Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-v2bm5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-09T12:16:49.937Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - The Play at the End of the World

Deke Weaver’s Unreliable Bestiary and the Theatre of Extinction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2021

By
Una Chaudhuri  and
Joshua Williams
Edited by
Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr
Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Get access

Summary

Chapter 5: This chapter situates the American artist Deke Weaver’s long-term project The Unreliable Bestiary within the ecological politics of the Anthropocene. Weaver aims to create a performance for every letter of the English alphabet, with each letter representing an endangered species or threatened habitat. The performances he has made to date – Monkey (2009), Elephant (2010), Wolf (2013), Bear (2016–17), and Tiger (2019) – address the looming threat of the sixth great extinction by pairing the most fantastic flights of the animalized imagination with the most astonishing facts discovered by animal science. Reactivating and reconfiguring the medieval bestiary in this way allows Weaver to braid together an epistemology derived from the ‘squishy science’ of performance with an affect he calls ‘plain old wonder’, producing a new theatrical grammar for being in and with extinction and a new ethical framework for encountering our remaining animal others.

Keywords

affectAnthropocenebestiaryDeke Weaverethicsepistemologyextinctionspecieswonder
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science , pp. 70 - 84
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Suggested Reading

Bass, Rick. Brown Dog of the Yaak: Essays on Art and Activism. The Credo Series. Minneapolis, 1999.Google Scholar
Bilodeau, Chantal. ‘In Search of a New Aesthetic’. HowlRound, 19 April 2015. https://howlround.com/search-new-aesthetic.Google Scholar
Chaudhuri, Una, and Hughes, Holly, eds. Animal Acts: Performing Species Today. Ann Arbor, 2014.Google Scholar
Crane, Susan. ‘A Taxonomy of Creatures in the Second-Family Bestiary’. New Medieval Literatures 10 (2008): 1–48.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York, 1994.Google Scholar
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Berlin Family Lectures. Chicago, 2017.Google Scholar
Green, Matthew. ‘Art in WOLF’s Clothing.’ Smile Politely, 11 September 2013. www.smilepolitely.com/arts/art_in_wolfs_clothing/.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Experimental Futures. Durham, 2016.Google Scholar
Kingsnorth, Paul, and Hine, Dougald. Manifesto. Oxford, 2009. https://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/.Google Scholar
Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York, 2014.Google Scholar
Scranton, Roy. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization. San Francisco, 2015.Google Scholar
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, 2017.Google Scholar
Weaver, Deke. ‘The Aura of Bad Maps’. Text and Performance Quarterly 29, no. 4 (October 2009): 418–37.Google Scholar
Weaver, Deke. ‘Excerpts from ELEPHANT’. In Animal Acts: Performing Species Today, ed. Chaudhuri, Una and Hughes, Holly. Ann Arbor, 2014, 163–81.Google Scholar
Weaver, Deke, and Lux, Maria. ‘The Unreliable Bestiary’. Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 22 (Autumn 2012): 31–40.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×