Posted in ASU news, News on Oct 09, 2026.
Last week the UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES Flagship Hub, directed by Joni Adamson, took its place as a proud seed-funder of a performance of Anthropocene.
The Flagship invited the award-winning creative team, Rachel Bowditch and Karen Jean Martinson, who teach at Arizona State University, to travel to Paris to present their work at the MOST Social Transformations Week, running from 29 September to 2 October, 2026.
With this initial seed-funding in hand, the Anthropocene team went on to successfully fund-raise so that all 22 of their ASU student performers and their technical team could to travel to UNESCO Headquarters in Paris for the performance.
Anthropocene is evocative storytelling about the consequences of climate change. The performance, which was also funded by the Humanities for the Environment Global Network, translates the abstract scale of the climate crisis into a visceral, human-scale experience, inviting us not just to understand the Anthropocene intellectually, but to inhabit it emotionally.
At the end of the night, the audience rose to an ovation, no doubt inspired, through dance and image, to address accelerating change in their own lives and work towards achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
The performance stood in productive counterpoint to the day’s policy discussions at UNESCO, by embodying a philosophy at the heart of the MOST-BRIDGES Coalition: the humanities and arts are not decoration to scientific and policy work, they are vital instruments for collective meaning-making in the face of accelerating planetary change.
Congratulations to the artists, organizers, and collaborators who brought this powerful work to Paris!
