If you plan to attend virtually or would like to watch a recording sent later, please register using the form linked on this page. We will send a link via email.

Noon at Night is a wandering classroom that prototypes creative adaptation to crisis. Through experimental performance, Noon at Night connects subversive learners and educators in higher education institutions worldwide in solidarity and interdependence. Incubating within the University of Michigan during the 2024-25 academic year, Noon at Night has situated its study and practice at the intersection of climate emergency, grief, and imperialism.

In the academic year 2025, Noon at Night will host a series of public events and workshops that immerse UM students and community members in potential future climate-related crises and create opportunities to practice mutual aid through speculative fiction and performance. Each program will focus on a possible crisis in our near-term future and invite participants to ask: what will I do in this situation and who can I turn to?

This hybrid interactive discussion is part of a creative resilience series to foster knowledge and skill development around collective disaster preparedness and climate emergency adaptation. This is in collaboration with Jen Rae from the Centre for Reworlding, Syrus Marcus Ware, students at University of Wisconsin - Madison, UofM students, and campus and non-campus community members. This serves as a primer for a public, day-long series of creative climate adaptation workshops on October 11, mapping the unique climate disaster vulnerability of UM and imagining creative responses to prepare for disasters and build resilient systems in the future. In November, UM students will join students at UW Madison and other transgressive educators worldwide to imagine how higher education institutions can generatively respond to climate disasters through a speculative fiction radio theater performance. This project will dramatize current and impending climate catastrophes, recording and transmitting survival skill workshops in a participatory drama.

Join artists Jen Rae, Syrus Marcus Ware, and dawn weleski as they discuss the role of artists in responding and adapting to the climate crisis.

______________________________

Dr Jen Rae is an award-winning artist and researcher of Canadian Scottish-Métis (Indigenous) descent living on unceded Djaara Country (Castlemaine) Australia. She is recognised for her practice and expertise situated at the intersections of art, speculative futures and climate emergency disaster adaptation + resilience – predominantly articulated through transdisciplinary collaborations, multi-platform projects, community alliances and public pedagogies. Jen creates and contributes to experimental multi-platform collaborative projects balanced with professional mentoring of other artists, public talks, workshops and deep socially-engaged projects with diverse partners and communities. Most relevant is her role as a core artist of Arts House’s prescient REFUGE project (2016-2022) - where artists, emergency service providers and communities worked together to rehearse climate-related emergencies exploring the impact of creativity in disaster preparedness. Relevant projects during REFUGE include the speculative fiction short film REFUGIUM (co-written with Claire G. Coleman); PORTAGE: SHELTER2CAMP in collaboration with 4 First Nations master weavers to co-build 6 life-size disaster shelters with over 120 community participants and partners; the FIRST ASSEMBLY OF THE CENTRE FOR REWORLDING event; and, the art exhibition RESURGENCE. All are grounded in First Nations knowledge systems and protocols, exploring themes climate, colonisation, disaster preparedness and intergenerational justice.

Syrus Marcus Ware is a Vanier Scholar, visual artist, activist, curator, and educator. Using painting, installation, and performance, Syrus works with and explores social justice frameworks and Black activist culture. His work has been shown widely, including solo shows at Grunt Gallery in 2018 )2068:Touch Change) and Wil Aballe Art Projects in 2021 (Irresistible Revolutions). His work has been featured as part of the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art in 2019 in conjunction with the Ryerson Image Centre (Antarctica and Ancestors, Do You Read Us? (Dispatches from the Future)), as well as for the Bentway’s Safety in Public Spaces Initiative in 2020 (Radical Love). Syrus has participated in group shows at the Never Apart in Montreal, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of York University, the Art Gallery of Windsor, and as part of the curated content at Nuit Blanche 2017 (The Stolen People; Won't Back Down). His performance works have been part of festivals across Canada, including at Cripping The Stage (Harbourfront Centre, 2016 & 2019), Complex Social Change (University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, 2015) and Decolonizing and Decriminalizing Trans Genres (University of Winnipeg, 2015).

dawn weleski (they/she) is UM Student Life Sustainability's Artist in Residence. weleski is internationally renowned for their participatory, politically-engaged work, activating and broadcasting the stories of individuals and groups that normative institutions fail to provide. They co-founded and co-directed Conflict Kitchen, a seven-year, seven-day-a-week restaurant that served cuisines from countries in conflict with the United States, and City Council Wrestling, where professional-ameatur wrestlers, local residents and City Council members personified their political interests into wrestling characters that figuratively and literally fought out their conflicts in the wrestling ring. They regularly exhibit and produce public projects around the world, and most recently exhibited at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum 2022-23. weleski holds a BFA in Visual Art with a concentration in Contextual Practice from Carnegie Mellon University and a MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University.