offers clues for this search. And on the evening of our meetings, we host an open event, The Village & The Forest, where we invite you to join us and share in our explorations.