Before examining how ecological performance engages with space and theorising immersion as part of an ecological performance aesthetic, this section will discuss ecological phenomenology and the way its emphasis on the immersive nature of ecological relationships provides a theoretical grounding for thinking about ecological performance. Drawing on and extending phenomenology and ecological philosophy, ecological phenomenology considers the experience of relational exchanges with the more-than-human world, analysing interrelated ecological relationships and their effects.
Eco-phenomenology is inspired and guided by the idea that uprooting and replacing some of modern philosophy’s deeply entrenched but environmentally destructive ethical and metaphysical presuppositions can help us to combat environmental devastation at its conceptual roots. (Thomson 2009: 445)
As Thomson suggests, eco-phenomenology aims to reconfigure some long established ethical and metaphysical presuppositions in order to think ecologically. The dualism of mind/world is inherent in the modern philosophical tradition ‘but phenomenologists argue that these conceptual dichotomies fundamentally mischaracterize our ordinary experience’ (Thomson 446). Although the mind/body dualism is somewhat outdated, the mind/world dualism has persisted in most theories of mind (although not all). This dualism separates humans from ‘nature’ epistemically because it fails to acknowledge that the entanglement of mind (or sense of self) and the world is foundational to our lived experience in the material environment (Thomson 446).
Somewhat ahead of the current tide of ecological philosophy, Seamon and Mugerauer (1985) contended almost 30 years ago that we are immersed within the world and that an aim of phenomenology is to ‘understand the nature of this immersion, which provides the touchstone and background for any formal, scientific consideration of environmental elements and interconnections’ (3). This perspective is a key concept in the development of eco-phenomenology, which seeks to understand that relational nature of our experience in the ecological world. Understanding and critically analysing this position of immersion may provide a robust theoretical foundation for ecological ethics and political responses to the current ecological situation. I suggest that from a perspective of eco-phenomenology, performance can open up a space for embodied engagement and immersion. Performance has
the potential to reframe perception of space and the ecological relationships within the work. The frame (and space) of performance may reveal and critique ecological relationships from the point of immersion within them, from an experiential perspective of ecology. Perhaps initiating the more recent wave of eco-phenomenology writings, David Abram (1997) draws on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, and refers to the body as the material locality of our intersection with the living world. It is this embodied experience of the more-than-human world that discloses ecological relationships and may foster a sense of ecological identity that has the potential to reconceptualise our relationship to the more-than-human. By disclose, I am referring to revealing or making manifest different aspects of ecological relationships, in performance specifically. These relationships are often made invisible or veiled in some way in daily life. Disclosure then, in phenomenological terms, implies an opening up or clearing away to reveal immanent relations. As I will argue, performance can uniquely facilitate this disclosure, through immersion, participation in the environment and the quality of attention it can produce.
The field of ecological phenomenology, also referred to as eco-phenomenology, is a relative new and emerging field. While phenomenology has been broadly integrated into fields of study outside philosophy, from anthropology to architecture to geography to nursing, ecological phenomenology is still in its infancy (Brown and Toadvine 2003: xi). Key texts on the subject include Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology (Seamon 1993),
The Spell of the Sensuous (Abram 1997), and the more recent Eco-Phenomenology (Brown and
Toadvine 2003). For Brown and Toadvine, philosophy in general can help clarify the ethical and metaphysical assumptions/understandings about the world around us and uncover why we feel ‘unease’ about the current environmental crisis (2003: x). Phenomenology is in a unique position to communicate and reveal the value of the experience of ecology and of being in the living world, rather than to quiet the experience as other theoretical methods may do (2003: xii). Phenomenology’s aims of ‘exploring and disclosing the complexities and novelties of our experience of the world’ (Brown and Toadvine 2003: xii) make it well placed to intersect with ecology. Ecology, in this context, is about exploring and disclosing the interrelationship between organisms and their environment (or world). According to Brown and Toadvine, in Husserl’s call for a return ‘to the things themselves’, phenomenology’s emphasis is on the experience of the thing itself (in this case the earth or nature) which positions it to express ecological value. Eco-phenomenology then makes a double claim: first, to understand the complexities of current ecological conditions necessitates phenomenological methods and understandings; and, second, that in a phenomenological analysis of our ecological situation, phenomenology comes to be a philosophical ecology (Brown and Toadvine 2003: xiii). Thomson identifies the eco-phenomenology ‘motto’ as ‘back to the Earth itself’ (448), a variation of Husserl’s saying, ‘back to the things themselves’. The meaning is twofold; the earth as material or concern of phenomenology and that ‘eco-phenomenology is for the sake of the earth’ (Thomson 448). However, the meaning of ‘the earth’ provides a problematic
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tension in relation to the ethical aims of eco-phenomenology. Thomson positions this as a tension between naturalistic ethical realism (following Nietzsche) and transcendental ethical realism (following Heidegger). The former could be called an ethics of life, premised on the idea that ontologically, good and evil are justifiably based on life-giving or life-destroying properties (Kohak 1993: 31). Thomson asserts that this basis for an ecological ethics may be too generalised to be applicable to real-world ecological conflicts and in its effort to preserve life as such, may actually devalue human endeavours such as art, literature, culture and religion (Thomson 452). Rather, a transcendental ethical realism based on Heideggerian thought that has its basis in metaphysics may be appropriate for ecological ethics. In a reaction against resourcism (or viewing ‘things’ and the more-than-human as resources to be utilised as efficiently as possible), this position advocates attunement to Heidegger’s ‘being as such’, in which we understand the limitations of our perception of other beings/entities and acknowledge they have meaning and value beyond what we are capable of conceptually understanding (Thomson 456). In this ethical conception it then follows that once entities are understood, we will approach them in an environmentally sensitive and responsible way. This position, I suggest, is open to the same critique as naturalistic ethical realism in that it may be too generalised to be applicable to resolving real-world ecological tensions and conflicts. Further critique of ecological thinking based on Heideggerian thought will be included in Chapter III: Dwelling.
It has been argued that the English Romantic movement greatly influenced the development of ecological phenomenology. Coletta (2001b) suggests the Romantics wrote about the experience of ecology rather than the science of ecology. As he suggests, in their Lyrical
Ballads: 1798 and 1802 (2013), Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote not only about the human
experience in nature but also about the experience of nature as a being itself, such as the feeling of a tree branch as it hangs from a tree. This ‘romantic ecology’ linked environmental and social issues and imagined nature as a ‘being’. This approach was a predecessor of phenomenology as Wordsworth ‘helps us to embody the earth in our experience of it’ (Coletta 2001b: 79). In romantic ecology meaning was in the relationship between the living world and human beings. John Clare wrote about a phenomenological ecology that was ‘lived’, with relationships and experiences examined in conjunction with the specifics of a place or environment (Coletta 2001a: 84). Personal experience was the foundation of knowing for the Romantics. In Clare’s poetry, all objects have being but we cannot perceive the relationships between beings as they are not a sensory phenomenon. However, cultural works, such as art and literature, can mediate those relationships, allowing them to be experienced in some form, if not directly sensed (Coletta 2001a: 85). The romantic influence on ecological phenomenology conceived a new way of perceiving the living world and the ecological relationships within it. By taking ecology out of the realm of biology and into creative imagining, it was made more accessible and relatable to people not necessarily versed in biological/ecological sciences. The relatable nature is important to cultivating an ecological sensibility and an understanding of human impact on ecological relationships.
Of course, the Romantic tradition was deeply rooted in entrenched class divides where nature appreciation was viewed as something open to those with education (i.e. white, wealthy men) to truly appreciate it, with John Clare as one the of only ‘working class’ Romantic poets. Politics, culture, class, gender, religion, worldview, accessibility and social issues are so bound up with ideas of ‘nature’, it is in all likelihood impossible to engage with the concept unencumbered. Politics have been played out in the construction of our concept and relationship to nature: commodity and capitalisation of landscape, class and access to resources, human rights versus land rights and climate change, just to name a few. For Kershaw (2007), not only is the romantic tradition problematic in its elitist, imperialist conceptions but also in its problematic positioning of landscape and the sublime (309). This view of the natural world as the landscape (and nature as sublime) creates spectators that look upon the landscape as a separate object, instead of viewing themselves as acting within it. The influence of the landscape perspective on theatre is evident in the writings of Marranca and Chaudhuri (Kershaw 2007: 316). The creation of spectatorship of the natural world is what Kershaw suggests perpetuates the ecological crisis rather than addresses it:
Spectatorship of a squirrel – or a character, or a subject – in a landscape in the theatre is inevitably caught up in this process of detaching the agent from its environment, and thus reduces the chances of insight into the environment of the agent and therefore of the agent itself in biocentric terms. (309)
The separation created by this view of landscape hinders our understanding of being immersed in the more-than-human world. In this way, the intersection of theatre, performance and ecological phenomenology may offer an alternative to the scientific reduction of nature and ecology. This alternative conception of nature is one that bridges the perceived divide between nature and humans, dissolving dualisms and understanding that humans are immersed in the ecologically-material world. Brown and Toadvine refer to this conception as ‘remembering the earth’ that collective amnesia has forgotten (xx). This perceptual detachment or amnesia that divides humans from ‘nature’ is at the centre of a contemporary western worldview and has a great influence on the perception of the living world and way in which the current ecological situation is viewed. Brown and Toadvine point to the traditional assumptions of scientific naturalism, capitalism, Cartesian dualism, Christianity and patriarchy among others as the source of the detachment (xix). Performance then, as a form of culture, may manifest and illuminate the ways in which our lived, ecological experience is affective and heterogeneous, interconnected to the material world.
Ecological phenomenology has more recently been taken up by the design discipline, particularly landscape architecture (Seamon 1993). This was under the assumption that if this way of perceiving ecology was adopted by designers, then the structures or landscapes they designed would be more responsive to ecology, particularly the living environment of a specific place. Seamon describes why a phenomenological approach to ecology is relevant, not only to design, but to being in the world:
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Phenomenological ecology supposes that beneath the seeming disorder and chaos of our world and daily life are a series of underlying patterns, structures, and relationships and processes that can be described qualitatively. (Seamon 1993: 16)
In describing these underlying patterns and relationships, we widen our knowledge of the world outside ourselves. According to Seamon, meaning is relational and found in the space between the individual and the wider patterns of the ecological world, of which the individual is a part. He also describes eco-phenomenology as seeing the world in a ‘more perceptive, multi-dimensioned way’ (16). Referring to the ecological knowledge ‘outside ourselves’, Seamon seems to be describing a type of ecological identity. Ecological identity is a way of perceiving the world and yourself in relation to it, a way of acknowledging your role within the mesh of ecological relationships, a shift to a non-anthropocentric worldview. I suggest that an ecological identity may be fostered through attending to or revealing ecological relationships within the frame of performance.
The way of seeing and interpreting within theories of eco-phenomenology is through finding meaning in the underlying ecological structures of perception. Riegner (1993) characterises this approach as a new way of seeing (and interpreting) the familiar or everyday world. He describes it as seeking to ‘experience the whole as it comes forth through the parts’ (212) in order for the familiar, living world to take on new meaning. This, however, is also the challenge: to see the everyday from a new perspective (212). For Ingold (2000) showing or disclosing is a powerful tool in recognising the human relationship to the living world. Showing something means that it is perceived through the senses of the person being shown to: ‘It is, as it were, to lift a veil off some aspect or component of the environment so that it can be apprehended directly’ (Ingold 2000: 21–22). Similarly, for Toadvine (2009), mediating nature requires an ‘expressive gesture’ as ‘nature, therefore, is precisely what discloses itself through our expressive acts, and as requiring such expression for its disclosure’ (15). I suggest that performance is one such expressive act, as it can reveal the mesh of interconnected relations we might call ‘nature’ and act as mediator of larger ecological relations, complexities and systems.
Throughout this thesis, I argue that ecological relationships can be made known, or perhaps disclosed, in and through performance. Performance in this sense functions as a way of showing, as Ingold contends, ‘art gives form to human feeling’ and that its form is related to how we perceive the world (2000: 23). He further suggests that art is guided by ‘the specific orientations, dispositions and sensibilities that we have acquired through having had things pointed out or shown to us’ (Ingold 2000: 23). Performance is both shaped by and works to shape our relationship to the more-than-human world, in which we are immersed. Art in general, and performance more specifically, can uncover metaphysical and ethical assumptions about our relationship to the living world, which eco-phenomenology takes as its subject. I
will return to eco-phenomenology later in this chapter with discussions on Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment and ‘flesh’, Abram’s concept of participation and Kershaw’s immersion.