Ed Wade-Martins has just come back from a week working with troubled young people. “It was a relief not to hear the words climate change or peak oil for the whole week,” he says. “It’s like in Brighton we live in this eco bubble obsessed with the coming apocalypse!”

For Ed, that bubble has existed for the past five years since he set up Movingsounds, a community arts organisation, with his friend of 27 years Keith Ellis. Movingsounds aims to use the arts to inspire creativity and raise awareness among young people about environmental issues.

Travelling around primary and secondary schools, Keith and Ed perform shows and workshops, such as getting students to make an orchestra of instruments from bits of rubbish, in order to engage them in thinking about environmental problems.

Hailing from Norfolk, Ed and Keith’s interest in the environment was sealed at age eight when they shared a mutual excitement over the newts nesting in their local pond. Ed later moved to London to study art at Goldsmiths, which he says killed the subject for him, and went on to scratch a living as a musician, performer and workshop leader in Brighton. Movingsounds was a natural progression.

Over the years they have worked with every school on the Isle of Man and with schools in Ringmer and Uckfield. This year they’ve set their sights closer to home.

After developing a new show, Ed and Keith are hoping to receive funding to take it to all the schools in Brighton. “It’s called The Connected Show,” says Ed. “It got to the point where if one more person said the solution to the problem is recycling I was going to scream, so the concept of the new show is to take ideas a bit deeper.”

The performance is a mix of acting, music and video projection, with samples donated by record label Ninja Tunes. The first half follows the evolution of humanity through industrialisation to where we are now. The second half examines possible futures.

Ed says: “There’s a corporate salesman trying to sell three different futures. One is a techno fantasy that says we can keep on going and technology will save us. The second is a greenwash future and the third is an apocalyptic future where we say, ‘OK, there isn’t a solution for this. We’ve got to close our borders and fight for our resources’.

“My character goes through a transformation process of enlightenment and a Zen guru appears and says it’s time for me to create my own future.”

The show then opens up into a workshop, where students can explore their thoughts and ideas and start to build opinions around ways forward.

But given the show is about allowing people to create their own futures, isn’t the appearance of a Zen guru a little too much of the writers’ ideological slant?

Ed says they have worked for months to make sure the show never preaches.

“Obviously it’s loaded with our own opinions, but we say no one knows what will happen, what are you going to do? We just want to encouraging questions. That’s a big thing.”

* Visit www.movingsounds.org for more information.