Carl Lavery

Introduction: performance and ecology – what can theatre do?

In the call for papers that motivated this issue of Green Letters, contributors were invited to reflect on what theatre and performance might be able to do ecologically, as opposed to what they may argue for and/or represent in terms of textual content. In making that distinction, my intention was to think through the implications of two challenging provocations that too many ecocritics, in both theatre and literary studies, have either repressed or ignored. First, the suggestion made by Elinor Fuchs (2006) and Bonnie Marranca (1996) that theatre’s ecological contribution is not found in any explicit ecocritical message it may purport to communicate, but rather resides in the more oblique possibilities inherent in the theatrical medium itself; and second, the perverse scenario that eco-theorist Tim Clark sketches out when he reminds readers that while ‘the dominant public conception of nature is now loosely ecological, and notions of “biodiversity” and the eco-friendly are ubiquitous truisms [...] forms of environmental degradation continue to accelerate’ (2014, 77). Taken together, these comments suggest that if theatre is to contribute to a more progressive environmental future, then it is incumbent on practitioners and scholars to reflect, rigorously, on how theatre works as a medium, while at the same time remaining vigilant with respect to its supposed efficacy. Such an approach differs from much extant work in Theatre and Performance Studies that tends either to advocate for a direct intervention into ecological and environmental matters and/or makes largely positive – perhaps even hyperbolic – claims for theatre’s capacity to bring about behaviour change, more often than not, through some ecstatic or enchanted immersion in ‘environment’ or ‘nature’.

Jean Genet : performance and politics

Jean Genet, Performance and Politics is the first book to explore the broad political significance of Genets performance practice by focusing on his radical experiments, polemical subjects and formal innovations in theatre, film and dance. Its new approach brings together the diverse aspects of Genets work through essays by international scholars and interviews with such key theatre directors as Richard Schechner, Terry Hands, Cornerstone Theatre and Jean-Baptiste Sastre. Where some of the contributors explore Genets relationship with political discourses and movements (performance theory, sociology, situationism, postmodernism, post-structuralism), others trace his influence on contemporary practice (Butoh, Body Art, avant-garde theatre, site-specific performance and queer cinema). This exciting and original volume situates Genet as a key political playwright and as a major figure in the history of twentieth-century performance practice, and will be of interest to students of Theatre, Performance, Dance, Film and French.

Contemporary French Theatre and Performance

This is the first book to explore the relationship between experimental theatre and performance making in France. Reflecting the recent return to aesthetics and politics in French theory, it focuses on how a variety of theatre and performance practitioners use their art work to contest reality as it is currently configured in France.

Is there a text in this performance

The point of this essay, as its title half-borrowed from a famous collection of essays by the literary critic Stanley Fish suggests (1980), is to explore, tentatively, what might be gained for Theatre and Performance Studies by going back to something which both disciplines have historically sought to repress, if not to bury: the text. I use the word ‘tentatively’ for good reason. What I am calling the ‘return to text’, in this essay, is not applicable to all forms of theatre and performance, since its focus is on language alone. For some, this could appear too partial, too caught up on one aspect of signification to the detriment of the other sign-systems that compose the complex totality of the performance event.1 Yet, in spite of that, I believe there is a place for such an approach in experimental approaches to performance theory and analysis, primarily because the text – or quite simply language – is a core element in new performance, the motor that, more often than not, drives the show. The proof? The role of stories and story-telling in the work of UK companies and artists such as Forced Entertainment, Tim Etchells, Graeme Miller, Mike Pearson and Lone Twin.2 So what do I mean by text? When I use the word text in this essay, I am not talking about either the performance text or the play-script, that is to say, the dramatic blueprint that performers conventionally strive to actualize and stage with accuracy and fidelity. On the contrary, I am interested in reading the text as a kind of ‘postscript’ or relic of/for an event that has passed. Within the parameters of this study, the linguistic text is essentially spectral; it allows scholars and analysts to hear – and to rehear – the forgotten speech of performers. To turn to metaphor, I understand the written text as an architecture for conjuring ghosts. This architecture is neither an official monument nor a sealed tomb, like the sarcophagus into which the Chief of Police descends at the end of Jean Genet’s The Balcony (1957). Rather, to use a term from George Bataille, the postscript, as I conceive it, is an ‘anti-architecture’ (1997: 22), a building blasted by holes, in which the poetics of memory replace the science of history and where ghostly voices are always on the verge of disappearing back into the still air from which their utterances have momentarily risen.

The Future of Ruins: The Baroque Melancholy of Hashima

Here, we present an iteration of our theoretical/creative writing project Hashima, begun in 2012. The paper is a collaboration and draws on the different discourses, practices and sensibilities of a performance theorist, a geographer, and a visual artist. For us, Hashima, located off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, and a former site of forced labor and intensive offshore coal-mining, is a provocation for experimentation. Hashima, exploited and abject, has offered itself, unsurprisingly, to the fetishistic gaze of artists, photographers urban explorers, and ruin enthusiasts. The logic here is to control representation, and to determine and fix the meaning of the island as always in reference to something else and elsewhere. Paradoxically, there is no sense of temporality or transformation in these representations of ruins; time has been stopped in an image. By contrast, we want to draw out the allegorical value of Hashima not as a site of loss, but as a baroque, blasted landscape of monstrous becomings that resists, and forefronts, this tendency to collapse history into nature. In the following, we introduce the island before turning to an exegesis of Walter Benjamins writing on German baroque tragedy in order to demonstrate how representation itself becomes tainted through a material encounter with the baroques two primary topoi, the ruin and the labyrinth. To do this, we finish with a creative narrative and two images illustrating our methodology.

Editorial Pas de Deux

In ballet un pas de deux is the name for a duet in which two performers (usually male and female) dance together according to a pre-established choreography. There is no conflict or tension in un p...

Bringing It All Back Home: Towards an ecology of place

For the past three years, theatre scholar Carl Lavery and dancer Simon Whitehead have been meeting regularly in their ‘home patch’ of West Wales to discuss and share their related interests in location, ecology and embodiment. This article is the first public articulation of these conversations and deals with their shared interest in exploring the interface between ecosophy and performance practice.1 The text unfolds in a double movement. The opening section concentrates on Lavery’s critique of the political and ecological shortfalls in Martin Heidegger’s notions of homecoming and dwelling; in the second section, and prompted by that critique, Whitehead provides his own practice-based insights into how one might perform an ‘ecology of place’ – an expanded ecology founded on a logic of implication and interdependence between ‘social, animal, vegetable or Cosmic [worlds]’ (Guattari 2000:19). Our understanding of what a ‘located ecology’ might be resonates with some of the ideas expressed by the cultural geographer Nigel Thrift in ‘Steps to an ecology of place’. In Thrift’s essay, place is defined as ‘a rich and varied spectral gathering’ (1999: 316, original emphasis), conjured via ‘an embodiment which is folded into the world by virtue of the passions of the five senses, and constant, concrete attunements to particular practices, which always involved highly attuned bodily stances’ (315). While we do not pay so much attention to what Thrift terms ‘spectrality’ in this text, we are nevertheless interested, like him, in how bodies practise places. For us, this turn to somatic experience affords a useful antidote to the logocentric and essentialist dangers inherent in Heideggerian thought.

Practising Participation A conversation with Lone Twin

In the discourses of art criticism and performance theory today, the word ‘participation’, like its antecedent from the 1980s, ‘postmodernism’, can sometimes appear to say so much that it means virtually nothing. Since the late 1990s, the term has been used by curators, theorists and artists to describe a form of art-making that stresses the direct involvement of the spectator in the production and/or activation of the work in question. Although involvement, as understood here, can be both physical and virtual (or indeed a combination of the two), the rationale of/ for this artistic discourse resides in the way in which participatory art is directly opposed to the passive reaction of a private spectator, who is usually found contemplating a canvas in a gallery, or a play on a stage. Whereas the ‘contemplative spectator’ is conveniently positioned by the champions of participatory and relational aesthetics as a willingly servile subject overawed by the immensity of the work in front of them, ‘the participative spectator’, on the other hand, is portrayed as being involved in the production of the artwork, part of a crowd, and, quite literally, in on the act. From this perspective, it is not difficult to see how the participative spectator has been fashioned by both contemporary artists (Liam Gillick, Thomas Hirschhorn, Philippe Parreno) and theorists (Nicolas Bourriaud, Grant Kester, Claire Bishop, Boris Groys) as a figure of democracy. Someone who meets the work and artist halfway and, in so doing, frees themselves from the intimidating shackles of a modernist culture seeking to imprison them in its difficult and opaque formalism. Grant Kester provides an apt summary of this position in his critique of what he believes to be the elitist solipsism inherent in modernist theories of art, the source of which he traces back to the early twentieth-century English critic Clive Bell:

Theatre and time ecology: deceleration in Stifters Dinge and L’Effet de Serge

ABSTRACT This article explores the production of ‘time ecology’ in two works of postdramatic theatre: Heiner Goebbels’ Stifters Dinge (2007) and Philippe Quesne’s L’Effet de Serge (2007). By focusing on the practice of deceleration, it argues that theatre’s ecological potential resides not so much in its ability to represent the world, but rather in its capacity for producing new types of temporal experience that purposefully seek to break with modernity’s regime of historicity and the accelerated rhythms that it has given rise to. Importantly, my concern with deceleration is not an argument for slowness per se; on the contrary, I am interested in highlighting the presence of multiple and interpenetrating timescales and rhythms. As well as exposing the full extent of theatre’s temporal potential, such a concern with postdramatic ‘chronographies’ offers an implicit critique of dramatic theatre’s extant practices of eco-dramaturgy that, all too often, attempt to construct a linear narrative which is invested in conventional sequential models of temporality (beginning, middle, end).

A Future for Hashima: Pornography, representation and time

This article sets out to investigate the relationship between ruins, futurity, and ‘ruin porn’ - a visual mode of representation that all too often seeks to fix post-industrial ruins as mere aesthetic objects, devoid of history and/or temporality. It does so by focusing on performance, which, in this context, is understood as a processual mode of art-making that provides spectators with an experience of time. In this expanded definition of performance, as one may perhaps expect, the performativity of the object is not limited to the theatrical event alone; rather, it now inheres in sometimes uncanny durational aspects of both still and moving images. The essay proceeds in three stages. Part one provides a historical and theoretical overview of the type of performance inherent in ‘ruin porn’; part two critiques two images from Yves Marchands and Romain Meffres Gunkanjima (2013), a photo album that attempted to document the ruins of Hashima, an island situated 15 kilometres from Nagasaki City in the East China Sea; and part three investigates the very different aesthetic at work in Lee Hassalls film Return to Battleship Island (2013) which was made in response to AHRC- funded project, ‘The Future of Ruins: Reclaiming Abandonment and Toxicity on Hashima Island’ (2013). In this reading of Return to Battleship Island , the onus is on showing how Hassalls film, in its representation of Hashimas crumbling apartment blocks and industrial buildings, intentionally sought to contest the atemporal logic of ‘ruin porn’ by attempting to endow the viewing experience with a sense of futurity. Crucially, this does not mean that film represented the future as an object, but, on the contrary, tried to make it palpable, as something one undergoes physically in the very act of reception.