From weather to climate: a note

This article explores a dimension of ecological experience that tends to be either forgotten or misrepresented in both theatrical practice and scholarly commentary – namely, our relationship with climate. Against scenographic and/or site-based experiments in representing weather, both of which are rooted in decidedly naturalist modes of mimesis, I argue for a more abstract dimension of depicting climate that is inherent in the affective and temporal registers of the theatrical medium itself. In this way, and drawing on David Williams’ entry for ‘Weather’ in the ‘A Lexicon’ issue of Performance Research (2006), the aim is to sketch out the possibility for a new way of thinking about theatre and climate that avoids the narrative and tropic contradictions inherent in the ‘climate change play’, its unresolved humanism. What I am arguing for ostensibly is a counter-intuitive practice of ecological theatre that does not oppose the medium to ‘nature’, but, on the contrary, thinks through the ramifications of posing theatre as part of nature, an isomorph, in other words. I refer to this alternative model of theatre as articulating a dramaturgy of the clinamen, giving rise to a temporal becoming that equates theatrical experience with climatological experience

Ecology in Beckett’s Theatre Garden: Or how to cultivate the Oikos

No abstract available

Animating tangible futures: Returning (again) to Battleship Island

Borrowing from Isabelle Stengers’s calls to ‘reclaim animism’ in practices that inherent to Western modernity and not racially equated with the supposedly regressive modalities of primitive thought, this essay seeks to investigate what an ecologically inflected model of ‘animated’ criticism might entail. It does so by engaging with Lee Hassall’s film Return to Battleship Island, a work that focuses on the ruins of Hashima Island in Japan. The aim of the text is to highlight how artworks are able to produce an (in)tangible or virtual space where perception is exposed to the touch of the world and implicated in its becoming. A chain is set up, in other words, where the world impacts on the artist who, in turn, fashions a space – an artwork – whereby that impact is expressed and translated in and for a spectator

Theatricality and Drifting in the Anthropocene: Reading Asger Jorn and Guy Debord’s Mémoires as ‘earth book’.

This essay proposes a new way of reading the Situationist notion of dérive (drift) in the Anthropocene by thinking of it as an operation that is geological in impetus, a sense of movement caused by an agentic earth. Equally, it looks to offer an alternative and expanded theory of theatricality in which the theatrical is no longer associated with theatre per se. On the contrary, it is now seen as a mode of representation that deterritorializes spectators by placing them in the midst of groundless flows and anonymous processes. In the same way that the earth in the Anthropocene is figured as a dynamic and unstable planet, so drifting and theatricality, when brought together, radicalise our extant understandings of the stage by allowing it to become motile, a terrestrial force. Here, the ecological potential of theatre is not found in staging plays about climate change or insisting on site-specificity, but in thinking through the geological power of theatricality, its capacity to exist as a type of plate tectonics. Such an expanded understanding of theatricality explains why instead of paying attention to a specific theatre production or even to the medium of theatre in a restricted sense, I examine how, in their 1958 text and image collaboration Mémoires, the Danish artist Asger Jorn and his friend Guy Debord were able to transform the page into a stage – to theatricalize and geologize reading. In an attempt, simultaneously, to expand and undo itself, the article is not content to conceptualize its argument, it looks to theatricalize itself, to become a kind of drift, a geology of writing

Theatre and time/ecology: deceleration in Stifters Dinge and L’Effet de Serge

This article explores the production of ‘time ecology’ in two works of postdramatic theatre: Heiner Goebbels’ Stifters Dinge (2007) and Philippe Quesne’s L’Effet de Serge (2007). By focusing on the practice of deceleration, it argues that theatre’s ecological potential resides not so much in its ability to represent the world, but rather in its capacity for producing new types of temporal experience that purposefully seek to break with modernity’s regime of historicity and the accelerated rhythms that it has given rise to. Importantly, my concern with deceleration is not an argument for slowness per se; on the contrary, I am interested in highlighting the presence of multiple and interpenetrating timescales and rhythms. As well as exposing the full extent of theatre’s temporal potential, such a concern with postdramatic ‘chronographies’ offers an implicit critique of dramatic theatre’s extant practices of eco-dramaturgy that, all too often, attempt to construct a linear narrative which is invested in conventional sequential models of temporality (beginning, middle, end)

From street to screen: Debord’s drifting cinema

This essay offers a new and original way of relating to the drift by positing it not simply as a pedestrian activity, something that occurs on streets and in cities (as the SI wanted) but rather as a practice that can be expressed in celluloid – in the rhythms and syncopations of montage. Through a close analysis of Debord's second film Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time (1959), we argue that this cinematic reading of the drift retains and performs its politics through its capacity to disrupt capitalist modernity's temporal regime. For us, such a regime, as it was for Debord, is predicated on the production of an endless present, in which what matters is how attention is seduced and captured by an expanded notion of the cinematic – the ubiquity of networks of screens, consoles, images and data flows. Faced with the continual refrains of ‘24/7 capitalism’ (Jonathan Crary 2014), it is no longer enough to express political content explicitly and/or to highlight, in Brechtian fashion, the structures of the apparatus. Rather by drawing on (amongst others) the work of Jonathan Beller, Bernard Stiegler, and Michael J. Shapiro, we show how Debord's films retain their relevance in the extent to which their drift-like quality, the irregularity of their rhythms, contests the unspoken choreography of what we call, after Henri Lefebvre, capitalist ‘dressage’. Through its interruptions and stoppages, Debord's cinema, we claim, manages to use the drift as a device for producing memory – the temporal lag that contemporary capital is desperate to erase in order to exhibit its own immediacy as a kind of eternity, the only time worth living

Return to Battleship Island

No abstract available

Assister au spectacle

No abstract available

Rethinking the dérive: Drifting and theatricality in theatre and performance studies

No abstract available