Youth theater collab: "Ritual Dam Smashing"

"The Ritual Dam Smashing" is a piece of participatory musical theater that's part of a larger show I'm working on called "Ecotopia Now!" Here it is being life-acted by the Fridays For Future Utah climate strikers and their allies in front of the Utah State Capitol as part of the Global Climate Strike 9/24/21.

The piece begins by the community arriving at the face of the dam (in this case a large paper banner) and writing/painting their answer to the question: "What are you going to smash through for eco-justice?" on it. In this case the kids wrote down things like: "environmental racism", "homophobia", "suicide," and more.

I then performed a song I wrote called: "Pre-cision Earthquake: the Prayer of Seldom Seen Smith" that dramatizes and embellishes the scene in Edward Abbey's novel "The Monkey Wrench Gang" where the salty Colorado River guide Seldom Seen Smith, kneels down on the bridge overlooking the Glen Canyon Dam and prays "for a little preeee-cision earthquake, right here."

At the conclusion of the song (where the Glen Canyon Dam has been successfully smashed to bits by a billion ecotopians, and the blue herons, sandbars full of deer, and all the drowned beauties of Glen Canyon have returned), we all gather at one end of the space and start getting hyped to "smash through the wall, once and for all!" When the energy reaches a crescendo, we charge at "the dam"-- feeling the collective thrill of running with others like an unstoppable tidal wave toward the world we wish to see.

Special thanks to Rebekah Ashley (Sierra Club) and David Dominguez (Ecotopia Now!) for facilitating the creation of the dam/banner. Footage and photos provided by: Rebekah Ashley, Grey Jensen, and Lakshmi Johal-Dominguez. Learn more about the Fridays For Future climate strike movement here: https://fridaysforfuture.org/