Animal Acts CRITICAL PERFORMANCES Presenting key texts by contemporary theater and performance artists along with illuminating commentary by leading critics Series Editors: Una Chaudhuri and Robert Vorlicky Fouoding Editors: Lyuda Hart aod Paul Heritage TITLES IN TH E SERI ES FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS AnimalActs: Performing Species Today edited by Una Chaudhuri aod Holly Hughes The Myopia and Other Plays by David Greenspan by David Greenspao, edited by Marc Robinson The Reverend Billy Project: From Rehearsal Hall to Super Mall with the Church ofLife After Shopping by Savitri D and Bill Talen, edited by Alisa Solomon Say Word!: Voices from Hip Hop Theater edited by Daoiel Banks Sex, Drag, and Male Roles: Investigating Gender as Performance by Diaoe Torr aod Stepheo Bottoms From Inner Worlds to Outer Space: The Multimedia Performances ofDan Kwong edited by Robert Vorlicky FROM CONTINUUM PUBLISHERS OfAll the Nerve: Deb Margolin Solo edited by Lyuda Hart Hardcore from the Heart: The Pleasures, Profit>, and Politics ofSex in Performance by Annie Sprinkle, edited by Gabrielle Cody Rachel's Brain and Other Storms: The Performance Scripts ofRachel Rosenthal edited by Una Chaudhuri Animal Acts Performing Species Today Edited by Una Chaudhuri and Holly Hughes The University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2014 All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid- free paper 2017 2016 2015 2014 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Animal acts : performing species today / edited by Una Chaudhuri and Holly Hughes. pages cm.— (Critical performances) ISBN 978- 0- 472- 07199- 9 (hardback)— ISBN 978- 0- 472- 05199- 1 (paper) — ISBN 978- 0- 472- 02953- 2 (e- book) 1. Animals in the performing arts. 2. Animal behavior. I. Chaudhuri, Una, 1951– editor of compi- lation. II. Hughes, Holly, 1955 March 10– editor of compilation. PN1590.A54A55 2013 791.8'023— dc23 2013040292 Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need? Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware that we are not really at home in our interpreted world. Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying. — Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies For my father, Wazirzada Sardar Baljit Singh, and for my friend Fritz Ertl: birder brothers across continents and centuries. — Una Chaudhuri and For the many canines and felines with whom I’ve shared my life, and for the humans who’ve helped our multispecies household thrive. Thank you, Frankie Joiris, Raissa Hinman, Denise Tarby, and of course Esther Newton. — Holly Hughes Contents Animal Acts for Changing Times, 2.0: A Field Guide to Interspecies Performance Introduction by Una Chaudhuri 1 The Dog and Pony Show (bring your own pony) by Holly Hughes 13 Commentary by Donna Haraway: Agility Is Performance Art Stay! by Vicky Ryder, Lisa Asagi, and Stacy Makishi 37 Commentary by Marla Carlson: What Happened to the Black Dog? Cat Lady by Joseph Keckler 55 Commentary by Erika Rundle: Theatre of the Cat Lady Who Is Not With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit? / ¿Con Qué Culo Se Sienta la Cucaracha? by Carmelita Tropicana (aka Alina Troyano) 69 Commentary by Lawrence La Fountain- Stokes: Martina, Catalina, Elián, and the Old Man: Queer Tales of a Transnational Cuban Cockroach No Bees for Bridgeport: A Fable from the Age of Daley by Kestutis Nakas 93 Commentary by Joshua Takano Chambers- Letson: A New Fable of the Bees Horseback Views: A Queer Hippological Performance by Kim Marra 111 Commentary by Jane C. Desmond: Kinesthetic Intimacies MONKEY by Deke Weaver 141 Commentary by Cary Wolfe: Apes like Us Excerpts from ELEPHANT by Deke Weaver 163 Commentary by Nigel Rothfels: A Hero’s Death Excerpt from Everything I’ve Got by Jess Dobkin 189 Commentary by Jill Dolan: The Great Refusal and the Greater Hope viii contents Excerpts from As the Globe Warms: An American Soap Opera in Twelve Acts by Heather Woodbury 197 Commentary by Ann Pellegrini: Zooglossia: The Unknown Tongues of Heather Woodbury The Others by Rachel Rosenthal 217 Contributors 239 by Una Chaudhuri Introduction: Animal Acts for Changing Times, 2.0: A Field Guide to Interspecies Performance Things are moving fast in the human- animal world. So much so that an upgrade seems warranted on my earlier take on it, or rather my take on that part of it that intersects with the world of performance, theatre, and performance studies. Version 1.0 of this bulletin appeared in American The- atre magazine a few years ago,1 and the double meaning lurking in its title has proved to be prophetic. The interspecies performances that are going on in our changing times, both onstage and off, are also good for producing change, not only in the ways we live with animals and the ways we think about them but also by transforming our values more broadly, resetting our priorities, rebooting our sense of what it might mean to be human: “animal acts,” in short, are a powerful way to change the world. In the past few years, a spate of conferences, scholarly monographs, criti- cal anthologies, book series, college courses, new journals, and special issues of journals have variously registered “the animal turn” in the humanities and social sciences.2 This academic burgeoning reflects a rapidly dawning “animal consciousness” in the culture at large, recorded in countless re- cent works of fiction, art, film, and popular culture. The impetus for this heightened attention to animals (or, as we’ve now learned to say: to the other animals) is, of course, varied and complex, but its link to both the animal rights movement and to the accelerating environmental crisis of our times is undeniable. The former, a centuries-old discourse whose current and ex- tremely forceful phase was launched by the publication, in 1975, of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, has reached deep into both social and legal prac- tice, transforming the fields of scientific animal experimentation and animal farming. Numerous horrifying exposés of the latter have resulted not only 2 animal acts in major changes in the way so- called food animals are raised and killed but also in a growing army of vegetarians, silently performing a daily refusal of meat culture. While no one working on behalf of animals feels the end of animal exploitation is near, many of us have come to hope that it is possible. In recent decades, attention to the plight of the other animals has come from a source that tends to be more compelling for most people than con- cern about animal suffering: human self- preservation. The increasing rav- ages of climate change have registered most dramatically on certain animal species, including, for example, one of the most beloved of the “charismatic mega- fauna” (a phrase from zoo jargon) who are responsible for bringing in the big Sunday crowds: the polar bear. As the forlorn gazes of these and other “poster animals” of climate- change- extinction peer at us from Time magazine covers and Times Square billboards, we begin to acknowledge what we’ve always known and also carefully “not- known”:3 their lives are contingent, exactly as ours are, on the delicate ecology of the planet we share with them. Now, we have to be concerned about the other animals not only for their sakes but also for ours.4 As ecological thought itself moves into a sophisticated new phase, es- chewing the conceptually crippling binaries— especially the one that so disastrously divided “nature” from “culture,” making the one into a distant spectacle or recreational escape and the latter into a thing of pure, uncon- strained artifice— the cultural conception of species is being transformed as well.5 Increasingly, it is the continuities and connections between species that are emphasized rather than the differences. At the same time, the crude dualism that put the human species on one side and all others— the mil- lions upon millions of others— on another side, separated by a Great Wall of human exceptionalism, is breaking down. The multitudes of other species that we have so lazily and offensively corralled into one single word— ”The animal! What a word!” as Jacques Derrida famously exclaimed6— are now roaming across the vast territories of sameness and difference that make each one unique while each one is also multiply enmeshed in the web of all planetary life. Be it in the work of animal rights, in the texts of animal studies, in the myriad animal practices found in every human culture, or in the vast field of animal representation, “animal acts” of all kinds are changing us, are changing our times, and will change the future of our species. The perfor- mances and commentaries in this book invoke all these realms while also contributing to them. They reveal the shaping force of animal discourse in every significant cultural category: gender, class, race, nation, age, profes- sion, sexual orientation, marital status, and, of course, species. Their scope introduction 3 and extension tempt me to resort to one of the characteristic methodologies of traditional natural history: the taxonomy. I am tempted, for example, to identify the many ways that class mediates the human relationship to ani- mals, ranging from the upper-cl ass traditions of equestrianism discussed in Kim Marra’s piece to the desperate survival tactics employed by Sawong, the mahout who teaches Deke Weaver to ride an elephant in Thailand.