“This is the way the world ends, not…”: towards a polis of performing ecology

In the opening decade of the twenty-first century humans faced a rising surplus of historical double binds that threatened no shortage of highly charged political and ethical dilemmas. For example, humanity’s success at performing survival began to outstrip the carrying capacity of Earth. And, of course, such blatant global dramas offer no obvious denouement. When all futures seem to promise only impossible scenarios, such as an end to ‘history’ or even ‘nature’, what kinds of performance paradigm might offer some glimmers of hope? This presentation approaches that prospect paradoxically by attempting to treat it lightly, as if we are always already such stuff as dreams are made on. So it delves into an end to all ethics and the onset of an especially extreme state of political exception for Homo sapiens as the species passes under a rainbow called climate change. For this particular specimen, on the left is a 1970s Hawaiian happening titled H.C.A.W. – Happy Cleaner Air Week – to the right a recent land-based installation known as A Meadow Meander. Between these unlikely materials it aims to conjure up a few random poles of a dynamic dispersal of Earthly doom that goes by the dubious bioethical alias of ‘performing ecology’

Artistas Cidadãos no Século XXI: Em Busca de uma Perspectiva Ecológica

O artigo que deu origem à parte principal deste texto foi primeiro apresentado em uma palestra de abertura dada em julho de 2005, na conferência anual da International Federation of Theatre Research, na Universidade de Maryland, nos EUA

Artistas Cidadãos no Século XXI: Em Busca de uma Perspectiva Ecológica

O artigo que deu origem à parte principal deste texto foi primeiro apresentado em uma palestra de abertura dada em julho de 2005, na conferência anual da International Federation of Theatre Research, na Universidade de Maryland, nos EUA

Research and Practice in Voice Studies: Searching for a Methodology

As more and more actor training conservatoires become subsumed into university structures there is a growing pressure on practice based teachers of voice to become active researchers. At the same time there is a growing area of scholarly research within Voice Studies. This article examines the shifting patterns of research and practice within Voice Studies and uses, as a case study, the author’s experiences of teaching at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (RCSSD). The author examines tensions between practice and research within a conservatoire setting and explores potential research methodologies in relation to this. The author proposes Practice as Research (PaR) as a suitable methodology for research within practice based Voice Studies and draws on current discourses relating to PaR within Theatre and Performance. The author proposes a model for Voice Studies PaR, which is based on the work of Robin Nelson, and demonstrates how this is being applied within Voice Studies research at RCSSD. The author addresses issues of dissemination of PaR and briefly relates the work in the UK to growing research agendas internationally

Environmentalism, performance and applications: uncertainties and emancipations

This introductory article for a themed edition on environmentalism provides a particular context for those articles that follow, each of which engages with different aspects of environmentalism and performance in community-related settings. Responding to the proposition that there is a lacuna in the field of applied drama and environmentalism (Bottoms, 2010), we suggest that the more significant lack is that of ecocriticism. As the articles in this journal testify, there are many examples of applied theatre practice; what is required is sustained and rigorous critical engagement. It is to the gap of ecocriticism that we address this issue, signalling what we hope is the emergence of a critical field. One response to the multiple challenges of climate change is to more transparently locate the human animal within the environment, as one agent amongst many. Here, we seek to transparently locate the critic, intertwining the personal – ourselves, human actants – with global environmental concerns. This tactic mirrors much contemporary writing on climate change and its education, privileging personal engagement – a shift we interrogate as much as we perform. The key trope we anchor is that of uncertainty: the uncertainties that accompany stepping into a new research environment; the uncertainties arising from multiple relations (human and non-human); the uncertainties of scientific fact; the uncertainties of forecasting the future; and the uncertainties of outcomes – including those of performance practices. Having analysed a particular turn in environmental education (towards social learning) and the failure to successfully combine ‘art and reality’ in recent UK mainstream theatre events, such uncertainties lead to our suggestion for an ‘emancipated’ environmentalism. In support of this proposal, we offer up a reflection on a key weekend of performance practice that brought us to attend to the small – but not insignificant – and to consider first hand the complex relationships between environmental ‘grand narratives’ and personal experiential encounters. Locating ourselves within the field and mapping out some of the many conceptual challenges attached to it serves to introduce the territories which the following journal articles expand upon

Editorial introduction

This article frames the journal special issue by offering a broad reflection on the historical development of ideas that have informed debates concerning intermediality and its pedagogical contexts. It opens with a brief articulation of media and intermedial theory to inform the debate. The challenges of contemporary media hybridity are then set within an historical context by tracing the origins of current (perceived) knowledge dichotomies and hierarchies into the philosophical canons of western antiquity. In examining distinctions between the different types of knowledge and expression that form the constituent parts of contemporary intermedial theatres, the article considers philosophical debates, traces historical trajectories and probes social dynamics from Aristotle to the present. Moving on to the current historical and social context of intermedial practice and pedagogy, the article examines specific challenges and opportunities that emerge from our own intermedial age. This multifaceted and trans-historical approach leads the authors to suggest that old hierarchical and divisional structures impact upon contemporary practices, affecting how those are perceived, received and valued