the “human” and the “natural” from the
aesthetic and still maintain that we have
met the challenge of ecological thinking
and ecological praxis’ (Kwinter 2010: 103)
Part Three
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In theorising a non-anthropocentric aesthetic of ecological performance, I will suggest that performance may resist anthropocentrism by highlighting and acknowledging the capacity for agency of the more-than-human. The previous four chapters have examined characteristics or tropes of an ecological performance aesthetic, and in this chapter I will consider how an ecological aesthetic can be considered non-anthropocentric. I set forth an argument that in the current ecological age of the Anthropocene, a non-anthropocentric aesthetic of performance and theatre may help contribute to what Bennett (2010) calls an ‘ecological sensibility’, extending ecological thinking to performance. As I have argued in Part 2, the concepts of immersion, dwelling and eco-cosmopolitanism are made manifest in performance as a way of amplifying and dissecting ecological relationships. In continuing to think ecologically, I consider how performance practice can contribute to the process of excavating the intricate interrelationships between humans and more-than-humans, and in turn, how this thought process can lead to more ecologically equitable modes of being. Drawing on Bennett and Barad, I will briefly outline how ecomaterialism may work to de-centre the human and redraw matter horizontally, reconfiguring the Great Chain of Being, and providing a useful critical framework for theorising the ways in which ecological performance can resist anthropocentrism.
Agency is not employed here as ‘intention’, ‘choice’ or audience agency as it has been positioned within immersive and participatory theatre scholarship60. Rather, it is configured
in this thesis as the ability to produce effects and to affect, influence or to make a difference to something, not necessarily within the realm of the human. ‘So agency is not something possessed by humans, or non-humans for that matter. It is an enactment’, asserts Barad, ‘and it enlists, if you will, “non-humans” as well as “humans”’ (in Dolphijn and Tuin 2012: 55). Throughout this chapter, I will refer to three different (although connected) types of agency: material, ecological and geological, all problematising the idea of agency as a solely human property. I am not using the term to indicate consciousness or intention as it is sometimes used. With the use of material agency, I am describing that which can influence the material world through physical effects. This can range from the material agency of worms to overturn soils creating new growing conditions, to the material agency of trees in converting CO2 to oxygen or cracking the pavement with their roots. Ecological agency, related to material agency, as effects on the material world always have an ecological relationship, is more specifically applied to indicate when this ecological relation is foregrounded. Ecological agency is not only the ability to affect the material world in an ecological way, but it also
calls attention to the complex interrelationships between humans and more-than-humans that characterise ecology. Geological agency can also call attention to these interconnected assemblages, but specifically relates to the way in which humans have made an unprecedented difference to the material-ecological world since the industrial revolution. In other words, following Chakrabarty (2012), humans now have this geological agency, which was previously reserved for large-scale geophysical nonhuman phenomena (although of course there are still more-than-human phenomena that exercise geological agency such as earthquakes, volcanic activity, wind, water and glaciers). Throughout this chapter, these descriptions of agency will be nuanced and problematised through their engagement with performance practice.
One of the ways performance may activate a non-anthropocentric ecological sensibility is through what I term ‘ecological anthropomorphism’. This is anthropomorphism that disrupts the anthropocentric hierarchy through recognition of the capacity for agency and action in the more-than-human and questions binary-making practices that divide humans and nonhumans. Fevered Sleep’s It’s the Skin You’re Living In (2012), a film following a man in a polar bear costume as he walks from the Arctic to his home in the city, illustrates this disruption by enacting an ecological anthropomorphism. It acknowledges the interconnections between human-animal-climate, troubling the distinctions and boundaries between them. I will also consider worms as operators that help us recognise the agency of the more-than-human through performance, as in Plantable’s The Celebrated Trees of Nashville, Tennessee (2012), one of my practice experiments. Ecological anthropomorphism not only reveals the way the more-than-human is like the human, as Bruno Latour (2009) contends, it also ‘gives shape to humans’ or shapes human actions (160). Barad (2012) argues that nature enacts a queer performativity that radically disrupts ontological distinctions between human and ‘other’. I consider queer ecology well placed to problematise and disrupt the configuration of human/ nonhuman in a dichotomous relationship.
I will then consider geological agency, specifically how performance can make meaningful the idea of humans as geophysical forces (Chakrabarty 2012), thereby moving towards a non- anthropocentric aesthetic by acknowledging both the uniqueness of human agency and its interconnectedness with more-than-human life. A performance that acknowledges human’s geological agency is Fevered Sleep’s The Weather Factory (2010), as it reveals the way the weather shapes human action and identity and the way humans shape the climate. A house full of weather is an affective metaphor that appeals to the human capacity to understand the geophysical influence of human agency in the current ecological age. Relating large- scale biophysical phenomenon like weather events to a human scale is enacting an ecological anthropomorphism, but in light of Chakrabarty’s theory of human agency, it is also moving beyond anthropocentrism by acknowledging how humans have taken on characteristics of more-than-human geological forces. This intermeshing of human/more-than-human agency also resists the binaries that prop up anthropocentric formations.
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In the final section of this chapter, I propose that the neologism ‘bioperformativity’ may be used to identify this non-anthropocentric performance. Drawing on the posthuman performativity theory of Barad (2003), I suggest that bioperformativity may be a critical tool to challenge the binary constructs between human/nature and disrupt anthropocentrism, by naming the way in which the more-than-human performs. I consider how the more-than- human performs within specific artworks, exemplified through the trees of Beuys’ 7000 Oaks (1982), which I will suggest are active forces that shape human action and manifest ecological agency.
All of these critical examinations and examples of performance will contribute to establishing an ecological performance aesthetic as non-anthropocentric. Theorising a non-anthropocentric aesthetic offers an opportunity to productively critique the perceived separation between humans and the more-than-human world, providing a new way of critically thinking about performance. This, of course, is a performative self-contradiction: a human elaborating a non-anthropocentric performance aesthetic, as Bennett (2010) identifies. Kershaw (2007) also cautions that writing about theatre and performance ecology is performative as it ‘could be reproducing the very pathology it wants to question: the exploitation and degradation of the Earth’s environment by humankind’ (300). However, I suggest this performative contradiction is a generative one as it may call attention to the way in which we as humans are inextricably embedded in the more-than-human world. By non-anthropocentric, I do not mean performance without the human, but rather performance work that acknowledges the capacity for agency in the more-than-human, does not inscribe the nature/culture binary, nor configures humans at the top of a strict, reductive hierarchy of beings within a mechanistic worldview.