Performance and Ecology: What Can Theatre Do?

Carl Lavery

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351371285
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

In comparison with Literary Studies and Media and Film Studies, the disciplines of Theatre and Performance, with their strong anthropocentric heritage, have been relatively slow in responding to such things as climate change, species extinction, or pollution and toxicity etc. However, in the wake of recent work on animals, cyborgs, and objects, as well as publications with a specific focus on ecology and environment, there are real signs that theatre and performance scholars are beginning to make their own contribution to the Environmental Humanities. But if theatre critics are engaged in new forms of ecocritical analysis, it is worth posing a pertinent question from the outset: namely, what can theatre do ecologically?

In this book, leading researchers and practitioners seek to answer that question from a number of perspectives and with diverse methodologies. Topics include: reflections on rehearsal processes, scores for performance, site-based interventions, ideas of conflict, investigations of temporality and time ecology, ecospectating, and the experience of disappointment. Taken together, these essays make an important intervention in the emergent (inter)disciplines of the Environmental Humanities and further our understanding of the ecological potential of Theatre and Performance in ways that are cautious, tentative but also generative.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism.

On creating a climate of attention: the composition of our work

Karen Christopher

and Sophie Grodin

ABSTRACT
This article explores how two performance makers – Karen Christopher and Sophie Grodin of the company Haranczak/Navarre – approach the rehearsal process as an ecological practice in and by itself. Drawing attention to such things as listening, openness and patience, Karen and Sophie explore how their devising strategy transcends the studio and becomes a form of relating to the world in general. Karen and Sophie illustrate their ideas by drawing on generative metaphors and by grounding their insights on their empirical experience of making Control Signal (2013) and miles & miles (2016). In the article there is an attempt to extend the dialogic nature of Haranczak/Navarre’s work into the editing process, to create, that is, an extended climate of attention.

Editor’s note

I commissioned this essay for Green Letters after hearing it delivered as a paper at the University of Glasgow in late March 2015. While Karen and Sophie used the word ecology sparingly in their original text, it seemed to me that their approach resonated well with the theme of the issue. As is apparent, both the paper and subsequent essay printed below are attempts to investigate what theatre can ‘do ecologically’ by focusing on an area of performance practice that standard models of ecocriticism and ecodramaturgy have yet to pay much attention to: namely, the ecological sensibility that informs the rehearsal and compositional processes of devised performance.¹ In Karen and Sophie’s practice, ecology is neither an object or representation nor a form of theatre that they are consciously striving to produce; rather, it is more accurately approached as a way of operating, a creative stance, an embodied engagement with what Timothy Morton has termed ‘ecological thought’ – a type of thinking characterised by interconnectedness, interdependencies and relationalities (Morton 2010, 7). Interestingly metaphor is not opposed here to concrete experience, as it is for ecocritics such as Katie Soper (1998) and Una Chaudhuri (1994). In Karen and Sophie’s process, the two exist as interdependent partners that are in constant dialogue and overlap. Their meeting or entwining is generative and open-ended, giving rise to an ethics of making, a practice of ecology whose scope encompasses human and ‘more than human’ worlds.

Reflecting the spirit of dialogue and open-endedness that Haranczak/Navarre’s work both affirms and produces, and after a suggestion from Karen, it seemed fitting to foreground certain aspects of the editorial process that informed the production of this text. This explains the presence of the editor’s prompts and Karen’s responses at various points throughout the essay. Perhaps the best way to respond to these interventions is to see them as attempts to stress the relevance of Karen and Sophie’s practices to some of the pressing theoretical concerns currently being explored by scholars and theorists within the extant field of eco-criticism.

Karen and Sophie: Haranczak/Navarre

We are two performance makers working together to pull something from the cloud of information we become aware of in the context of our gathering together, day after day, month after month, cultivating a piece of performance work between us.

Sophie is a young Danish performance maker who has recently completed a course in performance arts at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. With other local performing artists she has worked to create a number of performance experiences including Room (2012), a performance that co-authors a story with one audience member at a time. She is interested in the dialogue that exists between people and space, and the arrangement of public space to influence interactions between people.

Karen is a middle-aged American performance maker and teacher. She relocated to London after her Chicago-based performance group Goat Island disbanded in 2009.² Her company, Haranczak/Navarre Performance Projects, is engaged in the dynamics of collaboration. Her practice includes listening for the unnoticed, the almost invisible and the very quiet.

We have worked together on two performance duets, Control Signal (2013) which looks at pathways of electricity through our bodies, through our surroundings and through history; and miles & miles (2016), a performance positioned at the edge of a landscape, with two people tied to opposite ends of a 100 m rope.

Together we have written this reflection on our making process, which we liken to a practice of ecology, a climate of attention. A climate of attention is a state of openness in which the senses are calmed and sharpened. Listening is tuned so that speaking or acting do not blot it out. It entails a kind of circular breathing of the senses, we are sensing and hearing simultaneous with being active, listening and telling intermingled. In practice it means we can have our own thoughts and listen too. We are suggesting that we are part of an ecosystem along with the elements of the place around us and the ideas we become aware of in it. We define the place around us as the world in which we imagine ourselves to be. It includes the very close and that which lies at an imagined distance as well as the reported realities we take on faith and the experience of life that we rely upon. We are not so much making work on the subject of ecology as we are activating an ecosystem through the way in which we go about working. Our method of working leaks its properties and makes itself felt in the body of the work composed. Together we are performing under the umbrella of Haranczak/Navarre Performance Projects.

For this essay, rather than blend our voices, we have each written complementary sections. These sections are preceded by our names as in a script for actors to speak.

Karen

Haranczak/Navarre: we look for points of intersection

Haranczak/Navarre’s work can be seen as research into the collaborative experience. With the meeting of more than one mind comes the possibility of surprise and misunderstanding – the resolution of which brings new clarity or opportunity for inspiration and unexpected solutions. Through collaboration, materials from separate minds with differing visions have to find a way to draw a connection between each other. This interaction heals the rifts that arise between us while maintaining our differences.

Haranczak/Navarre’s performances use bodies in time and place combined with spoken word, to create evocative visual combinations. The content of each performance is determined through a process of discovery which allows the prevailing concerns and interests of the artists involved to be affected by the prevailing concerns and interests of the world around them. Historical, social, philosophical, and cultural research and appropriation is considered alongside the development of new text and movement.

We define performance theatre as a live event for the engagement of ideas, led by the bodily actions which we compose and perform. The audience are presented with a sequence of actions in order to follow a train of thought or succession of ideas. As distinct from more traditional theatre forms, which are often writer-led, performance theatre combines flexible forms of narrative with alternate forms of expression, through movement, sound, installation, materials and props.

Performers and audience together create a climate of attention which adjusts tempo and attunes thought processes on a communal level. Each individual audience member follows their own train of thought. The practice of paying attention for the duration of a performance deepens engagement with thinking processes, allowing time and space for the consideration of life through the themes of the performance. We are paying attention as a practice of social cooperation, a way of opening ourselves up to others, a practice of interdependence.

Editor’s note

This is close to what the theatre scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte refers to as the ‘autopoetic feedback loop’ of live performance – the sense in which performance is ecological in its very structure, in the way, that is, that its inherent relationality is dependent on what we might call a receptive or living environment. In a phrase reminiscent of the Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela (1980), Fischer-Lichte notes:

In short, whatever the actors do elicits a response from the spectators, which impacts on the entire performance. In this sense, performances are generated and determined by a self-referential and ever-changing feedback loop. Hence performance remains unpredictable and spontaneous to a degree. (Fischer-Lichte 2008, 38)

Collaboration: an ecology of mind

Collaboration invites the inclusion of multiple voices, and exercises the ability to involve divergent viewpoints. I am using collaborative methods in support of practising restraint, tolerance and flexibility in responding to difference. In collaborative processes we are listening for complex answers to the questions we pose. We are not looking to find just the one answer that we hope fits all circumstances. Part of collaborating is allowing influences at play in the world around us to affect the direction of the work we make. We amble around for a while trying and testing where we are in relation to each other, our surroundings and our current interests as well to the material that we bring to the moment. In performance we find ourselves mostly occupied with preparing the ground for the purpose of optimal reception, optimal hearing. We search for a context in which an idea can be heard – that is what we have to provide first for ourselves and then for the audience.

Author’s note (Karen)

In the first version of this text, an editor’s note appeared at this point suggesting a connection with philosopher Timothy Morton’s ideas on ecological thought and also those of Gregory Bateson’s classic text Steps To an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology (2000). I wasn’t familiar with Morton’s work, though I found in my house the email collection he made with musician and artist Björk Guðmundsdóttir as part of her publication Björk: Archives (2015). And, though it is hard not to have had a bit of Gregory Bateson rub off on me over the years, I’ve never actually read Bateson. This seemed like an opportunity presenting itself.

Timothy Morton’s books are now on my teetering reading list, but in the meantime responding to the ideas in his emails to Björk I find he is, to some extent, a kindred spirit. Statements such as – ‘Creation comes out of vulnerability, doesn’t it? Some kind of attunement to something that isn’t you. Susceptibility’; and ‘In a way art is the opposite of collecting, because it must be more like listening to something one can’t quite hear – it’s an old idea of channeling, sort of nonviolently allowing things to beam themselves down. What is original does not come from absolute blank nothing (“oblivion”), but from an electromagnetic tenderness – from remembering, not forgetting’ – chime nicely with the kinds of approaches taken by Sophie and me as we worked on our two duets together. The following citation from Morton is particularly interesting as it links, in some ways, to how we interact with the materials welcomed into the space with us. Morton writes:

An artist attunes to what things are which means sort of listening to the future, which is just how things are – I think time is a sort of liquid that pours out of hatpins, underground trains, salt crystals. So a work of art is also listening to itself, because what it is never quite coincides with how it appears, too. ‘You have to play a long time to sound like yourself’. Miles Davis. (Morton in Morton and Guðmundsdóttir. 2015, np)

I was able to look at a couple of essays from Steps to an Ecology of Mind. I think some of Bateson’s influence has trickled down to us. I’m particularly moved by the thoughts behind his question ‘How do ideas interact?’ In the essay ‘Form, Substance, and Difference’ Bateson writes, ‘The flexible environment must also be included along with the flexible organism because, as I have already said, the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself. The unit of survival is a flexible organism-in-its-environment’ (Bateson 1987, 472)

As a starting directive we give ourselves the goal of listening to and sensing the environment in which we find ourselves. We are conscious that the conditions around us will feed into what the work becomes. The interaction between us creates a climate which will influence the work and its aesthetic. We are conscious that collaborative devising relies on a sensitivity to the ecology that we are part of as the work is being made – which is to say, to the totality or pattern of relations between the organisms involved and our environment. There are some features of this that support the work and some that challenge it. Nevertheless, our ability to engage with these features is fundamental: they become the warp and the weft of what we are able to make. We begin with a kind of open intention and we finish a work by fine tuning it to suit a set of specific intentions. But in the vast middle area of the devising process we are struggling to find the best way to interact with our immediate environment and most of all we ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: performance and ecology – what can theatre do?
• 1. On creating a climate of attention: the composition of our work
• 2. The performance `apparatus': performance and its documentation as ecological practice
• 3. Projecting climate scenarios, landscaping nature, and knowing performance: on becoming performed by ecology
• 4. Theatre, conflict and nature
• 5. Theatre and time ecology: deceleration in Stifters Dinge and L'Effet de Serge
• 6. Confounding ecospectations: disappointment and hope in the forest
• Index