Grammy award-winning artist Lorde rounds up a year of environmental activism by lending her track “Leader of a New Regime” to a dance film created for the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow as part of The Generation Restoration Film Festival, produced by the UN Environment Programme. 

The concept and choreography behind the music video was envisioned by New Zealand-born, UK-based filmmaker and choreographer Corey Baker, who worked with nine dancers to create this windswept film at Falck Renewables’ Millennium Wind Farm in the Scottish Highlands. The project takes its name from the tenth track of Lorde’s climate-conscious album Solar Power, which she released earlier this year.

“In Leaders of a New Regime, I see the dancers almost as children of the wind turbines,” said Baker, who directed the project. “There are a lot of preconceptions about wind turbines. I was keen to show their beauty, majesty and create a work emphasizing a sense of harmony and compatibility between humanity, nature, and renewable energy.”

In the opening moments of the film, dancers perform military moves in imitation of the uniform layout of the turbines. Then, a dancer gives a breathtaking display of contemporary choreography and industrial mimicry while strapped 120 meters in the air to the top of a wind turbine. By the closing scene, the dancers have formed a circle, perhaps signifying the closed-loop renewable energy system that environmental protectionism advocates for.

Artists like Lorde and Corey Baker are acutely aware that recent flooding and wildfires are a “code red for humanity,” as stressed by UN Secretary-General António Guterres in a climate report this year. The resounding headline from COP26 is that the world’s leaders are not doing enough to slow, speak less of halting, climate change caused by human activity. Greenhouse gases are at an all-time high and the planet is perilously close to hitting the 1.5°C global heating limit.

“There’s a critical role for art to play in the climate conversation,” said Baker, “and our film celebrates the positive moves we need to make—individually and collectively—to save our planet.”