Volume 10, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Critical Theatre Ecologies

This article reflects on the sociopolitical, cultural, and health landscape(s) of our current moment in time, addressing how intersecting crises have delivered us to an unprecedented moment for drama, theatre, and performance. As communities across the world have had to dispense with staples of everyday life – attending live theatre performances being one of these –, so art, in all its forms, has never been more significant in its capacity to bring us together, even if modes of togetherness have shifted in their referentiality and locationality. As the article proposes, we need to take an intuitive approach to the appreciation of how our ecologies – in their broadest iteration – have been impacted and realigned by the COVID-19 pandemic in such ways that we can expect that our future scholarship(s) on plays, place, and landscape will and, indeed, ought to reflect this experience. Dialogues on theatre and environment, which are already intersectional, are now receiving yet another focusing lens through the pandemic.The article also suggests that our understandings of how our ecologies have been adapted invite a consideration of new modes of engaging with the environment in our discourses – and of the very term itself and what it might encompass – and new economies in calibrating our discourses to reflect our radically redistributed individual and collective experiences. The text offers examples of categories that emerge particularly strongly where spatial liminality is key; in so doing, it asserts that in-betweenness is a central element towards understanding our contemporary role and responsibilities: from collapsing binaries (environment/economy) to the unmoored experience of our times.

In this text and image essay, I introduce a new concept to the environmental humanities; one which seeks to trouble metaphysical notions of dwelling by combining the idea of home (the oikos in ecology) with a notion of permanent becoming. In this way, home loses its conservative and reactionary connotations with atavistic origins and identities and instead is opened up to nonhuman forces and powers. As I explain in the opening section, bec(h)oming is a matter of affect; it depends upon the capacity of bodies to move beyond themselves, to be impressed and transformed by the environments which they move through, to tap what the philosopher Gilbert Simondon might see as the “pre-individual” energy that runs through all organisms. Humans are no exception; they, too, are caught in the flux and flow. By focusing on bodies, the essay not only looks to depart from conventional narrative-based notions of ecocriticism and theatre ecology, it aims to provide a lexicon, a new idiom for thinking through corporeal ecologies that are attuned to sensations, the virtual play of a cosmic Earth. To do that, the text provides the first detailed account of the work and practices of influential UK movement artist Simon Whitehead, whose Locator workshop has proved pivotal for so many dancers, choreographers, and artists over the past few decades. Integral to the paper is a desire to experiment with alternative modes of writing, a style that would express the enthusiasms of bec(h)omings and give some sense of its somatic potential.

Tim Spooner has described his practice as “an increasingly complex series of live performances centred on the revelation of life in material.” 1 In this article, I consider this revelation as the precondition of a theatre ecology. Spooner stages a theatrical encounter between bodies and environments, in which distinctions between person - thing , subject - object , self - other no longer hold. Whilst there are evident parallels between this practice and posthumanist , or new-materialist philosophy, I shall describe Spooner’s theatre as artlike .This article responds to two thematics outlined in the original call for papers for CDE 2021: “eco-spaces” and “eco-aesthetics.” The argument runs: 1) an ecological space is the result of an ecological aesthetics; theatre is considered fundamentally social, political in significance; art is fundamentally ecological in significance; 2) ecocritical theatre and theatre ecology are categorically distinct: in ecocriticism, political, social, and cultural concerns mediate a concern for nature; in a theatre ecology nature is reconstructed virtually; 3) ecocriticism stages a recognition of an ecological crisis in social terms; theatre ecology stages a revelation of an environment; 4) against theatre, there is legislation; 5) a theatre ecology extends a juxtapositional logic of political ecology : this is a false start and ill-timed.The argument leads to a reconstruction of three gestures drawn from three of Spooner’s performances. In these gestures, theatre is rendered artlike . The exposition describes Spooner’s practice in terms of embodiment and occupation , before considering how the ecological implications of an artlike theatre are, firstly and finally, ethical.

The concept of resilience is frequently described within neoliberal discourses as the ability of individuals to bounce back from shocks and reflexively adapt to changing circumstances. In ecological sciences, however, resilience is more commonly understood as the capacity of systems to radically transform themselves, when their usual mode of operation is challenged, rather than simply reverting to their original state. This article considers how live action role-play, as a form of participatory performance, might support ecological resilience by enabling players to actively reflect on their cultural practices in constructing the systems of their play and develop new capacities in the process through intersubjective exchanges with diverse others.The notion of performing resilience is concretised through discussion of artistic research residencies at Trumpington Community Orchard in Cambridge in 2017 and the Peartree Bridge estate in Milton Keynes in 2018. These projects explored how encounters with unfamiliar spaces and beings might enable participants to play with their resilient changeability. Specifically, the article addresses the value of spatial reflexivity in building resilience, proposing spatial defamiliarization as an aesthetic strategy for transcending the immediate familiarity of habitual practices, expanding participants’ horizons of perception and imagination. These arguments yield a theoretical model for cultivating resilience through participatory performance termed anchorage-leverage . This model suggests that habit can provide the foundation for potential transformations of cultural practices as existing capacities are reconfigured by new relational connections, conferring new affordances that enable participants to radically reconfigure the ecologies in which they play and live.

Looking at Simon McBurney’s award-winning solo performance The Encounter (2015), this paper examines the play’s contribution to environmental humanities through an ecocritical study of its combined use of state-of-the-art sound design and the age-old art of storytelling to address the link between the ecological and spiritual crises that we are facing. The Encounter relates the real story of the American photographer Loren McIntyre who lived with the Mayoruna tribe for six weeks in 1969 after getting lost in the Amazon rainforest. Relying heavily on sound design to take us deep into the jungle, the show addresses our relation to nature and technology and elicits our empathy to denounce the dictates of a globalised world ruled and threatened by neoliberal and neocolonial capitalistic ideologies. As the brain – and the stage – become the forest, The Encounter challenges the notions of distance and separation from the Other in favour of a deep sense of interconnectedness. Using Donna J. Haraway’s 2016 book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene , this article sheds light on how The Encounter invites us to recognise the urgency of defining what it means to live together in “response-ability on a damaged earth” (Haraway 2) and how the intermedial, hybrid qualities of the play found not a “post-human” but, on the contrary, a “com-post” theatre piece (11).

This article explores how water performs on the contemporary stage. Drawing on theorists such as Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, and Joanna Zylinska, we investigate water in its various dramaturgical functions as matter, medium, and metaphor to sketch performance alternatives that highlight nonhuman forms of agency. Focusing on the work of sound artist and geographer AM Kanngieser and their use of water to listen to the Anthropocene as well as on the Filter Theatre production of David Farr’s play Water (2007/2013), we want to highlight how diffraction and resonance alternately provide ways of rethinking traditional configurations of making meaning. The sonic dimension of water, in particular, turns into a productive site for manifesting the heightened relationality of the Anthropocene world. The article thus argues that the material dramaturgies of water show how the crucial interactions between science, philosophy, and performance manage to sketch new posthuman knowledge formations.

This article considers how processes associated with reviving well-known plays can offer new theatrical approaches to the climate crisis. Such revivals can make visible ecological or environmental features that might have gone unnoticed in the past, but which can inspire agency and instil knowledge in the present. This idea is explored in relation to an Irish production of Caryl Churchill’s Far Away (2000), which was staged on an uninhabited island off the South Coast of Ireland in 2017 by Corcadorca Theatre Company. This production can be seen as offering a practical illustration of many of the theoretical ideas associated with theatre ecologies, especially for how Corcadorca blurred distinctions between audience and performers, indoors and outdoors, performance and spectatorship, past and present, and much more. This production should thus be seen as a case study that is worthy of analysis in its own right but which also allows for the identification of viable practices for the staging of theatrical revivals more generally.

This article situates two works by contemporary American playwright Adam Rapp – Faster (2002) and Ghosts in the Cottonwoods (2014) – in the wider context of the different traditions of ecological theatre that emerged in the United States in the twentieth century. These traditions can be characterised by their distinct spatial orientation, while similarly shifting focus away from the centrality of representing character and human subjectivity. Contemporary eco-drama retains this spatial orientation established by the landscape play (Gertrude Stein) and environmental theatre (Richard Schechner) but breaks with their displacement of character by developing an aesthetic mode which stages the formation of human subjectivity as deeply intertwined with concrete places. This article shows how Rapp’s plays turn places into “symptomatic spaces” in Una Chaudhuri’s sense that signify a deep interdependence between human subjectivity and nonhuman nature. My reading focuses on how Rapp’s plays contribute to the formation and the conceptualisation of a distinctly “Anthropocenic imaginary” in contemporary American drama.

Ecodramaturgy, a critical framework that interrogates the implicit ecological values in any play or production, is explained here and then used to demonstrate the central tenets of climate theatre, including theatre’s potential for decolonisation, interspecies understanding, and community engagement. Burning Vision (2002) by Marie Clements employs a ceremonial performance form to unearth the hidden history of uranium mining on Dene lands as it argues for environmental justice and the authority of Indigenous oral traditions. Sila (2014) by Chantal Bilodeau foregrounds the interdependence of culture and community across species. Finally, Salmon Is Everything (2006) by Theresa J. May amplifies the voices of Indigenous communities most affected by ecological loss. Taken together, these plays and their productions underscore the potential for theatre-making to function as a democratising force in the Anthropocene.

Oil explorations by multinational corporations in Nigeria have grave consequences on the ecosystem. Gas flaring, oil spillage, and other forms of land and water pollution seriously degrade the natural environment as well as displace Nigerians from their homes and traditional occupations. Pollution has caused increased flooding, erosion, and dearth of both food and fishes, leading to poverty and hidden hunger, among other problems. More destructive is the reactionary disposition of the Nigerian state to climate change and ecological disasters. Beside the provision of make-shift structures and relief materials to flood victims, there are hardly any proactive efforts on the ground to check the activities of multinational corporations operating in the country. Greg Mbajiorgu’s eco-drama Wake Up Everyone (2011) depicts the challenges of the climate crisis in contemporary Nigeria. A close reading and critical analysis of the play, which is a microcosm of the country, illuminates the ways these challenges affect Nigerians and the need for action. Apart from displacing individuals from their homes, flooding takes a heavy toll on the agricultural sector, as most crops and livestock production systems in Nigeria are not yet fully technology-based and are, therefore, susceptible to environmental degradation. As a result, the flooding of farms and plantations, damaging crops and seedlings, leads to a corresponding degree of food scarcity/insecurity and indeed inflation in the cost of farm produce. This paper concludes that conscious efforts suggested in the play should be made to forestall multinational corporations from further pillaging the environment, and that government functionaries saddled with the task of forging active measures to stem the effects of climate change in the country should rise to their responsibilities.

Ella Hickson’s Oil (2016) and Leigh Fondakowski’s Spill (2014) make palpable to their audiences what I call the Petrocene : the age in which human existence has become impossible to conceive without oil. Each play illuminates the pervasive presence of petroleum infrastructures in its own way: while Spill focuses on the specific and sensational crisis of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, Oil presents a series of scenes which focus on two women (mother and daughter) who struggle to carve out their existence in various time periods and in the context of different fossil-energy regimes. Both plays succeed in unveiling not only the toxicity of extractive regimes necessary to fuel the Petrocene, but also the toxicity of the narratives that uphold extractive regimes and their attendant injustices. Moreover, both plays convey the intoxicating effects of oil, which appears as a near-magical substance that promises unfettered progress and access to the good life. Examining these plays in conjunction not only highlights the increasing presence of ecological concerns in dramatic pieces, but also illustrates the ways in which dramatic performance can distill enormous oil infrastructures into apprehensible worlds and thus create vital spaces for pondering the Petrocene.

The article argues that the so-called Capitalocene, proposed by Jason W. Moore, augments Anthropocenic reasoning by addressing the systemic and ideological shortcomings threatening the very basics of human existence that hitherto have so often been neglected or simply missed by “Green Arithmetic” and a naive belief in technology. The readings of Philip Ridley’s Shivered (2012) and David Eldridge’s In Basildon (2012) illustrate that the Capitalocene and its attempts at understanding the ecological and social consequences of global capitalism offer an exciting new lens for the analysis of contemporary political drama, especially with regard to the ecology of industrial plants in the post-manufacturing age.

“We are shaped, to a greater extent than almost any other species, by contact with others. [. . .] Yet what counts now is to win. [. . .] And for this, we have ripped the natural world apart” (Monbiot). This quote stems from a Guardian article that is also printed as an epigraph in Tanya Ronder’s 2015 play Fuck the Polar Bears , and it reveals the connection between the Capitalocene, as described by Jason W. Moore, and contemporary eco-drama: both thematise the “Age of Loneliness” (Monbiot) in which everyone fights against each other. In contemporary drama, this behaviour is frequently reflected in the depiction of isolation and alienation from nature that is expressed in the form of disgust, for instance, by making objects that are associated with nature literally or metaphorically disgusting.To various degrees, the depiction of the Capitalocene in combination with disgust and abjection can be found in Fuck the Polar Bears as well as in Dawn King’s 2011 play Foxfinder . In both plays, disgust is depicted as degrading the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature. The dichotomy of nature and culture then lines up to “a seemingly endless series of human exclusions” (Moore, Introduction 2) and alienates humans from nature. In these plays, a random disgusting object functions as substitute for the border between humans and nature. By making toy polar bears or foxes disgusting, the border between humans and nature, and to some extent between humans and other humans, is redrawn, which leads to an increased sense of isolation and alienation. Therefore, both plays use disgust as a technique to extrapolate the lack of interconnection between humans and nature, which comments on the competitive, isolating, and destructive nature of the Capitalocene.