Performance Research A Journal of the Performing Arts ISSN: 1352-8165 (Print) 1469-9990 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprs20 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. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 6 View related articles View Crossmark data 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 Circus 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 ringmaster, 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.