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Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center »Address: 202 S. Broadway Ave. Urbana, IL 61801
Phone: (217) 344-8820
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From the Change of State Performance Project comes the premiere of AquaTown: A Future Hydrohistory, an original play from the group’s co-founder Andrea del Moral that addresses the future of climate change in the Midwest. The performances began June 10 at the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center in Urbana.
“I am fascinated by this question: How are we going to respond to major societal change?” director del Moral said. “Climate change, economic downfall, and resource depletion are not wild speculations anymore. What do we do?”
Andrea del Moral drew her inspiration for AquaTown from her love of “wild water.” In this country, each individual uses and needs water every day, but water is still considered a “special interest” issue when it is certainly not, del Moral said.
“Attention to local water management is growing — rain gardens, prairie restoration, Prairie Rivers Network, Mahomet Aquifer Project — as a director working on the West Coast around water issues, I devised the project out of curiosity as to how people are approaching really different water issues in the Champaign County area, in the context of water becoming a mainstream, forefront issue worldwide,” del Moral said. “There’s quite a lot of innovation here — many people are beginning to think about it and take action.”
“I am horrified and devastated by emergence of bottled water as an everyday object over the last decade, and I have lived without indoor water and know that we can live well without wasting it,” she said.
The cast and crew of AquaTown have not wasted any time in the process, either.
“AquaTown has been created mostly from scratch over the past month and a half by some really talented people, both from C-U and from farther away,” set designer and stage manager Carly Nix said. “I think people will be really intrigued by the style of the show.”
From her research on climate change, economic conditions, resource access, as well as the experience of the three actors in the play, del Moral created characters and scenes that spawned plots. She then composed them into a mixture of theatre, music and dance.
AquaTown “feels more like a performance collage than a play,” del Moral said. “It is accompanied by a dynamic and talented musical ensemble that has made an original score on original instruments.”
Set between the years 2020 and 2070, AquaTown delves into ideas of how people will react to the prospect of climate change in the Midwest in the years to come. Characters arrive in and out of simultaneous future struggles, all the while struggling with the dilemma of sustainability in the 21st century.
AquaTown: A Future Hydrohistory debuted with a free show on Thursday, June 10 and ran through June 13, with the other performances giving a special $2 discount to those who help the environment by not arriving by car.
“AquaTown is relevant because financial, energy, and water resources are most likely going to be harder to have in the near future,” del Moral said. “This show invites audiences to think about these really complex and, to be honest, scary and difficult questions, in a context of humor and beauty.”
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