Developed by Dr Tom Payne from Sheffield Hallam University with an interdisciplinary team and partners across the city and beyond, Storm-Cloud will be a series of performances, creative works, and dialogue events which combine climate research with the arts, inspired by John Ruskin.
The events will introduce the project to the public and support the development of future research, performance, public engagement and exhibition on the themes of climate and pollution.
The programme will launch on Wednesday 19 June 2024 at the Tanya Moiseiwitsch Playhouse in the Crucible Theatre with Storm-Cloud: Observations of the Sky, a contemporary staging of John Ruskin’s prophetic public lecture ‘Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’ (1884).
Ruskin’s controversial lecture highlighted the disastrous results of nineteenth-century industrialisation, the human role in climate change, and the effects of air pollution, ‘a plague-wind’ on our health.
Storm-Cloud: Observations of the Sky has been developed by an interdisciplinary team of artists and scientists led by Dr Tom Payne, with dramaturgical focus by Terry O’Connor, composition by David John Brady, motion design by Jake Goodall, illustrations by Billy Hughes and Penny McCarthy, photography by Becky Payne, digital media by Richard Mather and Anne Doncaster, and archival research by Ashley Gallant.
Following this performance, a special dialogue event will be held at the Millennium Gallery on Thursday 20 June.
This event will feature collaborative discussions between invited artists, community organisers, cultural institutions, and researchers which will shape the direction of the Storm-Cloud programme.
Later this year, Storm-Cloud: Thrown into Form will debut at No Bounds Festival, a special one-off performance at the G-Mill at Sheffield and District African Caribbean Community Association (SADACCA).
Storm-Cloud: Thrown into Form is an immersive experience created in response to Ruskin’s lecture and combines live performance, spoken text, digital projection, and a unique weather soundscape to conjure a striking atmosphere of environmental dis-ease that evokes the climate crisis.
The Storm-Cloud programme is led by Dr Tom Payne and supported by Sheffield Theatres, Sheffield Museums, Sheffield Hallam University, Invisible Dust, No Bounds Festival, The Green Estate Community Interest Company, Sheffield and District African Caribbean Community Association, Space Hub Yorkshire, UK EONS, and The Guild of St. George. Storm-Cloud is receiving ongoing mentoring from Tim Etchells, Forced Entertainment.
Photograph by Becky Payne