Natalie Rogers-Cropper has seen climate change firsthand. In her native Trinidad and Tobago and elsewhere in the Caribbean, higher water temperatures have turned normally vibrant coral white and left the beaches more vulnerable to storm surges.
“I’m meeting people whose lives as fishermen have been badly affected and seeing all of our coasts starting to disappear with the high level of water,” Rogers-Cropper, the executive director of Garth Fagan Dance, said.
As a choreographer, she responded through her art. In 2023, around the time she took the helm at Garth Fagan, she premiered her first work for the company, “Life Receding.”
The company will present a portion of that piece this week, fittingly at a summit run by the Climate Solutions Accelerator of the Genesee-Finger Lakes Region, which runs April 4-5 at the Joseph A. Floreano Rochester Riverside Convention Center.
The theme is “Co-Creating Our Future,” and to start the work in making that happen, the organization has booked several dozen speakers from around the region, including author and activist Kit Miller, who formerly headed up the MK Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence.
For her piece, which Garth Fagan presents an excerpt of on Friday, Rogers-Cropper found inspiration in the words of a family friend, Nobel Prize-winning writer Derek Walcott.
“He describes the Caribbean very vividly,” she said. “It’s very beautiful words to sort of balance out the pain of that beauty disappearing.”
Because the summit is packed with panel discussions and community meetings, Climate Solutions Accelerator Abigail McHugh-Grifa said a thought-provoking dance presentation can help with its overall goals.
“As we think about what it means to co-create our future, we will need to be creative,” she said. “The arts can be so powerful in terms of just helping people see the world differently and be open to ideas that maybe they wouldn’t otherwise.”
The summit aims to give people the skills, knowledge and relationships to make progress on their own climate journeys. McHugh-Grifa added that changing behaviors is just as important as changing deeply rooted ways of thinking.
“Even the idea that we are separate from nature or superior to nature — we would probably take better care of the planet if we realized that our health and wellbeing depends on the health and wellbeing of the earth,” she said.
But where to begin? Climate action remains as urgent as ever, despite the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle key environmental policies. Individual action can feel overwhelming.
McHugh-Grifa knows the feeling. But she’s got a tip: Think of your own climate journey like a choose-your-own-adventure story.
“There is uncertainty, right? There is risk,” she said. “But that’s actually kind of what makes it fun and exciting to get engaged in this work.”
Rogers-Cropper’s dance piece can help kickstart that adventure, as long as the audience keeps an open mind.
“We want the audience to work at it,” she said. “This is about climate change — what in it is about climate change. It won’t be obvious, but you have to work at it.” climategfl.org
Patrick Hosken is CITY’s arts reporter. He can be reached at patrick@rochester-citynews.com.
This article appears in Dec 1-31, 2024.
