Ice is beautiful, but fleeting. Artists can spend days carving an intricate ice sculpture just for it to melt in hours. The same can be said about glaciers.
Mother Nature is the artist, and glaciers are her masterpiece. However, rising temperatures are causing these stunning ice monuments to melt rapidly.
To highlight this, Jasper aerialist Sasha Galitzki has created an endurance performance that combines her mountain-climbing skills with silk dance.
Galitzki is an aerialist or someone who performs acrobatics high above the ground. In this case, But Galitzki isn’t performing in a circus. Her stage is the glaciers themselves.
She hangs above the glaciers in silks, often without safety nets or ropes. Instead of performing for an audience, Galitzki performs for still photographers.
“…if I had a choice between performing for an audience or traipsing out to a glacier, I would use the glacier every time. That, to me, is more rewarding than the applause of an audience,” Galitzki told The Globe and Mail.
Galitzki’s performances are intended to capture the fragile nature of glaciers while also emphasizing her fragility within them.
“Ice fascinates me. On the one hand, it’s hard, cold, and brutal because we humans are not designed to survive alongside it. But on the other hand, it’s so fragile – a little warmth, and it’s gone,” said Galitzki.
Galitzki’s body is squeezed and balanced on a small piece of fabric or metal during her performances. She only has a few minutes before her hands turn purple from the cold.
From the moment her performance begins, a clock ticks towards the moment when she can no longer hold on. She has to make every millisecond count.
Where It Started And Where It’s Going
Before Galitzki performed atop glaciers, she spent seven years as a professional ski patroller in Tahoe, California.
She is also an experienced rock climber. While her background as an aerialist is important, Galitzki says her performances wouldn’t be possible without her mountain experience.
‘It’s crucial. I couldn’t do this if I didn’t have the aerial background, obviously. But I couldn’t do this without my mountain background, either,” expressed Galitzki.
Galitzki began her winter performances during the pandemic while living in Waterton. In complete isolation, she sculpted her performance into what it is today.
“Isolation forces things to grow in hard places. Instead of performing in front of a live audience, I was performing for the wind and the trees,” she explained.
Galitzki, who previously relied on images to capture her performances, is now producing a short documentary film with director Trixie Pacis.
Pacis is a talented writer, creator, digital creator and filmmaker from British Columbia. When it comes to storytelling using digital mediums, her talents shine.
Galitzki and Pacis hope to bring their film to the festival circuit this fall before releasing it online next year.
A Distant Problem
During her interview with The Globe and Mail, Galitzki recalls performing in a 50-foot-high ice cave last winter. When she revisited the cave a year later, it had shrunk to half that height.
“Visiting the same glacier twice is heartbreaking: you can see its disintegration in front of your eyes. That is a loss that I feel keenly,” explained Galitzki. According to Galitzki, the cave probably won’t exist next year.
From a distance, nature appears constant. But that same distance has numbed us to the reality of climate change.
Per Espen Stoknes, a Norwegian economist and psychologist, explains this concept in his book “What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming.”
Stoknes believes we are too distant from climate change in many ways. For many of us, melting glaciers are seen through a TV screen, not outside our windows.
Because of this, the problem appears physically distant and unurgent. Similarly, climate science deals with timescales well beyond our lifetime.
Because of this, climate change and melting glaciers tend to fall to the bottom of our to-do list, behind other urgent issues.
What’s so great about glaciers, anyway?
For starters, glaciers form the planet’s largest reservoir of fresh water.
In fact, one out of every four people rely on glaciers and seasonal snowmelt to supply their water.
Closer to home, the Saskatchewan Glacier, which supplies many communities in Alberta with drinking water, will be mostly gone by the end of the century.
According to a University of British Columbia study, roughly one in four people living in Alberta will experience water shortages due to melting glaciers.
Melting glaciers have more than just local impacts. They’ll have global effects. As glaciers continue to melt, sea levels will rise. This will lead to coastal flooding and more frequent and intense coastal storms like hurricanes.
