My conversation with Meghan Moe Beitiks, assistant professor in theatre at Concordia University in Montreal. Meghan Moe is an artist and designer working with associations and disassociations of culture, nature and structure. Our mutual friend Ian Garrett thought we might get along. We did. Our conversation focused on Meghan Moe’s Angles of Consequence project, a season of site-specific performances with Canadian performers to create work with reflected sunlight in key sites of climate advocacy and destruction in Québec. Meghan Moe and I had tea in Montreal. It was a very, enlightening, conversation.
Show notes generated by Whisper Transcribe AI:
Action points
Story Preview
Imagine art that dances with the sun, revealing hidden truths about our planet’s climate crisis. Megan Moe’s ‘Angles of Consequence’ uses reflected sunlight in powerful performances, sparking dialogue and demanding action.
Chapter Summary
00:00 The Power of Empathy
01:05 Introducing Megan Moe
01:31 Angles of Consequence
03:08 Art as a Tool for Understanding
04:35 Reflected Sunlight and Climate Change
07:09 Indigenous Resistance and Environmental Impact
09:49 Collaborating with Nature
Featured Quotes
Behind the Story
Megan Moe’s project, ‘Angles of Consequence’, emerged from pandemic isolation and a fascination with reflected sunlight. It evolved into a series of site-specific performances addressing climate change in Québec, highlighting both the destructive forces of fossil fuels and the powerful resistance of Indigenous communities. The project aims to create an open-access guide, encouraging global engagement with sunlight performance art.
Note: This is an automated transcription that is provided for those who prefer to read this conversation and for documentation. It has been verified but is not 100% accurate (some names might not be quite right). Please contact me if you would like to quote from this transcript: claude@conscient.ca
[00:00:00] Megan Moe
And even being confronted with something that is like, weird or uncomfortable character growth, like you have to having to ask the question, why is this person doing this weird thing? It's a good exercise in empathy, to be perfectly honest. Like, why is this person doing this thing? Why does that make me uncomfortable? What, what is it about my perception that has shaped this experience for me? I feel like those are really essential questions for us to be constantly asking ourselves, especially in an age where there's a lot of discord, there's a lot of dissent, there's a lot of disagreement. And the better we understand ourselves, the better we're able to engage with humans who are different than us.
[00:00:47] Claude Schryer
Episode 232 My conversation with Meghan Mo Beitiks, assistant professor in Theatre at Concordia University, Montreal. Meghan Moe is an artist and designer working with associations and disassociations of culture, nature and structure. It's our mutual friend Ian Garrett, who thought we might get along and we did. Our conversation in Meghan Moe's kitchen focused on ‘Angles of Consequence’, a season of site specific performances with Canadian performers who created works with reflected sunlight in key sites of climate advocacy and destruction in Quebec. It was a very enlightening conversation.
[00:01:35] Meghan Moe
Angles of Consequence so one of the things that I feel like we don't talk about enough in the arts world is that there's a fair amount of research at this point that have established the cultural, psychological and almost like biological necessity of making art as a way to process feelings, perspectives, thoughts. One of the things that, like art gets this kind of reputation of being fun or inventive and that like, those are its primary things, that it will distract us or it will create a new world. But I, I feel like the, the importance of art in, in processing doesn't always get the fair amount of play that it gets. And a lot of folks who think that maybe they can't make art if they're not an official Capital A artist miss the fact that the, the making the art is not always about the product. Sometimes it's just about the process. That being said, like, art has also been proven to be really effective at spreading information, raising awareness, connecting communities. It is also really consistently innovative.
It introduces new ideas into the world and introduces new paradigms of thought, you know, ways of approaching things. So I would say, like, when folks, you know, when we come into moments of crisis or collapse, I think most people's first thought is, you know, prepping or politics or that sort of thing. And those are, and that's valid. But I think that the, the thing that we Forget, we can forget really easily is that we also need moments of digestion. We need moments to, to absorb and understand what we've experienced and what we've learned. And then that moment of digestion can lead to ways of problem solving, like recalibrating ourselves to meet a new challenge, building connections and strengthening communities to work together in the face of difficult times.
[00:04:05] Claude Schryer
Well, we've met twice now. I heard about you from Ian Garrett, who's I think a colleague of yours. And it was interesting because you write the way I think, or I think the way you write. I'm not sure. So, Meghan Moe, I wanted to know. People can read your bio in the episode notes, but where are you at now? I know you're a teacher, but you're also a creator. And what are you working on that is super inspiring?
[00:04:35] Meghan Moe
Well, I don't know about super inspiring, but during the pandemic I started working a lot with reflected sunlight because it was a material available. I was living in Florida and trapped indoors and watching the sun kind of pass over the floor. And so I started creating installations with reflected sunlight and mirrors. And I went on to create a performance with reflected sunlight with local performances in Las Vegas and the. With the Rogers Art Loft. And so that has kind of evolved to my current project, which is called Angles of Consequence. And what it is is a series of site specific performances that I'm producing by other artists with reflected sunlight at locations that are crucial to climate change.
So me and some research assistants were funded by a SSHRC Insight development grant. We did some research on what are some locations in Montreal and Quebec that are relevant to this question of climate change. And to answer that question, we really had to look at what are organizations that are having the most outsized impact on the climate, both positive and negative.
The negative is really easy to prove. It's the fossil fuel companies. The. There's tons of data out there on it. Everything's very interwoven. If you're making fossil fuels, you are having a very negative impact on the planet. The positive is a lot harder to discern, mostly because there's a million ways to lessen climate impact, but there's also a million different types of greenwashing happening with companies that are trying to present themselves as more ecologically friendly or, you know, they're focused on one aspect of sustainability, but they're not taking into account a whole bunch of others.
But one of the things that we found is that one of something, again that has been proven to be consistently effective is actually indigenous protests. And resistance against fossil fuel system expansion. And there was a report called, I believe it's called Indigenous against Carbon. It's by the Indigenous Environmental Network and Oil International, I believe. And it. It breaks down the millions of gallons of oil that have been kept out of the atmosphere by indigenous resistance to fossil fuel system expansion, specifically pipelines. So we found that there was a pipeline that was planned through Montreal.
It was called the East Energy Pipeline, Might be coming back, I know, depending on legislation, but it was initially shut down from local indigenous resistance. And so one of the sites of the performances that we chose was. Was along that path of the canceled East Energy pipeline. And then another location is a refinery in Montreal est, which a lot of. I don't know that everyone realizes that even though in Quebec we have some of the cleanest power in Canada, most of it is hydroelectric, which has its own fraught history with indigenous communities. But we have a number of refineries in Montreal est that are processing that fossil fuel. And one of the things, one of the reasons I think that that maybe is not always on the forefront of people's consciousness is that there was a bill a few years ago that prohibited the expansion of further fossil fuel development in Quebec, and that is still valid to this day.
And so we have another group of artists who have taken on that bill itself as a prompt and have selected their own site in considering kind of all of the questions and issues that come up in considering the bill. So we have three art, we have a solo artist, we have a duo, and we have a group of three. And they're each working with a specific site. And our research assistants are acting as assistants and stage managers and documenters to them. We're going to do an official season launch on May 1st with Force Base at Concordia. So there'll be a live stream, discussion and panel and broadcast through them. And then the performances will take place in June of this. This year. And one of the things that I like to warn people about, that feels like an awkward logistical element, but is actually core to the work, is that each of the performances have an initial scheduled date and they have two backup dates in case the sun decides not to show.
And the thing that I like to remind people is like. And this has been true of my own work as well, is like, the sun is not gonna show up on your time. Right? It's not gonna. It doesn't care whether you're giving a performance is busy. Right? So. So I've encouraged the artist to think both about how they work on a clear, sunny day and also like, what sort of how the work plays out when they might not have direct sunlight.
That being said, if there's rain or something, we have these back updates. But I think it's also, I mean, talk about the role of the artist. Increasingly, I feel like this is an important mindset to have or a stance to take. We think about what it means to be a great artist in terms of mastery, control and genius. We think if someone is a great artist, they have total control over their material or their craft. And if they're, hopefully they're really valid if they're a genius. And that means that no one's allowed to question them and everyone should scramble to make whatever weird requests they have work.
Well, when you're trying to collaborate with the sun again, it doesn't give a crap what your resume is or like what you, what you've done so far. It's. It's going to show up on its own terms. It's got its own community with clouds and, you know, microclimates that it's navigating. And I feel like it's really humbling to be like, I'm gonna make this whole work that's centered around the sun and the sun might decide to not show up that day. It or it might behave differently than I expect. There might be clouds, there might be a wind that shows up and, and introduces a new element.
And I'm really interested in and considering that dialogue both of like, how do I do what I do, you know, effectively to the best of my ability, but how do I let go of some of this perception of control that I have and embrace how the work unfolds when I've surrendered part of it to an ecological entity? But all of that is, it's grounding us in where we are physically on the planet. I talk a lot about like, positionality in both literal and cultural senses, that our view of the world is determined in part by our literal location on the globe, but also by these other layers of gender, race, class, etc.
That, that shape how we experience the world. And so that's part of what I'm really excited about is all of these artists are taking very different approaches. They're um, they come from different trainings, they come from different positionalities. And so my hope is that that produces a very broad vocabulary of how to engage with sunlight and performance. And then part of the project is, is that we're producing an open access guide for performing with sunlight. And I'm hoping to distribute that and encourage other folks around the world to make their own sunlight reflective performances.
[00:12:40] Claude Schryer
Now we're almost out of time, which is unusual. Not unusual, but unfortunate. We're not going to talk about sonography and all those other things that we might have, but maybe another time. I end with action points. Now you've just given me a really good one, which is this whole artwork. But what other things? Now you're an educator around sonography and sustainability. What kind of advice do you have for artists and listeners?
[00:13:04] Meghan Moe
You mentioned Ian Garrett, the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts has a really fantastic platform called Canada Green Tools that is about calculating the carbon footprint of different sizes of events or performances. And I feel like that sort of thing is useful. It's kind of a drag cause it's very bureaucratic. It's about like, you know, math and numbers and all of that. Unless you love those things which go for it.
But there's an older talk that Ian gave a while ago that I really like that is about considering the fact that gathering people in one place is inherently sustainable. In that on a carbon level, everyone's in theory turning off all of their lights at home and coming to the one place to gather together. But I would also say that, you know, circling back to kind of my first answer, that that's also part of what, what helps us in these time difficult times of, of crisis and climate change and political upheaval is that we are invited to be human in space with one another. And that's also one reason why I think live performance is so important, especially in the age of AI, is that we are met face to face with kind of the miracle of our own existence. Like, humans are incredible. They do crazy, incredible stuff all the time. And being able to witness that up close and consider what that human is doing in relationship to your own humanness, I feel like makes us all clearer, more grounded and, and better.
And even being confronted with something that is like weird or uncomfortable character growth, like you have to having to ask the question why is this person doing this weird thing? It's a good exercise in empathy, to be perfectly honest.