Loud and Clear: Brave New Voices Speak Green at This Year’s Festival
The top four winners of the 2008 Speak Green contest are blowing in to Park City to tell their personal takes on cigarette butts, moldering bread, and coincidental cancer.
“The kids are so inspiring – they’re at that age where you’re still so sure you can make a difference. And they’re so willing to be a part of making change,”
-James Kass, Founder and Executive Director of Youth Speaks.
-James Kass, Founder and Executive Director of Youth Speaks.
It’s 2:00 in the morning, I’m hugged up in a dog-cat-blanket pile on the couch, and I’ve got the chills. It isn’t the cold – nope, I’m shivering because I just got finished watching all 1:43 hours of the video of the 2008 Speak Green contest, presented by Youth Speaks along with The Redford Center (at the Sundance Preserve).
The contest, held this past July 16 at the Kennedy Center in DC, was the final round of a series of events that had whittled 100-plus of the nation’s most promising young poets down to just a handful of performers. One by one they took the stage and, in the rolling cadence of a hailstorm, they told a story of a new green movement, one full of cities without trees and out-of-reach Hybrids, cigarette butts and ATM receipts, asthma, and the cancer of coincidence.
And if canned footage of the performance, viewed five months after the fact on an aged 12-inch laptop, can move this aging cynic to chills and wonder, without a doubt the live event is definitely going to be one of the buzzworthy events of the Festival. It isn’t just the poetry that gets to me, though the poems are beyond amazing – pure verbal aerobatics, each word twisting, flipping, and reversing on itself. What’s goose-bumping me is the poise and clear-eyed certainty of the performers themselves. How is it possible that kids of such a still-tender age (they range from 13 to 25 in this level of the competition) are already so insanely confident? Watching how primed and ready they are to take over the world makes me feel about 1,000 years old. And the picture they paint of their environment is a grim one, full of near-impossible problems and hardship. But still, I’m left feeling strangely hopeful.
“The kids are so inspiring – they’re at that age where you’re still so sure you can make a difference. And they’re so willing to be a part of making change,” says James Kass, Founder and Executive Director of Youth Speaks. “By introducing young voices of color into the conversation, we reshape the conversation, even redefining the meaning of the word ‘environment.’” While international attention preoccupies itself with the alarming rise in global temperatures and water levels, the Youth Speaks kids’ concerns about the environment fall much closer to home. “Not like they don’t want to save the polar bears, but there are already millions being raised to save the bears,” Kass says. “Meanwhile, these kids are going to a dilapidated school, and there are four liquor stores in their neighborhood but no market.”
The young poets of Youth Speaks first joined forces with The Redford Center in 2006 during the second Sundance Summit, a multiple-day event where mayors from over 50 cities and towns across the U.S. gathered to talk about issues of climate change. “The issue was pretty simple: convince the mayors that climate change was real, and motivate them to go home and take action within their communities,” says James Redford, Chair of the Redford Center board. After two solid days of lectures, seminars, and meetings, the mayors clearly had a solid understanding of the issues. However, “the most inspiring moment, the moment where all this new information was transmuted to a clarion call for action … was the performance by [Youth Speaks] slam poet George Watsky. As he took the microphone in front of 50 mayors, it was hard to know what was going to happen, but three minutes later – after a poetic barrage of youthful outrage, disappointment, and hope – you could have heard a pin drop.”
Since this year’s contest winners were announced in July, the Green Team has crisscrossed the country, performing at environmentally minded events from the Green Festival in San Francisco to the Greenbuild conference in Boston, where they opened for Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Next stop: the Sundance Film Festival.
The art of telling personal stories in new, unexpected ways is what this year’s Festival is all about. And nowhere is this idea more embodied than in the Brave New Voices Speak Green event. Thursday, January 22 at the Music Café, Lauren Whitehead (age 24), Katri Foster (age 22), Joshua Bennett (age 20), and the Urban Word NYC 2008 slam team (ages 16-20) will be speaking up and out about their own environmental issues in their own personal, powerful ways.
Don’t miss these Youth Speaks performances:
Thursday, January 22, 2:40 p.m.
Music Café, Park City
Friday, January 23, 7:00 p.m.
Michael Berry Gallery, Salt Lake City
Ongoing
Throughout the Festival, Youth Speaks poets will be taking to the streets of Park City for impromptu performances. Keep your eyes peeled.
Click here to check out the Youth Speaks website.
Learn more about the Redford Center at the Sundance Preserve.
