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The Theatrical Biosphere and Ecologies of Performance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Baz Kershaw
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Abstract

In what would a postmodern theatrum mundi, or ‘theatre of the world’, consist? In an ironic inversion of the very concept, with the microcosm issuing a unilateral declaration of independence – or of incorporation? Or in a neo-neoplatonic recognition that it is but a cultural construct of an outer world that is itself culturally constructed? In the following article, Baz Kershaw makes connections between the high-imperial Victorian love of glasshouses, which at once created and constrained their ‘theatre of nature’, and the massive 'nineties ecological experiment of ‘Biosphere II’ – ‘a gigantic glass ark the size of an aircraft hangar situated in the Southern Arizona desert’, which embraces all the main types of terrain in the global eco-system. In the Biosphere's ambiguous position between deeply serious scientific experiment and commodified theme park, Kershaw sees an hermetically-sealed system analogous to much contemporary theatre – whose intrinsic opacity is often further blurred by a theorizing no less reductive than that of the obsessive Victorian taxonomists. He offers not answers, but ‘meditations’ on the problem of creating an ecologically meaningful theatre. Baz Kershaw, currently Professor of Drama at the University of Bristol, originally trained and worked as a design engineer. He has had extensive experience as a director and writer in radical theatre, including productions at the Drury Lane Arts Lab and as co-director of Medium Fair, the first mobile rural community arts group, and of the reminiscence theatre company Fair Old Times. He is the author of The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (Routledge, 1992) and The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard (Routledge, 1999), and co-author of Engineers of the Imagination: the Welfare State Handbook (Methuen, 1990).

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , May 2000 , pp. 122 - 130
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2000

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References

Notes and References

1. Harvey, David, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 174Google Scholar.

2. Kelly, Kevin, ‘Biosphere at One’, Whole Earth, No. 77 (1992), p. 105Google Scholar.

3. Luke, Timothy W., ‘Reproducing Planet Earth: the Hubris of Biosphere 2’, The Ecologist, XXV, No. 4 (1995), p. 157, 162Google Scholar.

4. Baudrillard has written of Biosphere II: ‘Al'image exacte des attractions de Disneyland, Biosphère II n'est pas une expérience, c'est une attraction expérimentale’. See Baudrillard, Jean, ‘La Biosphère II’, in Des Mondes Inventés: les Parcs à Thème, ed. Eyssartel, Anne-Marie and Rochette, Benard (Paris: Editions de la Villete, 1995), p. 127Google Scholar.

5. Forced Entertainment Theatre Co-operative, programme for Dirty Work, 1999.

6. Chaudhuri, Una, Staging Place: the Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), p. 77Google Scholar; quotations from Kohlmaier, Georg, and von Sartory, Barna, Houses of Glass: a Nineteenth-Century Building Type, trans. Harvey, John C. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

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10. Kelly, Kevin, ‘Biosphere II: an Autonomous World’, Whole Earth, No. 67 (1990), p. 12Google Scholar.

11. Kershaw, Baz, The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 29–56Google Scholar.

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14. Marranca, Bonnie, Ecologies of Theater: Essays at the Century Turning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. xviGoogle Scholar.

15. Ibid. p. xvii.

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17. Fuchs, Elinor, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater After Modernism (Bloomington; Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1996), p. 107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18. Ibid.

19. Thomas, op. cit., p. 243–54.

20. Chaudhuri, op. cit., p. 28.

21. Ibid., p. 29.

22. Kershaw, op. cit., p. 187–216.

23. McKay, George, ed., DiY Culture: Protest and Party in Nineties Britain (London: Verso, 1998)Google Scholar.