Performance Research A Journal of the Performing Arts

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Anthroposcenic Performance and the Need For ‘Deep Dramaturgy’

Lara Stevens

To cite this article: Lara Stevens (2019) Anthroposcenic Performance and the Need For ‘Deep Dramaturgy’, Performance Research, 24:8, 89-97, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2019.1718436 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2019.1718436

Published online: 23 Mar 2019.

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rprs20 Anthroposcenic Performance and the Need For ‘Deep Dramaturgy’

LARA STEVENS

The United Nations has declared that ‘Climate industrial facilities and giving up present Change is the defining issue of our time’ (United modes of consumption. Deep adaptation also Nations 2016). Unprecedented changes in the requires ‘restoration’ – people and communities environment are leading to extreme weather rediscovering attitudes and approaches to life events, reduced crop yields, ocean acidification and organization that our hydrocarbon-fuelled and drastic and accelerated species extinction. civilization has eroded. In light of these urgent The impact of these changes is profoundly changes, I examine the role that art might play in affecting human health through reduced access the crisis. to safe shelter, food, care and sustainable This prompts me to ask: might we need jobs, rendering the climate emergency the key a ‘deep dramaturgy’ – a dramaturgy that political concern of our time. In 2018 the World emphasizes ‘relinquishment’ of certain attitudes Bank reported that countries needed to prepare and theatrical practices and ‘restoration’ of for more than 100 million internally displaced others? What do we need to relinquish from people due to the effects of climate change current ways of doing theatre and what do we (Rigaud et al. 2018), and this figure is rising. The need to restore so that performance can play possibility of near-term human extinction is a productive role in responding to the climate increasingly raised in relation to climate change emergency? What does it mean to make theatre (see, for example, Bendell 2018; Cohen et al. in the age of the Anthropocene and in the face 2016; Colebrook 2014a, 2014b; McPherson 2019; of potential social collapse or even human Read and Alexander 2019). Increasingly, the extinction? How do we set the scene to make importance of imagination and narrative is being Anthroposcenic theatre, which is to say, theatre flagged as vital to human survival for its capacity and performance that intervenes in the ecological to reconceptualize ways of living and engaging emergency and shows possible alternative with the planet (see, for example, Alexander 2014; modes of living and engaging with the natural Eckersall 2019; Plumwood 2007; Rose 2009). world? What can theatre or performance do to Theatre can play an important role because it bring us closer to a more ethical relationship to not only represents problems associated with our immediate environments? Above all, what ecological change for audiences to consider but can theatre and performance do to expand our also has the capacity to put forward radically ecological consciousness that a walk through the new ways of living, being, seeing, acting and forest cannot? interacting that move beyond those that have led Twenty-five years ago, Una Chaudhuri put us into this predicament in the first place. forward a model for Ecological Theatre. Jem Bendell has recently argued that we cannot Chaudhuri’s essay ‘“There must be a lot of fish continue to prioritize plans for mitigation of in that lake”: Toward an ecological theater’ environmental changes in the face of ‘inevitable considered the prospects for a theatre that near-term social collapse’ (2018). He prefers would bring to an end the practice of treating we adopt strategies of ‘deep adaptation’, which the environment as the scenic background to the will involve more than ‘resilience’. Instead, he human-centred drama (1994: 24). She critiqued contends, we need to embrace ‘relinquishment’ the ways in which theatre scholarship had for – the letting go of certain assets, behaviours too long overlooked the agency of nature in and beliefs. This might mean withdrawal of dramatic works and ‘read’ the natural world as dwelling on coastlines, shutting down vulnerable simply symbol or metaphor for human concerns.

PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 24·8 : pp.89-97 ISSN 1352-8165 print/1469-9990 online 89 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2020.1718436 © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group A new kind of theatre, an Ecological Theatre, In ‘Introduction: Animal acts for changing she argued, would abandon modern naturalism times, 2.0: A field guide to interspecies and realism, considered to be humanism’s performance’ (2014), Chaudhuri noted that it privileged dramatic form. In place of this remains a challenge for artists and scholars to Anthropocentric theatre, Chaudhuri initially talk about actual animals as self-determining favoured site-specific performance for its capacity creatures, as something more or other than to stimulate spectators’ awareness of their spatial symbols for human ideas and metaphors for and temporal situation and the co-existence of human dramas. She writes: non-human others in the space. Her scholarship Animals show us how much we still need to know, not has sought to consider animal performance on only about them but also about ourselves. At the same its own terms, moving beyond human aesthetic time, they show us how very hard it is going to be to values and towards non-human-led performance. attain that knowledge, especially if we cling to our More recently, Chaudhuri has considered old habits of inquiry, our old reliance on ‘ocular proof’ human-centred drama that responds to climate and disembodied ideas. Much of the new knowledge gained through animal acts comes from going change, noting some key examples of what way past the limits of logic and book learning, and she calls ‘Anthropo-Scenes’ or theatre with accepting instruction, instead, from the life of bodies. an ‘Anthroposcenic-imagination’ in the plays This is, of course, why performance offers more to of Caryl Churchill and Wallace Shawn (2015). animal knowledge than any other cultural form: its The Anthropocene is a term proposed by the reliance on physicality, materiality, and embodiment atmospheric scientist Paul J. Cruzen to denote makes it especially useful for venturing into areas a new geological epoch that follows the Holocene. where language is absent. (Chaudhuri 2014: 10) This recommended geological period has one Chaudhuri’s argument that we need to stop marked difference from those that preceded clinging to old habits and gain new knowledge it – it has been shaped by a single earthly from the physicality, materiality and embodiment species, the human. Since the Anthropocene of non-human bodies aligns with Bendell’s demands that we as humans now recognize demands for ‘relinquishment’ and ‘restoration’ in ourselves as a geophysical force with catastrophic current modes of living. effects, Chaudhuri argues that drama with an Western theatre has historically seen itself as Anthroposcenic consciousness must do the a radical artform; even the bourgeois realist theatre same. Key to such ‘Anthropo-Scenes’ and the of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century representation of anthropogenic climate change was created in reaction to the melodramatic styles on stage, as Chaudhuri sees it, is a ‘derangement that preceded it which were perceived as too of scale’, a marked incommensurability between disconnected from lived experience and from the everyday human actions/behaviours and pertinent political questions of the time. For those their contribution to climate change (19). She in the discipline of theatre and performance studies acknowledges how difficult it is to make art that today – in a moment of ecological breakdown – we represents and relocates the human in relation need to challenge every facet of our lives, not just to geologic time scales and geophysical forces. the kinds of food we eat, what modes of transport Yet she advocates for moving away from the we take, where we invest or divest but also how traditional theatrical subject matter of human we make performance and even what constitutes biography, psychology and sociology and the ‘theatre’ and ‘performance’. There is important politics of special interest groups (20). My work emerging that is beginning to challenge use of the term Anthroposcenic performance traditional ideas of which bodies are acting, borrows from and expands upon Chaudhuri’s animate, agential on stage as well as off. Rebecca thinking, turning the focus back to her earlier Schneider’s ‘New materialism and performance interest in non-human performance. Non-human studies’ (2015), for example, provides an important performance encourages human spectators to starting point for redefining ‘live art’ by broadening think beyond their own species and challenges the scope to include non-human matter (previously the myth of human exceptionalism, which has led perceived as inanimate) ‘acting’ across time us to our present climate emergency. scales that move well beyond human lifespans.

90 PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 24·8 : ON POLITICS ■ Cardoso Flea at the Sydney Opera House, 2000. Photo Anne Maregianno In attempting to think through Anthroposcenic human spectators clamouring to see the tiny stars. performance or ‘deep dramaturgy’ I will consider Dressed alternately as a professorial fi gure or a series of performances devised by Colombian- dominatrix , Cardoso stage-managed born, Sydney-based artist Maria Fernanda Cardoso, the fl eas’ performances and commentated the acts the Cardoso Flea Circus 1994 (–2000) and ‘The Art and the feats of her performers for her audiences. of Seduction’ (2016/18). To successfully train the fl eas, Cardoso sought out experts in fl ea training but the artform was dead. Abandoning ‘old habits of inquiry’, Cardoso CARDOSO FLEA CIRCUS reverted to trial and error. It took Cardoso fi ve Cardoso Flea Circus was fi rst performed in 1994 years of intensive research and experimentation, and toured until 2000. In this work, Cardoso discussions with veterinarians and observing trained thousands of cat fl eas to perform the instinctive behaviours and desires of fl eas to traditional circus acts in the mode of the travelling successfully ‘teach’ the fl eas their circus tricks. fl ea of the nineteenth century. She During the performance, particular fl eas walked began with a troupe of fi fty fl eas and the largest the highwire, danced to the rhythms of the performance included approximately 1,500 fl eas. Tango, were fi red from a canon on a , The traditional fl eas used in fl ea circuses were pulled a toy train 160,000 times their weight, human fl eas, pulex irritans, but Cardoso was jumped hoops, swung on a miniature and unable to use them because she could not fi nd danced in micro-tutus. Many of the fl eas received any as they are yet another species driven to nicknames that related to their skills – Harry near extinction by humans. At each performance Fleadini ‘escaped’ from the arena via a thread; audiences entered a tent structure to fi nd an Teeny and Tiny walked the tightrope; Samson and oval glass enclosure that held a miniature big- Delilah lifted weights made of cotton balls. All the top tent that measured about 1.3 × 0.9 metres. performances were mere appearances of learned Circus music played throughout the performance. behaviours and were, in fact, based on the fl eas’ The walls behind the enclosure were covered instinctive drives. Throughout the training process with screens. A roving cameraman used a high- Cardoso concluded that ‘nature works for itself’ powered camera to magnify the acts taking place (Stevens 2019) by which she means that nature within the enclosure in real time for the rows of works to protect its survival rather than for the

STEVENS : ANTHROPOSCENIC PERFORMANCE AND THE NEED FOR ‘DEEP DRAMATURGY’ 91 pleasures of humans. The work gave the illusion of perceiving her. She said that, from the perspective flea agency but was artfully choreographed around of the fleas: ‘I felt that I was God … I also felt I was their instinctive drives to escape or self-protect. their mother’ (Stevens 2019). She would conduct Cardoso Flea Circus captured the imagination a memorial each time a flea died in her care. She of thousands of human spectators all over the was also ‘host’ to their parasitic needs, which is to world who scrambled to purchase tickets. In some say, she offered herself up to them as their food sites it became so popular the performances had source, feeding them from her arm three times to be balloted. The performance was exhibited per day. Her feeling of being like a God came at many of the major international sites and less from a sense of mastery or power over the festivals, including in a tipi erected outside the and more from imagining how she would Centre Pompidou, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, appear to them given the difference in scale. She Arts Festival Atlanta, The Fabric Workshop and remarked that she would have seemed enormous Museum, the San Francisco Exploratorium and to the fleas and would have been a presence that the Sydney Opera House. One of the Cardoso Flea they could feel through vibrations but not see Circus tents, enclosures, miniature props and holistically, operating as she described, at the original musical score were eventually purchased ‘edge of perception for them’ (Stevens 2019). by the Tate London and the performance toured Cardoso Flea Circus does not sit easily with as a video installation. Chaudhuri’s idea of interspecies performance, not The Cardoso Flea Circus is a performance piece least because of the power imbalance between of animal exploitation and cruelty in the mode of the interspecies performers and the way in which traditional circuses throughout history. Meiling these insects were anthropomorphized and Cheng (2007) would classify it as an ‘animalwork’, trained to mimic human forms of . that is to say, ephemeral artworks that Although Cardoso fed the fleas daily from her incorporate animals as in/voluntary performers blood, she ironically noted that she lived off and/or manipulated art objects. One reviewer them too, as the work became a major financial from the Arts Festival of Atlanta wrote: ‘By giving success (Shuttleworth 2000). The work was also them [the fleas] names, telling stories of their heavily reliant on ‘ocular proof’, which enabled prowess, and mourning certain untimely deaths, Cardoso to turn the fleas’ behaviour into a ‘freak the artist succeeds in transforming carriers of show’ for human consumption. It restored largely disease and death into noble creatures’ (Byrd forgotten or outmoded performance training 1998: 45). Another was more critical of the cruelty techniques that are not necessarily productive involved in Cardoso’s training, writing: in the midst of a climate emergency. This was As animal circuses decline in popularity on grounds a work that was seemingly not made with an of cruelty, it may seem odd that no-one bats an eyelid ecological consciousness, not least for the ways in at Colombian Maria Fernanda Cardoso training her which it reinforced long-standing attitudes that charges by tying them in wire harnesses and putting the natural world is for human consumption and them in small glass tubes so that they concuss exploitation. Its disinterest in relinquishing ideas themselves whenever they try to do anything other of human mastery and control over the natural than walk on all sixes. But then, Cardoso’s charges are world sets it in opposition to the kinds of deep fleas. (Shuttleworth 2000) dramaturgical modes of thinking and making Here the reviewer points out the hierarchies performance that we require today and reflected of value within speciesism that confer greater the dominant attitudes of the historical moment worth on more ‘charismatic animals’, such as the in which it was created in the mid-1990s. polar bear and the panda, as well as trading on On the other hand, the performance made new the human discomfort with insects, particularly discoveries about fleas and their behaviours, arthropods, which are often viewed as pests pushed the limits of logic and book learning and, or vermin. in many ways, was driven by the needs, instincts For Cardoso, the power relation between herself and drives of the tiny non-human bodies. Its and the fleas was more complex, and she spent popularity among international publics suggests much time contemplating how the fleas were that it provoked either a rare sense of human

92 PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 24·8 : ON POLITICS wonder or curiosity about an species or fed a public appetite for the abnormal or repellent in the mode of ‘freak shows’ exhibited as part of circus performances since at least the sixteenth century through to the twentieth. Either way, it certainly provided humans a perspective on the behaviours and visual image of the fl ea that radically differed from the more common encounter in the fur of their dog or cat. As such, the work had the potential to encourage humans to reconsider their relationship to the animal – its intelligence and impressive bodily capacities, or to reinforce the righteousness of human dominance and myths concerning insects lacking sentience and thus experiences of fear or pain. Cardoso’s work with creatures that are unvalued or even despised by the human animal in Cardoso Flea Circus began her on a path throughout her career that has taken a profound interest and reverence in tiny insects, their behaviours and anatomy (see, for example, Stevens 2015). Cardoso Flea Circus was the fi rst of a number of works centred on the performance of the non- human. In these works, Cardoso does not appear as a performer as she did in Cardoso Flea Circus. Instead, she allows the non-human to perform itself, particularly in performances of courtship, copulation and reproduction. I argue that these more recent performances open up new avenues for seeing and perceiving human and non-human species using techniques that we might usefully describe as deep dramaturgy. Further, they incite a dialogue between the problematic human–non- ■ She + He = Art II, 2018. human binary and are more radically shaking up Digital imaging in human understandings of performance, aesthetics collaboration with Geoff and the potential obsolescence of the human in Thompson and Andy Wang. the drama of our biosphere. spider. These spiders are the size of a speck to the naked human eye and Cardoso makes the scale of her amplifi cations apparent in photographs titled ‘ON THE ORIGINS OF ART I’ AND ‘ON Actual Size that appear in the exhibition. The THE ORIGINS OF ART II’ ( 2016/18/19) males have bright colourful tails with iridescent In 2018 I attended ‘The Art of Seduction’ highlights like the peacock bird while the females exhibition by Cardoso at ARC ONE Gallery in are a dull brown-grey and hairy. The males use Melbourne, Australia. Two of the works included these tails to perform a kind of dance to attract in the series were ‘On the Origins of Art I’ and a mate, like the male peacock bird or the male ‘On the Origins of Art II’. In these performances, Bird of Paradise. Cardoso once again returned to the aesthetic of ‘On the Origins of Art I’ and ‘II’ are video magnifying tiny under-represented insects. This installations created with high-defi nition (HD) time it was the Australian Maratus, an eight-eyed macro cinematography and a laser vibrometer jumping spider commonly known as the peacock that capture the visual and audio performance of

STEVENS : ANTHROPOSCENIC PERFORMANCE AND THE NEED FOR ‘DEEP DRAMATURGY’ 93 this extraordinary mating ritual. In the videos, (Cardoso 2019a). We might say that, in ‘The Art the male Maratus waves its legs like an air-traffic of Seduction’, Cardoso respects the Maratus on controller on a runway, in order to attract the their own terms. In foregrounding the female female’s attention. From a human perspective the Maratus, she allows it to stand as a performance dance has a comic element. Given the context, he that is not for humans. Instead we are privileged seems to be saying, ‘Over here, over here, look at spectators to another species’ performance, me!’ The vibrations of the dance and the rhythm one in which we might recognize some shared build to the point where the Maratus unfolds aesthetic values. This, however, is not to suggest and fans out his iridescent abdominal flap and that Cardoso does not interfere with the animals shakes it from side to side as he side-steps back or stage-manage the performance. She fully and forth. Cardoso uses a vibrometer to capture acknowledges that the mating ritual is entirely and amplify the sound of a rhythmic beat that orchestrated for the camera as much as a nature the insects make by vibrating their abdomens. documentary contains much behaviour that is not This beat sets the pace for the dance. If the ‘natural’. Such curation requires great technical female is impressed by the male’s artistry, his precision and scientific expertise, sensitivity and beats, his colours, what might most accurately be ethical considerations. It is this that sets apart described as his ‘twerking’, she will allow him to her mode of stage-managing the fleas from the approach her. performance-making of the Maratus. In the description of the work Cardoso writes: For this project, Cardoso collaborated with He is about 4 mm big, she is 6mm. He is colourful and spider experts in order to locate the Maratus. outlandish, she is not. He tries really hard to get her, She applied for permits from national parks she watches him. Hard to please females have driven that allowed her to take away limited numbers the Maratus males to such extremes that they are of the insect from any one location. Locating the [sic.] probably the first ever performance artists: the Maratus is painstaking work due to its size, they dance and choreograph, drum and sing, all at the even for spider experts. Over the years, however, same time as they wave their colourful tails. (Cardoso Cardoso gradually learned how to recognize their cited in Museum of Contemporary Art Australia 2018) movements and spider in the undergrowth of Instead of manipulating the Maratus to behave the bush. In order for the male to be enticed into in ways humans might consider interesting or performing the ‘dance’, the female Maratus has to aesthetically impressive, in this work Cardoso be a virgin and therefore must be collected early plays the role of scientific observer and invites in the season. Once the insects were in captivity, audiences to do the same. She offers a different Cardoso had to develop techniques to capture experience to seeing the Maratus in nature or in their behaviour on film. In order to get the most a nature documentary where the spiders would ideal angles she created a tiny stage out of paper be in their natural habitats. Cardoso places them and would brush the insects gently onto it using against a stark white backdrop, a seemingly a paintbrush. It took her a number of years to traditional gallery space, creating a ‘stage’ for figure out how to work with the pheromones the Maratus dance and beats. In so doing, she that would prompt the desirable behaviours for makes the actions more readable to humans as filming. Evidently, there was much curatorial performance and their demands for ocular proof. activity behind the scenes of these ‘artistic’ We might say that the performances were performances. curated or stage-managed rather than created We cannot know what the experience is for by Cardoso. She facilitates human spectatorship the intended audience, the female Maratus, yet to an impressive non-human choreography, there is much anticipation in waiting for the music and visual display previously invisible and female’s response to the male artistry. It leaves inaudible to humans. She resists the temptation a strong impression that her decision to mate or to overlay the Maratus’ dance and beats with not to mate is based on a complex combination music. She emphasizes the animal’s ‘complex of audio–visual–kinaesthetic aesthetics. Jane system of courtship display that exhibits its Goodall notes in her review of the show that the prowess as a dancer, musician and visual artist’ Maratus are ‘equipped with exquisite decorative

94 PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 24·8 : ON POLITICS features and sensory organs so refined that (2003) calls ‘naturecultures’ is a reminder that a purely functional interpretation of them there is no outside of nature for any species. seems inadequate’ (2013: 53). In trying to prove This prompts us human spectators to move a clear difference between humans and animals, beyond thinking about the politics of socially Enlightenment philosopher René Descartes and culturally conditioned performances, such as argued that animals lacked a ‘soul’ (1993 [1637]). Judith Butler’s slogan ‘Gender, you’re ‘doing’ it!’ He famously likened animals to machines and to more urgent ontological and epistemological hypothesized that the non-human animal’s relocations of ourselves within the Anthropocene capacity for language was merely imitative rather – it reminds us: ‘Nature, we are it!’ than rational, writing that it is nothing more Responding to ‘The Art of Seduction’ Cardoso than ‘nature which acts in them according to the writes: ‘I love working at the edge of perception. disposition of their organs’ (ibid.). But peacock What fascinates me about the small is that it’s spiders (and other non-human animals, such even more complex than the big’ (Cardoso 2019b). as the peacock bird and Bird of Paradise most Such sentiments are shared with animal and obviously) complicate this picture. They show performance studies scholar Steve Baker who that animals, insects no less, barely large enough writes that we come to animals ‘as a reminder of to be seen by the naked human eye, also value the limits of human understanding, and also of beauty, that they too have an aesthetic eye and the value of working at those limits’ (Baker cited ear, that they are the sum of more than just their in Chaudhuri 2014: 11). Cardoso certainly works organs, their programmed machinic drives. at the limits of human understanding by choosing Yet, it is not only the Maratus’ visual flair – their to work with insects with which most people are reliance on attention-seeking gesture, spectacular very unfamiliar. She revels in the ‘derangement colour, symmetrical pattern that resonates with of scale’ and the incommensurability between our species, but also their use of sound as a tool human understandings of the non-human and for communication; their subsonic call, the the power of the very tiny to surprise and delight. vibrations created, make for a multi-modal form It is precisely this play with scale and the shock of of communication. Cardoso insists through her revelatory behaviours that thrust humans out of title that this is ‘The origins of art’, that human old habits of thinking that I argue make the works culture has learned from nature, an inversion of Anthroposcenic performance in Chaudhuri’s an entire history of philosophy and science. The sense. While Chaudhuri hopes for theatre and arresting beauty and the impressive displays of performance that can evoke geological scale, these creatures make a radical reversal of how we deep time scales, this begins with smaller shifts humans place ourselves as cultured beings at the in perception of scale similar to the plays of pinnacle of the animal and non-human hierarchy. Churchill and Wallace. It is precisely the way in which this work demands Models of the ‘slow’ movement – slow theatre, a relinquishment of dominant human behaviours slow art, slow dramaturgy – are often extolled and beliefs over our own exceptionalism that as more ecologically minded forms of cultural makes it a potential model of deep dramaturgy. production and consumption. But how can we The present suffering of the natural world has make slow theatre, slow art when there’s no been arrived at through centuries of Western time left, when we might have already reached instrumentalization of the natural world as our ‘tipping point’? When governments and limitless resource and an inflated sense of human corporations are doing too little too late to slow intelligence where ‘culture’ has been positioned the rising air and sea temperatures? When the in stark opposition to nature. melted icecaps cannot be refrozen? Can we/Must For the human spectators, the nature/culture we afford prolonged contemplation of an artwork, dichotomy set up by millennia of philosophy a slow burn? Perhaps in the 1960s and 1970s when and science becomes suddenly blurred as we see the land art/environmental performance/a site aspects of ourselves in the performances of these specific movement began, there was still enough tiny arachnids. The blurring of these once rigidly time left for such leisurely deliberation, but can we separated categories into what Donna Haraway still have that same vantage point today in 2020?

STEVENS : ANTHROPOSCENIC PERFORMANCE AND THE NEED FOR ‘DEEP DRAMATURGY’ 95 Or do we need something that is more urgent and and other species. This kind of performance and that demands letting go of the habits and lifestyles its dramaturgy has the potential to expand our to which we cling, perhaps even to our privileging ecological consciousness because it represents of our own species above all else? worlds and complex systems, inter-relations and Peter Eckersall and Eddie Paterson (2011) modes of communication that operate at cross- define ‘slow dramaturgy’ as dramaturgies that purposes to the human hydrocarbon-fuelled, foreground time and reorient sensory perceptions. growth-driven narratives of ‘progress’. These The rise of ‘slow dramaturgy’ indicates a shift jarring moments of radical intimacy might make in the pace, structure, material dimensions of the relinquishment of our current lifestyles theatre to bring out its dialectical, ecological and less painful as we accept and even embrace our uncanny experiences (190). They write: ‘The role human vulnerability and similarity to the non- of slow dramaturgy is to bring the everyday into human and work towards a non-human-centric this new awareness and to make this a problem for restoration of the environment that our species our consideration’ (ibid.). ‘The Art of Seduction’ has so profoundly altered and damaged. reveals the uncanny in the everyday natural world yet it only appears to human spectators as ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS uncanny because of how profoundly we accept Photos used with kind permission from the artist, Maria the idea that this thing we call culture is an Fernanda Cardoso. exclusively human trait. The ‘problem’ then that REFERENCES the work invites its human audiences to consider is how ignorant or dissociated we may be from Alexander, Samuel (2014) ‘Life in a “degrowth” economy, and why you might actually enjoy it’, The Conversation, 2 October, the behaviours, emotions, interactions of the http://bit.ly/2Raaj5m, accessed 9 September 2019. non-human world that often flourish exquisitely Bendell, Jem (2018) ‘Deep adaptation: A map for navigating around us without our notice. climate tragedy’, IFLAS Occasional Paper 2, Institute of Yet more than ‘slow dramaturgy’, I see these Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) at the University of performances as employing a ‘deep dramaturgy’, Cumbria, UK. which is to say, a dramaturgy that demands Byrd, Cathy (1998) ‘Maria Fernanda Cardoso: Cardoso Flea we surrender human exclusivity over artistic Circus’ (Review of Arts Festival of Atlanta), Art Papers (January/February): 45. production. The ‘depth’ of the dramaturgy Cardoso, Maria Fernanda (2019a) ‘On The Origins of Art suggests a relationship to time and immersion I and II’, http://bit.ly/2t1uWsp, accessed 9 September 2019. into something that produces a capitulation Cardoso, Maria Fernanda (2019b) ‘Spiders of Paradise’, – or shows how we human spectators might http://bit.ly/2QMNDc8, accessed 9 September 2019. become, as Eckersall writes: ‘parenthetical Cardoso, Maria Fernanda (2018) The Art of Seduction, to, overwhelmed by, and even absent in exhibition and video installation at ARC ONE Gallery, 6 contemporary existence’ (2019: 308). ‘On the February–8 March, Melbourne, Australia. Origins of Art I’ and ‘II’ ask us to relinquish the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (2018) ‘Maria human delusion of our monopoly over beauty, Fernanda Cardoso, On the Origins of Art I-II, 2016’ https:// www.mca.com.au/artists-works/works/2018.13/, accessed reason and aesthetic appreciation as well, more 19 December 2019. radically still, as the idea that everything beautiful Chaudhuri, Una (1994) ‘“There must be a lot of fish in that in this world is for our consumption alone. lake”: Toward an ecological theater’, Theater 25(1): 23–31. Like Cardoso Flea Circus, it asks us to shift Chaudhuri, Una (2014) ‘Introduction: Animal acts for perspective on the insect kingdom but this time changing times, 2.0: A field guide to interspecies with a greater respect for the subject matter performance’, in Una Chaudhuri and Holly Hughes (eds) as its own master (without presuming that Animal Acts: Performing species today, Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, pp. 1–12. the capturing of this footage is not without questionable ethics). What this kind of art Chaudhuri, Una (2015) ‘Anthropo-Scenes: Theater and climate change’, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English tries to bring to audiences that a walk in the 3(1): 12–27. forest cannot, is a renewed, surprising or even Cheng, Meiling (2007) ‘Animalworks in China’, TDR: The voyeuristic encounter with the natural world that journal of performance studies, special issue: Animals and breaks our habitual modes of viewing our own performance 51(1): 63–91.

96 PERFORMANCE RESEARCH 24·8 : ON POLITICS Cohen, Tom, Claire Colebrook and J. Hillis Miller (2016) Read, Rupert and Samuel Alexander (2019) This Civilization Is Twilight of the Anthropocene idols, London: Open Humanities Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire – and what lies Press. beyond, Melbourne: Simplicity Institute. Colebrook, Claire (2014a) Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Rigaud, Kanta Kumari, Alex de Sherbinin, Bryan Jones, Jonas extinction, vol. 1, Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Bergmann, Viviane Clement, Kayly Ober, Jacob Schewe, Colebrook, Claire (2014b) Sex After Life: Essays on extinction, Susana Adamo, Brent McCusker, Silke Heuser and Amelia vol. 2, Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Midgley (2018) ‘Groundswell: Preparing for internal climate migration’, World Bank, Washington DC, 19 March 2018, Descartes, René (1993 [1637]) Discourse on the Method of https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/29461, Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the accessed 18 September 2019. Sciences, trans. John Veitch, The Project Gutenberg eBook, http://www.gutenberg.org/fi les/59/59-h/59-h.htm, accessed Rose, Deborah Bird (2009) ‘Writing place’, in Ann Curthoys 19 December 2019. and Ann McGrath (eds), Writing Histories: Imagination and narration, Melbourne: Monash University ePress, Eckersall, Peter (2019) ‘Radically dead art in the beautiful pp. 8.1–8.13. end times’, in Peter Eckersall and Helena Grehan (eds) The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics, London and Schneider, Rebecca (2015) ‘New materialism and New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 308–10. performance studies’, TDR: The drama review 59(4): 7–17. Eckersall, Peter and Eddie Paterson (2011) ‘Slow dramaturgy: Shuttleworth, Ian (2000) ‘Cardoso Flea Circus’, Renegotiating politics and staging the everyday’, Financial Times, August, Australasian Drama Studies 58(April): 178–92. http://www.cix.co.uk/~shutters/reviews/00094.htm, accessed 20 September 2019. Goodall, Jane (2013) ‘Natural aesthetics: Formations of gender in the work of Maria Fernanda Cardoso’, Artlink 33(3): Stevens, Lara (2015) ‘Dismembering the member: Rethinking 52–5. sexual difference in Maria Fernanda Cardoso’s exhibition “It’s not size that matters, it is shape”’, Journal of the Haraway, Donna J. (2003) The Companion Species Manifesto: Association for the Study of Australian Literature, Special issue: Dogs, people, and signifi cant otherness, vol.1, Chicago, IL: On species, 15(2): 1–13. Prickly Paradigm Press. Stevens, Lara (2019) Phone Interview with Maria Fernanda McPherson, Guy R. (2019) Only Love Remains: Dancing at the Cardoso, 22 July, Melbourne–Sydney, Australia. edge of extinction, New York, NY: Woodthrush Productions. United Nations (2016) ‘Climate Change’, 11 January, Plumwood, Val (2007) ‘A review of Deborah Bird Rose’s http://bit.ly/2Tg8iXT, accessed 6 July 2019. Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for decolonization’, Australian Humanities Review 42, August, http://bit.ly/30fkycA, accessed 14 October 2019.

NEW FROM PERFORMANCE RESEARCH BOOKS Performing Poland by Dariusz Kosiński is a fascinating synthesis of the history of Polish theatre from the tenth century to the present day. In a lavishly illustrated book, the author not only takes a look at theatrical texts and works, but also describes a culture of the performative that includes ritual, ceremony and public manifestation. In fi ve parallel stories the book celebrates a colourful and multi- faceted depiction of Polish national culture and identity: ‘The Theatre of Festivities’ describes folk, religious and contemporary public holidays that are inscribed into the lives of individuals and society; ‘A Theatre of Fundamental Questions’ reconstructs the special Polish tradition of ‘sacred theatre’; ‘National Theatre’ recounts the story of national identity, which in Poland is strongly infl uenced by theatre; the relationship between theatre, politics and power is discussed in ‘Political Theatre: Between ceremony and protest’; and the conclusion, ‘The Theatre of the Cultural Metropolis’, comprises urban scenes and the history of artistic theatre from the ‘salon culture’ of the nineteenth century to the present ‘theatre of crisis’.

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STEVENS : ANTHROPOSCENIC PERFORMANCE AND THE NEED FOR ‘DEEP DRAMATURGY’ 97