Amber Amoo-Gottfried | "Facts and figures are critical, but it’s creative projects which bring the climate movement to life"
4 May 2025
We are delighted to welcome Amber Amoo-Gottfried to Bristol Old Vic on 28 May to lead a very special workshop inspired by our next production The Beautiful Future is Coming.
Sowing Seeds of a Beautiful Future invites young people to step beyond the theatre and into their own vision of what might lie ahead.
Through guided meditation, role-play, and hands-on art-making, we’ll imagine futures where something did shift — where communities rose to the challenge, to new ways of living, loving, and caring for the planet — before crafting messages from imagined worlds to send back to the present.
Our Climate Consultant Nico Conde spoke to Amber about her work and inspiration...
Nico:
Amber, you spend much of your career advocating for climate justice and empowering young people to engage in both environmental and social action. How do you think theatre and storytelling can help shift narratives around the climate emergency from fear to action?
As a facilitator, how do you approach the process of inspiring hope and resilience in the face of the climate crisis? What helps people feel empowered and believe their actions matter?
Amber:
It’s simple: art stirs emotion. It helps us untangle, explore, and reflect on our place in the world— that’s naturally an emotional and connective process.
Facts and figures are critical, but it’s creative projects like The Beautiful Future Is Coming —theatre, film, music, literature, and more— which bring the climate movement to life, connect people emotionally, and make change feel possible. I see gallery spaces, auditoriums, and studio workshops as governing a similar role to sharing circles. Spaces for storytelling and exchange. In these spaces, communities can develop their own personal relationships with stories of discovery, challenge, and healing.
Art gives them space to feel, to grieve, to hope in ways that they might not otherwise allow themselves in everyday life. Creative spaces offer a safe container, and rare kind of permission, for people to sit with their emotions, curiosities, and dreams for the future.
There’s this quite striking quote from music-led performing artist, Love Ssega, which I think sums it up pretty well: “The power of the arts lies in their ability to invoke a reaction – or, in other words, to activate an emotion. Therefore, what artist isn’t an activist?”
That’s the thing about creative projects. By nature they activate emotion, invoke reaction, and inspire action.
Nico:
In your work, you often invite people to connect with nature through hands-on experiences. How does nature play a role in both your personal life and the work you do with communities, particularly in fostering a sense of connection to people and the planet?
Amber:
Nature is quite intimately woven into who I am and how I show up in my work.
In an urban setting, it can be easy to get lost in the grey and gravel. We’re lucky in Bristol, it’s quite a green city and even the centre has some beautiful nature spots— from Brandon Hill, to Greenbank Cemetery, to Avon Gorge.
For me, connecting with nature is all about the senses. Listening to what the land has to say, noticing its textures and tastes. It’s about being in conversation with the world around you, and giving yourself the permission to get playful and experimental with it.
As kids, we have little qualms about squelching barefoot in muddy soil, or marvelling at pocketed sticks and stones like precious treasures. As adults, we need to be more intentional about how we reconnect with this unapologetically curious side of us, to heal tensions in our relationship with the wider world. That’s what we do in my nature-based workshops with communities— we interweave nature, art, and mindfulness to reconnect with ourselves, each other, and the ecosystem that binds us.
When I’m in nature, I dance, I sing, and sometimes share poetry with the landscape. It’s my offering. In reciprocation, you can learn a lot from nature— it’s tender, nurturing, and rhythmic, but also raw, ferocious, and chaotic. Nature teaches you, in a world where we’re conditioned only to move at speed, that there’s real value in moving slowly too. Giving yourself the permission to rest so that you can take action when the time calls.
Nico:
The Beautiful Future is Coming weaves together narratives spanning across time, from past environmental discoveries to future scenarios. In your own work, how do you balance looking at the past and present while trying to imagine and build a sustainable and equitable future?
Amber:
It’s precisely our growing understanding of the thread that weaves together past, present, and future that’s fuelling meaningful dialogue in the climate movement.
How did centuries of colonialism lead to the mass fossil fuel exploitation that caused today’s climate crisis? What must we protect and nurture now, so that future generations can not only survive, but truly thrive?
In my work, I often talk about time —past, present, and future— as a kind of composting process. We need to break things down to understand what’s nourishing and what’s harmful. Composting helps us filter and clarify: to let go of what’s harmful —systems of domination, relationships of extractivism, patterns of working that no longer serve us— while holding onto what’s regenerative. Even within the most broken systems, there are seeds of wisdom, laughter, and resilience which can be harvested to feed a beautiful future.
From there, imagination becomes a powerful tool. Dreaming and designing new systems, relationships, and possible worlds. I use creative practices to help communities lean into their sense of hope— to paint a picture of futures that are joyful, equitable, and feel like home. The next step is to plant those seeds in the present. In this way, hope isn’t passive; it's active, imaginative, and rooted in both reflection and action.
Nico:
In your view, what role do creativity play in the broader movement for climate justice? How can we ensure that stories from communities who are most affected by the climate crisis are heard?
Amber:
I’m a firm believer that climate action must be rooted in collective care over control.
We’re not just facing a climate crisis— we’re living through a web of overlapping crises: from climate breakdown and biodiversity loss, to racial injustice and cost-of-living.
The world is complex, messy, and interconnected— trying to control or dominate that complexity is what tipped us into a state of imbalance in the first place. Decolonial, queer, and feminist movements have sought to unpack how cultures built on exploitative control —of land, of bodies, of ecosystems— create the conditions for crisis.
While control cannot handle complexity— care can.
Care invites us to connect deeply, think relationally, and approach complexity with humility— essential ingredients for working at the intersection of climate and social justice.
What does this look like in practice? It means shifting power, funding, and visibility towards community-led climate initiatives. It means challenging dominant narratives, and re-centring repair and care in conversations about places like Palestine, where genocide and ecocide are entwined. It means creating nature-connection programmes that centre systemic land justice and are shaped by the needs, dreams, and lived realities of brown, queer, trans, disabled and youth communities.
When care is the focal point, everything else aligns more naturally and intuitively. As a learning designer, research campaigner, and grant-maker, this approach shapes every aspect of my work.
