Locating an indigenous ethos in ecological performance

Stories are powerful forms of representation and cultural imagery in many Indigenous cultures, and performance is a site where these stories are shared, revealed and enacted, making it a powerful site of cultural imagery for Indigenous ecological knowledges and cosmologies. I argue that an Indigenous ecological ethos is a necessary addition to thinking about performance and ecology, one that resists patronizing and simplistic stereotypes of the ‘eco-Indian’ and acknowledges diverse, complex and evolving epistemologies. Drawing on Huggan and Tiffin’s postcolonial- ism ecocriticism, as well as May and Kuppers experience as non-Indigenous scholars and practitioners, this article considers the role postcolonial ecology might play in the field of performance and ecology and how non-indigenous scholars and theatre- makers might engage with it. I suggest strategies for locating an Indigenous ecolog- ical ethos, through Däwes, Nolan, Howe and Halba and their critical reflections on Indigenous performances specifically attuned to ecological concerns. I draw on plays and performances that highlight the inseparability of land, identity and more- than-human (Salmon is Everything, NK603: Action for Performer & e-Maiz, Woman for Walking); work that is non-linear and recognizes the simultaneity of past, present and future (Burning Vision, Chasing Honey); and work that takes up ecological justice issues (Sila). These aspects suggest ways of locating an Indigenous ecological ethos and developing a more multivocal and inclusive field of performance and ecology

Performing the bio-urban in Bonnie Ora Sherk’s The Farm and Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Flow City

The current dark ecological context has prompted resurgence in debate about the concepts of hope, despair, responsibility and urbanism. Both Bonnie Ora Sherk’s The Farm (San Francisco 1974-1980) and Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ work at the New York Sanitation Department (1976-present), revision human/more-than-human relationships and interactions, conceiving of an urban community as made up a multiple species and people. Their work provides models for radical coexistence, breaking down reductive urban/nature and nature/culture binaries. Recontextualising these formative performance works in light of contemporary developments and an intersectional ecological analysis, I argue they act as key sites for addressing critical issues of urbanisation and ecology. We are living in the urban century as global patterns of urban migration mean that more than half the world’s population now live in cities. Given this growth, cities represent vital landscapes for ecological thought. However, the longstanding ontological distinction between the city and the natural world has led to the growth of cities in ways that do not always support long-term human and non-human life, health and wellbeing. My concept, the bio-urban, invokes the ecological vibrancy of the city and considers humans (and nonhuman species) in urban habitats as active participants of ecology, from an ecomaterialism position. I utilise the bio-urban as a conceptual framework to draw together expanded practices of performance from Sherk and Ukeles, to challenge the false urban/nature dichotomy and replace the clichéd image of eco performance as a reverential walk through a ‘green and pleasant land’. Both artists take an intersectional approach to urban ecology, which nuances and informs the bio-urban. In ‘dark’ times of ecological uncertainty, performance can be a site to challenge destructive thinking, bringing to light invisible relationships, blindspots, imaginative utopias and alternative possibilities for what it means to coexist today

Ecodramaturgies: theatre, performance and climate change

This book addresses theatre’s contribution to the way we think about ecology, our relationship to the environment and what it means to be human in the context of climate change. It offers a detailed study of the ways in which contemporary performance has critiqued and re-imagined everyday ecological relationships, in more just and equitable ways. The broad spectrum of ecologically-oriented theatre and performance included here, largely from the UK, US, Canada and Europe, have problematised, reframed and upended the pervasive and reductive images of climate change that tend to dominate the ecological imagination. Taking an inclusive approach this book foregrounds marginalised perspectives and the multiple social and political forces that shape climate change and related ecological crises, framing understandings of the earth as home. Recent works by Fevered Sleep, Rimini Protokoll, Violeta Luna, Deke Weaver, Metis Arts, Lucy + Jorge Orta, as well as plays and Indigenous activist movements such as NoDAPL and Idle No More, are described in detail

Towards an Ecological Performance Aesthetic for the Bio-Urban: A Non-Anthropocentric Theory

As current precarious ecological conditions require urgent and multi-scalar responses, performance has an opportunity to creatively respond to the ecological situation, opening up new ways of thinking and engaging the public’s imagination. Problematising differentiating practices that divide humans from ‘nature’, I suggest performance may highlight the interconnectedness of humans and the more-than-human world by theorising, revealing and critiquing ecological relationships. My research into an ecological performance aesthetic takes up this opportunity and conceives of new ways of critically thinking about performance. I engage a range of ecological philosophy, combined with ecodramaturgical analysis of performance, to theorise the intersection of performance and ecology. Ecodramaturgy (May 2010) combines ecocritical and applied approaches to performance with ecological ways of performance-making, and represents a critical extension to the discipline of performance studies. Drawing on the ecomaterialism of Bennett (2010), Latour (2004), Alaimo (2013) and Barad (2012), I theorise ‘nature’ as a set of interconnected relationships, which disrupts the binaries between urban/nature, nature/culture, human/nonhuman. I coin the neologism the bio-urban to reflect the vibrancy and material agency of ecological relationships in urban settings. The focus on urban-based practice resists the rural bias present in much ecological writing (Harvey 1993b) and addresses a gap in scholarship around urban ecology in relation to performance. This research centres on a wide variety of illustrative, broadly site-based performance events, including urban gardening performances (and my own practice), walking and cycling performances, installation, live art, theatre pieces and work in places such as streets, mountains, (urban) meadows, cemeteries and rivers. I consider the way in which performance engages with the world, through the interrelated and overlapping discourses of postcolonial ecology, human geography and urban ecology. An ecological performance aesthetic informs modes of practice, presentation and reception, within current ecological conditions. From the provocation of the bio-urban, I theorise immersion and ‘environmental participation’, drawing on the corporeality of our relationship to the space around us, following ecological phenomenology. I then examine oikos as (earthy or planetary) home and consider it in relation to dwelling, suggesting that ecological performance opens up a space for critiquing these ideas. The complex relationship between the local and global is characterised in performance through eco-cosmopolitanism (Heise 2008). Finally, I suggest a non-anthropocentric paradigm for performance, one that employs an ‘ecological anthropomorphism’ that accounts for the material agency of the more-than- human, as well as the human as a geophysical force (Chakrabarty 2012). The aim of the research is to articulate an ecological performance aesthetic, extending and developing the field of performance and ecology

Billinghurst, "The Armchair Book of Gardens: A Miscellany"

Billinghurst has created a beautiful botanical collage of illustration, poetry and prose about the history and significance of gardening. Acknowledging gardens not only as places of sensuous pleasures but as a way of viewing the world, gardens as ecological sites is largely missed from the miscellany. Drawing on gardens as a worldview, gardening is considered as a way of fostering an ecological identity in relation to the way it may remind us of our embeddedness in the more-than-human world

Dossier: climate change and the decolonized future of theatre

This dossier opens up a set of questions about what theatre and performance can do and be in a climate-changed future. Through a series of practice snapshots the authors suggest a diversity of responses to decolonizing and environmental justice issues in and through theatre and performance. These practices include the climate-fiction film The Wandering Earth, which prompts questions about what decolonizing means for China and the impact of climate chaos on the mental well-being of young people; The Living Pavilion, an Australian Indigenous-led project that created a biodiverse event space showcasing Indigenous art making; Dancing Earth Indigenous dance company who use dance as a way to engage Indigenous ecological thinking and Indigenous futurity; water rituals in the Andes of Peru that problematize water policy and ethnic boundaries