In this Edinburgh Fringe special, Kaska speaks to Lewis Coenen-Rowe about the trees and myths that inspired his deforestation opera STUMPED, becoming an artist activist, and about the importance of coming together for storytelling like this to help us imagine a better future and take collective action.
Credits
Interview, recording and sound production: Kaska Hempel.
Music: Exerpts from STUMPED by Lewis Coenen-Rowe.
Transcript
Narration
Kaska: Hello, it’s Kaska, your Story Weaver. The Edinburgh Fringe frenzy is just about to kick off this week and we have a perfect recommendation for you. STUMPED. The show combines an opera exploring cautionary mythical tales on our destructive relationship with trees, with reflections from forest experts and community groups involved in caring for them.
The show is certainly an unusual offering by Fringe standards but it promises to be ideally suited to both existing opera fans and newbies.
Last week I popped over to Glasgow to speak to the show’s creator Lewis Coenen-Rowe about his inspiration for the work, his activist journey and the importance of coming together for storytelling to help us imagine a better future and take action.
Lewis: My name’s Lewis. I am a composer. I specialise in writing music for singers and music that’s kind of storytelling. I’ve written four operas.
And I’m very interested, concerned, stressed about environmental issues. But this piece that we’re talking about today will be my first opera about environmental issues, specifically.
When I’m not composing, I also work at a charity called Creative Carbon Scotland, which works on the roles of arts and culture for addressing climate change.
Kaska: Can you tell us about the piece we just listened to at the beginning of the show?
Lewis: This is an extract from the opera Stumped. This comes from the start of the fourth section, which is about oak trees and was the germinating idea for the piece. So when I discovered the story that this section is based on. That’s when I knew I had to write the piece, basically. So it’s a story that is 2,000 years old.
It’s from Roman Italy. It’s about a guy who cuts down the sacred oak tree and is cursed by the goddess to have an endless appetite that can never be satisfied and he keeps consuming more and more until eventually he consumes himself, eats himself, and dies gruesomely, as in a lot of these old stories.
And I was just amazed to discover this story because it feels like such an on the nose metaphor for where we are now. If you were to write this story now you’d be like, oh come on, that’s so obvious. But it was actually written 2,000 years ago and I thought it was just absolutely fascinating.
Kaska: You’ve obviously been on some kind of climate journey, and being a classically trained musician and composer. That piques my interest. And how did you end up where you are right now with these concerns and working for a charity that’s trying to tackle them?
Lewis: My background is in classical music, as you say, that’s what I studied at University. That was what my passion was, what I thought I was going to do. Originally, I thought I was going to be a concert pianist, and then found performing in public far too stressful, so I ended up specializing in composition instead.
I originally moved up to Glasgow to get a job at Glasgow University, the music department, so I certainly saw music as the main thing I was doing with my life, but increasingly I was getting involved with environmental and climate campaigns in my spare time. So I was certainly thinking about climate change a lot, stressing about climate change, trying to work out what I could do about it.
I was involved in a lot of sort of grassroots campaigns, things like Friends Of The Earth and so on. I was also involved in a group which campaigned against fossil fuel sponsorship of the arts. So there was a sort of connection with the arts there. But I think for a long time I sort of saw the music work I did as quite separate.
I didn’t really see what I could do with music that felt relevant to addressing something like climate change. And it’s taken me a long time to work out how to do that, basically. I didn’t want to write music about climate change without knowing I could do it well, and doing it in the way that mattered for me.
And I think the key thing for me is writing something that’s really specific and has a purpose to it. So not just writing something which is about climate change, we’re all doomed, kind of music. I wanted to write something that would draw attention to something more specific and also hopefully be empowering and help make us feel like there are things that we can actually do.
That felt really important to me.
Kaska: Do you remember how you became concerned about climate? Was it sort of a gradual process or did you have some kind of aha moment?
Lewis: I don’t think there was a big revelation. I think it was something I’d been aware of from a young age. I was aware it was important.
I sort of assumed that the people in charge were fixing it because it was so important. And I suppose I was reading more news about climate change, I was getting more informed, and I think during that process I came to the discovery, I think, really, that actually the people in charge were not doing enough to fix climate change, nothing like enough.
And that actually, you know, it needed people like me to step up and do more, and I think probably there was a point where I changed over from, I suppose, just thinking about doing my recycling and telling other people off for not doing their recycling properly and all the things like that, to thinking actually the most effective thing I can do with my time as an environmentalist, as someone who cares about climate change, is to think about campaigning and trying to use my voice to influence change more broadly.
And maybe that was the light bulb moment for me, stopping seeing climate change as something that was about my individual choices and something that was much broader.
Kaska: So excuse for this conversation is your new opera called STUMPED. Which will be running at the Storytelling Centre during the Edinburgh Fringe, I believe. And can you tell us what it is about?
Lewis: So STUMPED is about deforestation, as the title implies. It’s based on five very old stories.
They all come from completely different places, different times. The oldest one is as much as 5,000 years old, but they’re all basically cautionary tales about not messing with trees too much. So they all basically have the same narrative. There’s stories about someone cuts down, harms, destroys the tree or the forest, and then the repercussions that follow from that.
They’re all stories about how human well being and the well being of forests are interconnected. So I was really interested in what we can learn from these stories and I wanted to write a piece that was based on them but that would link them up to the modern day. So the opera takes those five stories which are told by the singers and then embeds them in this kind of framing narrative which is set on an internet forum.
The users of the internet forum talk about the stories and basically connect them up to modern day deforestation issues and what we can do in the world now and what we can learn from those stories.
Kaska: So you obviously looked at all the stories and past sort of experiences of humanity. And tried to bring the relevance to the current day.
Why do you think that might be a powerful way to talk about the issues that are affecting us now?
Lewis: I think stories are very important and powerful things. They’re a huge part of how we, you know, interact with the world and how we understand the world we live in.
So there’s a big difference between getting the facts about deforestation and actually really understanding what it means on a personal or emotional sort of gut level. And I think stories really help us relate to that. So I think that’s one thing that, in many ways, the piece is about the power and the importance of storytelling.
And that’s why it’s on at the Scottish Storytelling Centre. It’s all about stories. I think the other aspect is what we can learn from the past. So I’m really interested in why throughout history, through various times and places, people have felt the need to write, tell, share cautionary tales about not messing with the trees.
And there’s obviously very good reasons why you would want to do that, because actually, history shows us that civilisations rise and fall based on their relationship with the natural world.
So I think of those stories as having, in a way, a very practical function. They’re a way of passing down that information. To your descendants saying you need to be careful how you treat the trees around you, because actually if you treat them badly, it will come back and cause you harm in return.
And I think maybe now we need stories like that more so than ever, and I’m not sure where those stories are at the moment.
Kaska: My next question is why trees? Why did you choose to go that way?
Lewis: The origins of the piece are in 2020. It was COVID lockdown. I think one of the things that really kept me going during that period was going out for my mandated daily walk that we were allowed to have. Going out to the park and thinking a lot about trees in a way that I’d not really thought deeply before.
I’d sort of always enjoyed being in green spaces, but I was suddenly thinking, oh my, what kind of tree actually is that? And why is it doing that? And I think we were all perhaps more attuned to seasonal changes at that time because of not being able to go out and do other things. We were just staying in the same place and seeing things change around us and seeing the trees change.
And I also knew that there was, in a way, while in lockdown, an opportunity to work on some new music. Which is an opportunity that doesn’t often come up. So I knew I wanted to write something, I was thinking a lot about trees, and then I was also spending a lot of time online researching trees and other things, and I think those elements all combined together to make the piece basically.
So I was googling stories about trees, discovered the stories that become the basis of the piece. And I think through the process of spending time online doing that research, that’s where the setting on the internet forum came from as well. So in many ways, the idea for the piece comes from quite personal experience, although it’s not presented as a personal piece in the final showing.
Kaska: I wonder whether you can share any sort of story about your favourite tree in the park. I mean, do you have one? Is there a tree that’s at the core of your inspiration? And can you tell us about it?
Lewis: I do have a favourite tree. So I was spending part of lockdown down in Liverpool where I grew up with my parents. In an area called Allerton, and in the local park there, there is a tree called the Allerton Oak, which is supposed to be over a thousand years old.
There’s loads and loads of stories about it. It’s apparently where Anglo-Saxon meetings used to happen under the branches of that tree. There’s a big crack in it that was meant to have appeared just because of some explosion in the port. So I don’t know if any of these stories are true, but it’s a tree that’s surrounded by stories.
It’s a beautiful ancient tree that I like to go back and visit. Every time I go to Liverpool. And I suppose it also relates to the shape of the piece. So the piece has five stories in it, but the fourth one is by some way the longest, and the fourth one is about an oak tree.
So I think there’s a connection there as well.
Kaska: Obviously, deforestation and trees are important for climate. Do you want to share anything that you learned from your research about the impact of trees, why are they important?
Lewis: I think something that really stuck out to me and something that makes it into the final version of the piece actually is the real importance of the difference between ancient forests and tree plantations, and these not being the same thing at all.
But when you go out hiking in Scotland, you can often see hillsides full of trees, but they’re actually a tree farm, basically. They’re just rows of all the same type of tree that’s been planted, and then there’ll be clear felt, and then a whole bunch of new trees will be planted instead. And that’s not a forest, although it might look like a forest when you first glance at it.
And the real forests are much more valuable for all sorts of reasons. They’re valuable for biodiversity, they’re also much better carbon sinks, they store a lot more carbon than a plantation is going to. Yeah, it made me think a lot about the importance of preserving the forests that we do have, compared to tree planting, and these being very different things.
And I learned quite a lot about the campaign around preserving the temperate rainforests of Scotland and thinking this idea of the Scottish rainforest is like enormously evocative to me, I love the idea that yeah, that there are rainforests very near to Glasgow in Argyll and you can go and visit them and they, you know, they do feel like rainforests.
They’re obviously incredibly wet, like full of life, plants growing on plants, growing on plants. But also cold at the same time. And I’ve actually invited someone from that campaign around preserving the temperate rainforests of Scotland to come and speak at one of the performances in Edinburgh at the Fringe.
So that’s a nice connection that emerged out of that.
Kaska: I wanted to ask you about the fact that this is the first piece that you brought your environmentalist activist identity and your creative identity together.
Why and how did you decide to weave them together?
Lewis: Yeah, I think it’s an interesting question. It’s something that I’ve struggled with in the past, and I think I was quite frightened of trying to bring these different things together, because I wasn’t sure if I could do it well. And I felt like if I couldn’t do it well, I shouldn’t do it, basically.
And I think I’ve learned a lot through my day job at Creative Carbon Scotland, so through that I’ve encountered all sorts of amazing artists who are, you know, directly tackling climate change and other environmental issues, spoken to people who are doing really cool things, learned from what they’re doing.
So I think that in many ways has given me the confidence to try and pursue this myself, as well as like quite a lot of practical stuff that I’ve learned from other people. And I think it’s helped me understand more clearly what I want to do as well. I think that was the key thing that I felt like I’ve with the concept for this piece found a specific issue that I want to say something about and feel like I have the skills to say something about.
I didn’t want to write a piece more broadly about environmental harm or climate change without having something particular that I felt like I could bring to it. And then I think it was also about just finding the model that worked. So thinking about putting on a show in a way that was also sustainable, so where the medium would be the message.
So there’s a recycled wood set that forms the main setting for the piece, and thinking about those aspects of it and how we could put on the show as sustainably as possible. We’re not doing any flyers, which is quite controversial for the Fringe. So I suppose thinking about that aspect of it was important.
And then also thinking about how the show can then support the wider environmental ecosystem around it. So we’re having a different speaker come to talk at the end of each performance about the work that their organisation or their group does. How people can get involved or support. That felt quite important to me that I didn’t want to put on a show that was just about the art and was disconnected from the environmental world.
I wanted to bring them together in some way. So I think those things helped make it feel like a really worthwhile thing to do.
Kaska: Yeah, so I like that idea of connecting a provocation or something to think about and emotionally respond to and very practical suggestion of what’s being done about it and getting involved, because that’s, in our work, we know that that sort of work’s giving people agency rather than just leaving them floundering about.
Lewis: Yeah, so I think, so I’ve been to so many shows which have had sort of amazing provocative messages to them, and then it’s like, well, what do I do with this, these feelings now? Like, I have all these feelings and I have nowhere to put them. So I think people often come away from, I think, especially environmental themed shows wanting to do something. And it makes sense to provide routes to help people do that.
Kaska: So are you an artist activist now?
Lewis: Ha ha ha, good question. Yes, I suppose so. I think, particularly I suppose if people see the piece, it is political in a sense. it’s not just kind of, vaguely pointing to environmental issues and talking about them.
It is trying to be quite specific about, here are people spreading misinformation about this, here’s what you can do. So I do see it as being activist in a sense. Probably a lot of other people who go there won’t.
Sometimes people in the arts are very turned off by this term activist. It has negative connotations for some people. I think for me, I see it very positively, it’s just about being active. It’s in the name, you know, it’s wanting to do stuff and make change. And I think that’s a really positive thing and definitely part of how I want to see myself.
You know, I want to make art that contributes to change in the world. I don’t want to make art that just points to issues without trying to fix them.
Kaska: Great. And that leads me to a follow up with one question, really. Why do you think it’s so important that we tackle these kind of issues through artistic approaches?
Obviously that’s a wider question beyond your personal work, because you’ve been involved with Creative Carbon Scotland, who’s funding this kind of work. So what’s the thought there?
Lewis: I think that’s, yeah, that’s a huge question and one that I think about a lot. I think for me, it really boils down to what I think we know about tackling climate change is that it’s not just a technical issue.
It’s obviously there are massive technological aspects to dealing with climate change that are really important. But it’s also an issue about imagination, how we think, social, cultural issues, how we operate as a society. And I think that’s evidenced by the fact that there are all sorts of solutions to climate change that are actually not being rolled out at scale yet, that aren’t being taken up.
It’s often said that we have the solutions to climate change, we just need to make them happen. And I think part of the reason that doesn’t happen is because of a crisis of our ability to adapt. Imagine and commit to the world that we want to see rather than where we are now. And I think that’s where the arts come in.
So the arts can help us to imagine different worlds, different ways of doing things, get us out of the rut of only being able to see things through the lens of the way we do things now to allow us to think in radically different ways. And I think there’s also something particular about things like theatre, opera, live shows, we are experiencing it all together.
It’s a fundamentally collective experience. So not only are you being presented with different ways of seeing the world, different ideas, hopefully presented in a way which combines information and emotion together. I think that’s really important. You’re also experiencing that together with all sorts of other people.
So it’s not a solitary thing. You’ve got this powerful shared experience that helps bind us together and commit collectively to action. Because doing stuff on your own can be really isolating and it’s not enough, basically. We have to do stuff together. And I think that’s why these collective experiences are incredibly important.
And when I think of art that’s made a big difference to me, I think it’s that collective experience that really makes you galvanized and recommitted to doing stuff. I think it’s really important.
Kaska: Through Creative Carbon Scotland, there’s lots of work being funded for artists working with communities. To maybe do some more community engaged projects or creating shows that can invite into their own communities. I would encourage people to look up Creative Carbon Scotland and all their work they’ve funded.
But I wonder whether you have any tips or ideas or thoughts on how community groups can bring this kind of creativity into their work without, you know, having to sort of invest into developing a big arts project.
Lewis: I think you can bring it in in really small ways, like it doesn’t have to be about putting on a whole opera performance and everything that that entails.
Lots of the projects that we’ve done with work have been about using art in very small, gentle ways. And actually that can be really effective. So we found, for example, running events, trying to get people to talk about environmental issues in that area or to give their feedback on climate change plans and strategies that are being made and getting people to participate in those.
Just doing really small things like printing, origami, collective drawing, we found that those can really draw out different kinds of conversations, like doing something together. Doing something with your hands I think helps us just to kind of relax and chat more easily. Doing something collectively together with people you might have completely different opinions from I think can be quite useful for trying to make those spaces less confrontational as well.
So working with arts doesn’t have to be big scale. I think really small things like just trying drawing, reading a poem at the start of your group meeting, just to get into a different kind of headspace. I think those things do make a big difference. And yeah, if you don’t feel that you have the expertise to do it yourself, then I think seek out others working in your area.
So find your local artists, find your local cultural organisations. We found that a lot of those are, you know, they really want to do more, thinking about things like libraries. Who, you know, want their space to be used. They can offer space to meet. They can help find different ways of communicating the things that you’re working on.
So trying to find those collaborators I think can be really useful as well and sort of spread the load that way.
Different things work for different people. So you need to try out a range of different things.
I love opera. Opera’s not gonna work for everyone. We need other people to be doing different things.
Kaska: So, you’re showing this piece at the Fringe. Obviously we’d recommend highly that people go and see your piece, but is there anything else about climate environmentalism, just this kind of space that you’ve seen in the Fringe programme that you might recommend people see?
Lewis: Yeah, I’ve been looking through some of the programme, which is huge as always, and I’m sure there’s all sorts of great things in there that I’ve not seen. I saw a piece advertised called The Last Forecast which is about climate change specifically. I think it’s a sort of dance physical theatre piece. Family friendly piece. Which I thought looked really interesting.
So I was quite struck by that and thought I might try and go. I think there’s a dance performance called The Flock And Moving Cloud. It’s got two different dance pieces which are about environmental themes, which I think looked really lovely. I’m sure there’s all sorts of other things there.
Kaska: And maybe you can tell us when and where we can see the show.
Lewis: So Stumped is on at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh.
There are shows on the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th, 11th and 13th of August. at 6.45 till 7.45pm. And the show on the 6th is also BSL interpreted.
Kaska: Wonderful. We’ll put the link in the show notes for the bookings.
And we’re just about to listen to another extract from your opera, to take us out of the show. Could you tell us more about what that’s about?
Lewis: So this extract comes from the very end of the piece. The fifth story. Up to now we’ve had four stories which all feature a tree which is cut down or destroyed and what happens next.
In the fifth story, we encounter a tree which is in danger that hasn’t actually been destroyed yet, and it’s left open. It comes from Viking folklore. It’s about Yggdrasil, which is the world ash tree that holds up the world and the threats to that tree. And I deliberately left this last story open ended and sort of hanging, so we don’t know what’s going to happen next, and the piece basically ends with an invitation to go out and create your own stories.
Resources
Lewis’ website
https://www.lewiscoenen-rowe.com
STUMPED opera on Insta
https://www.instagram.com/stumpedopera
STUMPED opera on FB
Made in Scotland Showcase
https://www.madeinscotlandshowcase.com/
Creative Carbon Scotland
https://www.creativecarbonscotland.com/
Scottish Storytelling Centre
https://www.scottishstorytellingcentre.com
Alliance for Scotland’s Rainforests