Environment / “Burnt Out,” devised and performed by Penny Chivas. At Dancebase Edinburgh, August 26-28; and “You’re Safe Til 2024: Deep History,” presented by David Finnigan and the Barbican, London. At Edinburgh Fringe, August 18-29.  Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

IN the dying days of the 2022 to Edinburgh Fringe, I caught up with not just one but two performances derived from the 2019 Canberra region bushfires.

Both creators are the children of Canberra environmental scientists and each begins with an acknowledgement of the Ngunnawal people and a welcome to First Nations audience members, striking an uncommon note in the festival.

First up was Penny Chivas in “Burnt Out”, inspired by her own experiences when she flew back from Glasgow, where she’s been completing a masters, to Canberra in late 2019, only to be greeted by a vision of hell.

The setup is deceptively simple, a ring of light in the blackness, in and out of which Chivas weaves her way as her bodily and gestures show both fear and extreme anger.

There are just two props – a large box of matches and a large lump of coal, a reference perhaps to former prime minister Scott Morrison. She later smears her face with it.

Chivas begins with her own a cappella rendition of “Along the road to Gundagai”, but you can just tell from the visual atmosphere that the “sunny sky” is not long to be so.

In another sequence, fingering that lump of coal, she performs her own version of Peter Allen’s “I Still Call Australia Home”. The irony is not lost on the audience of committed environmentalists, who seem well aware of who/what Adani is.

Elsewhere she enumerates the years of recorded extremes fires – 1851, 1898, 1926… and so on.

This is an angry piece, an act of plain-speaking that would have benefited from a tighter, more poetic script. More often composed of quiet, contained movements familiar from the butoh theatre, which has influenced her, the slow movements tell a lot, although there are occasional moments of extreme speed.

A unique aspect of the performance is the score by composer Paul Michael Henry, who recreates the anguished sounds of magpies and an almost didgeridoo-like drone reminiscent of helicopter or fire-truck sounds.

Chivas’ vision is one of sheer rage as she asks why we haven’t recognised what’s going on.

“Burnt Out” has already been honoured with the inaugural sustainability prize from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and will, all being well, be seen at QL2 Dance studios in Canberra later this year.

DAVID Finnigan’s one-man show “You’re Safe Til 2024: Deep History”, is already familiar to audiences at the Canberra Theatre.

It’s an hour-long. theatrical-scientific mind-blast examining of where we fit into deep history in terms of climate change.

Finnigan was not in Canberra in December 2019, but his best mate Jack Lloyd (Co-CEO of Belconnen Arts Centre) was and decided to take his family down the coast for a holiday – bad decision.

At the very same time, Finnigan’s father was in hospital with a spinal infection and, out of the mists of pain, texted Finnigan in London asking him to make a summary of his notes on the 75,000-year history of the human being.

He embarked on the project, aiming to tell the story through the eyes of a universal “She”.

Finnigan is a well-known Canberra performance poet and theatre artist who, with Lloyd and musician Michael Bailey, ran a science-theatre company and is a  natural raconteur. He chats affably with the audience about his own appalling selection of popular songs – one of which he relates to climate change – and posits that through art we can confront and deal with the problems of climate.

Using the butcher’s-paper-on-the-wall technique, he begins to chart the positive things that we can do – “take power” is one of them. Wrong – by the end of the show he is forced to abandon the whole lot as he realises that within such precepts lie the roots of the problem.

Surrounded by piles of Demerara sugar, used to demonstrate the world’s increasing population, Finnigan enumerates the destruction of the 2019 bushfires, especially on the one billion animals who were incinerated.

There wasn’t a dry in the house.

But all is not lost. His mate Jack and family escape from the coastal fires, his dad gets out of hospital in one piece and Finnigan comes up with a sort of optimistic conclusion that the climate-change era may pass so that a future generation can enjoy a happier future than ours.

These two personal and wildly different shows, one dominated by sound and movement and the other by intellectual ideas, make a welcome inclusion in the Fringe program, especially since the UK has recently been made aware that it is not immune from the problem either.