"Global warming. Climate change. The climate crisis. Call it what you will, it is a central challenge of our times. Art and artists can -- and must - respond to it."

-- Paul Gordon Emerson | Co-founder 

There is no escaping the climate crisis.  

The issue now is how we engage to meet it.  

Company | E is, and has always been, committed to this task. We began our concerts on climate change, Warmer, in 2007. Since 2017 the centerpiece of our programs for young audiences has been ecological. To Sail Around the Sun, and Letters to Earth, both are ecological programs.         

As an organization deeply committed to International Cultural Engagment we are refining our strategies and approach to that engagement, seeking new, sustainable ways to create partnerships and to become a center for information on how art and artists can work responsibily.   

Here are a few parts of our work.  

WARMER - Concerts on Climate Change

WARMER is an ongoing series of commissions to choroegraphers around the world, in the U.S. and DC. The goal of the entire series is to bring attention to the global climate crisis through the lenses of artists all around the earth -- a further reminder of the idea that we all live on just one small planet.      

CONCERTS FOR YOUNG AUDIENCES

Company | E's programming for the young and young at heart is central to our repertoire. The company has been commissioned twice by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts since 2017 to create new works for young audiences. The first of those TO SAIL AROUND THE SUN, set to the music of the Four Seasons by Anotnio Vivaldi, chose to take an environmental and ecological message.

In it, a young hero is tasked with finding all four seasons in a single day -- bringing home that fact that it is always winter and always summer somewhere on earth. Her journey is a reminder, again, that we live on just one small planet, and that what happens anywhere on earth affects what happens everywhere.  

AUTUMN: An Excerpt from TO SAIL AROUND THE SUN

LETTERS TO EARTH takes a different approach to the question. LETTERS asked students from all over the DC area to write a letter to the earth, to say anything they wished to the planet. From those letters the Company created an evening-length concert, sharing the messages -- so often dire and regretful, and so often hopeful of making a difference -- with audiences throughout DC.

NEW TECHNOLOGIES FOR ENGAGEMENT WHICH CUT OUR CARBON FOOTPRINT  

In 2022 Company | E launches a new effort, in partnership with Paul Modjadji and Breaking Down Borders Africa to create powerful digital partnerships which can bring people together "as though they were in the same room" while never leaving their home countries and studios. 

The goal is to foster a world where people who aspire to art can be taught by, and share with, artists from all around the globe -- reducing the requirement for air travel and giving people access to the world regardless of their means.

The program plans to launch in summer/fall 2022 between BDBA and Company E, with ambition to expand to multiple countries by mid 2023.