Climate Justice in the Arts with Marla King through WWTP
One of the hot topic requests from our dance community for 2025 was around Climate Justice.
We invited dancer and Climate Change Activist Marla King to lead a session and share her expertise and experiences around the theme of environment and climate justice in arts and dance. Marla is a Welsh dance artist, creative, facilitator, and climate and social justice advocate. As well as her experiences collaborating and performing with a range of companies and choreographers, she also facilitates workshops and dialogue sessions with various creatives and arts organisations around embedding values of climate justice and ecological consciousness within their work. These artists and organisations include Glasshouse Dance, VOXED, Richard Chappell Dance, Glasshouse Dance, Rubicon, CoDa Dance, YDance, and Sustainable Arts in Leeds. She is a co-creator of the glanio collective – who came together to explore creative responses to the climate and ecological emergency. The collective has been exploring models of slow touring rooted in ecological wellbeing, working with local artists and the community, in partnership with Impelo. She’s also an active member of Equity for a Green New Deal, advocating and campaigning for climate justice within the sector and beyond. Marla is a board member of the Resilience Project, a youth-led organisation with a vision to empower young people who are experiencing climate anxiety and burnout from activism, through exploring creative processes that can help foster emotional awareness and collective care within activist spaces.
The Climate Justice in the Arts Session was held online allowed a safe and open space for reflection. Marla facilitated the session to focus on the unique, powerful and deeply important roles each of us hold in our contribution towards holistic, compassionate, justice centred climate action, through our work, creative practices and life more broadly.
Following the session, Marla said,
“Thanks so much for inviting me to share a session through WWTP and continuing to create spaces for collective learning and connection across the sector. Also really appreciate your continued support and focus on bringing these important issues into the programmes you organise.”
The attendees of this session also said
“Marla is so knowledgeable and generous in sharing this knowledge and understanding with others. I very much appreciated her compassionate approach and her acknowledgement of the feelings of helplessness which can sit alongside climate justice. Recognising the value of taking small steps and hyper-local community action was helpful for me. The links and resources were helpful as well. Thank you Marla, we are lucky to have you working with us! I am unlikely to have the capacity to join a working group on a regular basis but would like to be kept in the loop.” Elly Welford.
“Thanks for organising this WWT event with Marla which was very informative - I’d like to receive info on the Climate Action in the Arts focus group organised by WWTP. I’m also attending a Dance focus group webinar next month, created by the Theatre Green Book as a way of offering opportunities for ballet and dance companies across the UK to exchange ideas and discuss environmental issues in the dance sector, so let me know if anyone has specific issues or questions which I could raise on their behalf.”
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