Making “The Last Mammoth”

(L-R: Iza Rincon, Gabbi Kosmidis, Sebastian Biasucci, Priscila Paes)

In the spring of 2023, the Mammoth History Lab and Prof. Rebecca Woods partnered with Toronto-based performance company Good Old Neon (GON) to create a short theatre piece for children. The project was, among other things, an experiment in translating the insights of scholarly history into a register accessible to, and enjoyable for, children.

 In June, GON held open auditions and assembled a creative team of five core actors, a stage manager, dramaturg, director, and playwright, altogether including artists from the Latinx, Indigenous, Turkish, Jewish, and Queer communities. They were: Nicola Atkinson, Sebastian Biasucci, Hayden Finkelshtain, Gabbi Kosmidis, Hazel Moore, Alexander Offord, Priscila Paes, Iza Rincon, and Nicole Wilson.  In August, the team went into the rehearsal hall with little more than a handful of notes, some loose ideas, and the research of Prof. Woods. By the end of the month, they had created The Last Mammoth (TLM).

 A core theme of the Lab’s work is mammoth remains as a bellwether for climate change. A cultural icon strongly associated with cold, ice, and snow, as well as with the concept of extinction, woolly mammoths are increasingly mobilized in debates over climate futures, as the recent climate protest at the Royal BC Museum demonstrates. As a familiar figure, this extinct charismatic megafauna seemed perfectly positioned to introduce the challenges of climate change, including the mass extinction event which it may entail, to young learners. This was the point of departure for our work on TLM.

(Director Nicole Wilson making notes of our many ideas)

The first weeks of creation were reserved for open experimentation: we engaged in ludic exploration through improvisational games and exercises, invented children’s stories on the spot, held political debates, wrote voluminously on chalkboards, and drank lots of coffee. This kind of experimentation is core to Good Old Neon’s creative process: we begin without a clear idea of what the final product could or ought to look like, and generate the final piece through an iterative procedure of exercises or experiments the outcomes of which are necessarily undetermined. During one phase of creation, we kept a daily log of everything we consumed during rehearsal: water, food, plastic, soap, hours of cell phone battery life, toilet paper. In another, we were compelled to confess our climate-guilt while our co-creators sang back to us: “Your guilt isn’t helpful.”

The creation process posed multiple unexpected challenges. One core issue was the question of asymmetry: so much of theatre for young audiences is designed to create unity between children who may be different from each other – for good reason! But an honest assessment of the climate crisis requires that we be honest about, and attentive to, social and economic differences. While the greatest burden of the consequences of climate change will be borne by the Global South, the greatest share of responsibility for the crisis falls on the shoulders of wealthy, highly industrialized societies, mostly in western Europe and North America. The easy label of “human-caused climate change” collapses these key economic and social differences into the general label “human.” But the average Canadian contributes much more to climate change than, say, the average Haitian.

We created this work in the particular context of Toronto, with its highly diverse population (nearly half of all Toronto residents are immigrants, according to the city’s own data), with households from multiple socio-economic tiers frequently occupying the same neighbourhood. For us, this context made it crucial that our work attend to the asymmetries attached to climate change for our audience and not collapse all actors into false equivalence.  But how? Such asymmetries can be difficult enough for adults to fully grasp, let alone children. In the end we used easy-to-understand economic markers – “the billionaires,” for example, were assigned significant responsibility in our play. While a six-year-old may not be quite ready to grasp the distinction between “the Global South” and “the Global North,” they can readily understand the difference between the ultra-wealthy and the average citizen — the person who lives in a mansion instead of an apartment, or flies a private jet instead of taking the bus.

We also discovered that personification is a powerful tool when communicating certain ideas to children. In one scene, a mountain is grieving over the loss of their best friend, a glacier which once spread far and wide but now has shrunk to the size of a small ice cube. While a young person may not have the vocabulary to understand such concepts as “shrinking polar ice caps” or “eco-grief,” they do understand loss: the loss of a family member, friend, pet, or beloved object. The ice cube — whose name is Gerald — quickly became an audience favorite. Prof. Woods’s own children were later overheard echoing the mountain’s mournful cry: “Gerald! Geeeeeraaaald!”

                                                                                           (Hayden Finkelshtain as “The Mountain”)

At the heart of our work on The Last Mammoth was a sixth, non-human performer: a baby mammoth puppet, designed and built by Graeme Black Robinson. The puppet was wholly constructed from recycled or scavenged materials (as one less-than-successful experiment, the wool was created from strips of “reusable” plastic Walmart shopping bags — these do not, it turns out, take color very easily). Throughout our open-ended experiments in theatrical form, the puppet dictated its own path: at any given time, it required at least two people to operate, with fully three puppeteers necessary while standing or walking. The cast therefore was compelled to hop between roles — now a character, now a puppeteer — a creative challenge which required its own careful choreography.

At the end of August, GON had created The Last Mammoth. From the initial press release:

 While on a school field trip to the museum, Mads – a young child – accidentally discovers ‘The Last Mammoth’ (portrayed on stage by a full-size puppet) frozen in an ice block. When the storm outside cuts the power, the ice thaws, and the woolly mammoth comes to life before their eyes. Together, Mads and their new friend journey north in search of other mammoths, for family and community. Along the way, they learn important lessons about extinction, climate change, and what it means to be ‘the last’ of your kind.

(Iza Rincon as “Mads’)

In March 2024, GON was invited by Prof. Kate Maddalena of University of Toronto Mississauga's Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology to present TLM for an audience of Media Studies students and other guests. Again, a useful and insightful talk-back session followed.

 Based on the feedback from both performances, GON is preparing to take The Last Mammoth back into the rehearsal room in order to sand some of the rougher edges, trim some of what drags, deepen and extend some of what is too briskly passed over, and explore what a baby mammoth means three years after the appearance of Nun-cho-ga in Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in territory.  Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island — this the name given by many Indigenous cultures, including the Haudenosaunee, to the landmass otherwise known as “North America” —  have themselves an entirely different relationship to climate, climate change, and extinction. As we move forward with exploring what The Last Mammoth can be, and for whom, we look forward to the opportunity to collaborate with other Indigenous artists to adapt the piece into different versions in order to speak to those distinct relationships to the climate crisis.

 We believe The Last Mammoth can fill a crucial gap in the culture. Many parents are currently in the process of grappling with their own climate grief, and there are few real precedents to refer to when thinking through how to engage children in this process in a way that is both honest and empowering. The Last Mammoth, we believe can be a useful tool in this conversation.

 The collaboration between the Mammoth History Lab, Prof. Woods, and Good Old Neon is also, we believe, a prime example of the possibilities generated through collaborations between academics and artists. An experiment translation (in among other things), our partnership demonstrated the ways in which it is possible for artists to tease out, re-interpret, and re-articulate core insights of scholarly work without doing violence to its complexity and rigor. We offer this as a model for other scholars interested in this kind of work and look forward to deepening our collaboration in the future.