Clean Air Now Organic: The Film

CAN Organic features the young dance group RAWMAR Dance Group, and a class of young dance-students from Leyton sixth-form led by choreographer Inez Robertson. Both groups suffer from highly-polluted living and working environments which affect their performance ability and health. The groups engaged with CAN out of concern for the air quality within their regions, and both created physical performance pieces that interact with the rural landscape at the intersection of natural and man-made. The dancers physicality and sensitivity to their environment makes more apparent the industrial human impact on the green-belt surrounding our major cities.

Within the CAN film and photographic stills, the dancers are seen in 3 human-impacted landscapes, which pose the question of our footprint on the environments we live in.

An eerie sensitivity is present in viewing the body as the ‘pollution receptacle’ in the video and photographic series. The loss of our natural ‘greenbelt’ environment is a saddening threat, and the pollution of these environments by industry are physically harming. This feeling is exacerbated by the vulnerability of the human form in the face of this landscape, and the combination of the power we have over it and the way it impacts back onto us.

www.cleanairnow.org.uk
What is CleanAirNow?
CAN is an independent campaigning initiative set up by Vasilisa Forbes and Claire Matthews in 2016 to raise greater awareness around issues of air quality and climate change, through visual arts. CAN were the first group to place air quality campaign billboards across London, and regularly use billboards spaces to communicate. The indie billboards, ‘subverts’, street-art posters and digital campaigns encourage a youth-audience to consider campaigning for environmental change, and directly involve and feature local youth on a volunteer basis.

CREDITS:
Producer: Jesus Rubio
Stills Photographer: Andrew McGibbon
Director: Vasilisa Forbes
Creative Director: Claire Matthews
Grader: Stefano Colosi
Editor: Goncalo Sa Correia 
DOP: Josh Birch using Red Scarlet
Drone: Matt Cranfield

Cast:
RAWMAR Dance Group:
Emma Holt
Ferghas Clavey
Chris Andrews
Sophie Page
Inez Robertson and class from Leyton Sixth Form