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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2022
This article investigates live performance in the broad geo-historical context of the Anthropocene, a contested term in recent scholarship, but one that offers a breadth of focus on human relations with its coexistent non-human other. These interrelations are examined through a range of theatrical and non-theatrical genres and sites from the Australian parliament's coal theatrics to exemplary performances by Indigenous companies Bangarra Dance Theatre and Marrugeku. It sets the scene with a visit to the Curtain Tree in the rainforests of north Queensland, Australia, arguing that the vitality and display of its root system models a special kind of reciprocity between the performative elements of the environment and the environmental elements of theatre and performance. This is traced through recent short-run immersive works, Hanna Cormick's Mermaid (2020) and Melinda Hetzel and Company's Conservatory (2020), and a rereading of a canonical Australian drama, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.
1 Crutzen, Paul, ‘Geology of Mankind’, Nature, 415, 23 (2002), pp. 1–96CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, here p. 23.
2 See Davis, Heather and Turpin, Etienne, eds., Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Clark, Timothy, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London: Bloomsbury, 2015)Google Scholar.
3 Manuel Arias-Maldonado and Zev Trachtenberg, ‘Introduction’, in Arias-Maldonado and Trachtenberg, eds., Rethinking the Environment for the Anthropocene (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 1–16, here p. 1.
4 Una Chaudhuri, ‘Anthropo-Scenes: Theater and Climate Change’, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 3, 1 (2015), pp. 12–27, here p. 20.
5 Lara Stevens, Peta Tait and Denise Varney, ‘“Street Fighters and Philosophers”: Traversing Ecofeminisms’, in Stevens, Tait and Varney, eds., Feminist Ecologies: Changing Environments in the Anthropocene (London: Palgrave, 2018), pp. 1–22.
6 Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016).
7 Alan Read, The Dark Theatre (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), p. 3.
8 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 59.
9 C. Clarkson, Z. Jacobs, B. Marwick et al., ‘Human Occupation of Northern Australia by 65,000 Years Ago’, Nature, 547 (2017), pp. 306–10.
10 Djarra Delaney, ‘Climate Adaptation and the 2030 Horizon’, University of Melbourne webinar, 24 November 2020, at https://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/home/news-events/past-events/climate-adaptation.
11 Alexis Wright, ‘The Ancient Library and a Self-Governing Literature’, unpublished paper at Writing Place, Writing Laws: Laws and the Humanities in the ‘Anthropocene’ workshop, Melbourne Law School, 10 May 2019.
12 Debra Bird Rose, ‘Anthropocene Noir’, Arena, 41–2 (2013), pp. 206–19, here p. 207.
13 Baz Kershaw, Theatre Ecology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 5.
14 Val Plumwood, ‘Ecofeminist Analysis and the Culture of Ecofeminist Denial’, in Stevens, Tait and Varney, Feminist Ecologies, pp. 97–112, here p. 103; and Freya Matthews, ‘Relating to Nature: Deep Ecology or Ecofeminism?’, in Stevens, Tait and Varney, Feminist Ecologies, pp. 35–55, here p. 39.
15 Tim Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), pp. 1–5.
16 Sarah Kane, Sarah Kane Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2001), p. 245.
17 Peter Eckersall and Eddie Paterson, ‘Slow Dramaturgy: Renegotiating Politics and Staging the Everyday’, Australasian Drama Studies, 58, 1 (2011), pp. 178–92, here p. 190.
18 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 2.
19 Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen and John R. McNeill, ‘The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?’, Ambio (Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences), 36, 8 (2007), pp. 614–21, here p. 619.
20 Ray Lawler, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (Sydney: Currency Press, 1957).
21 Erika Munk, ‘A Beginning and End’, Theater, 25, 1 (1994), pp. 5–6, here pp. 5–6.
22 Peter Griggs, ‘Deforestation and Sugar Cane Growing in Eastern Australia, 1860–1995’, Environment and History, 13 (2007), pp. 255–83, here p. 257.
23 Will Higgenbotham, ‘Blackbirding: Australia's History of Luring, Tricking and Kidnapping Pacific Islanders’, ABC, 17 September 2017, at www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-17/blackbirding-australias-history-of-kidnapping-pacific-islanders/8860754, accessed 18 July 2021. For a postcolonial analysis of the play see Russell McDougall, ‘Sugar, Land and Belonging: Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and No Sugar’, Australasian Drama Studies, 38, 1 (2001), pp. 58–65.
24 Lesley Head, Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 42.
25 Reef Water Quality Protection Plan Secretariat, Scientific Consensus Statement, Brisbane: Queensland Government, 2013, pp. 1–50, here p. 4, at https://www.reefplan.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0022/46174/scsu-chapter-3-relative-risks.pdf, accessed 15 December 2021.
26 Downing Cless, ‘Ecodirecting Canonical Plays’, in Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May, eds., Readings in Performance and Ecology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 159–68, here p. 159.
27 Lawler, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, p. 48.
28 Jonathan Mills, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll programme, State Opera South Australia, 2020.
29 Lawler, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, p. 188.
30 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 2.
31 Carl Lavery, ‘Ecology in Beckett's Theatre Garden: Or How to Cultivate Oikos’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 28, 1 (2018), pp. 10–26, here p. 22.
32 Joslin McKinney, ‘Scenographic Materialism, Affordance and Extended Cognition in Kris Verdonck's ACTOR #1’, Theatre & Performance Design, 1, 1–2 (2015), pp. 79–93, here p. 92.
33 Bruce McConachie cited in David Wiles, ‘On Being a Twenty-First-Century Theatre Historian’, Theatre Research International, 44, 2 (2019), pp. 189–95, here p. 191.
34 Elin Diamond, ‘Churchill's Tragic Materialism; or, Imagining a Posthuman Tragedy’, PMLA, 129, 4, (2014), pp. 751–60, here pp. 752–3.
35 Una Chaudhuri, ‘There Must Be a Lot of Fish in That Lake’, Theater, 25, 1 (1994), pp. 23–31, here p. 23.
36 Lara Stevens, ‘Anthropocenic Performance and the Need For “Deep Dramaturgy”’, Performance Research, 24, 8 (2019), pp. 89–97, here p. 89.
37 Cut the Sky, Marrugeku, co-artistic directors Rachael Swain and Dalisa Pigrum, Premiere Perth International Arts Festival, 27 February 2015.
38 Marrugeku, Cut the Sky, at www.marrugeku.com.au/productions/cut-the-sky, accessed 11 June 2021.
39 Rachael Swain, Dance in Contested Land (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 107–8.
40 Peta Tait, ‘Enveloping the Nonhuman: Australian Aboriginal Performance’, Theatre Journal, 71, 3 (2019), pp. 347–63, here p. 354.
41 Lesley Hughes, Will Steffen, Greg Mullins, Annika Dean, Ella Weisbrot and Martin Rice, ‘Summer of Crisis’, Climate Council of Australia Ltd, 2020, p. 3.
42 Tait, ‘Enveloping the Nonhuman’, p. 358.
43 Francis Rings, ‘Terrain: Study Guide for Teachers and Students’, Bangarra Dance Theatre, 2019.
44 Lavery, ‘Ecology in Beckett's Theatre Garden’, p. 11.
45 Keith Kahn-Harris, ‘Denialism: What Drives People to Reject the Truth’, The Guardian, 3 August 2018, at www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/03/denialism-what-drives-people-to-reject-the-truth, accessed 24 September 2021.
46 Clive Hamilton, ‘That Lump of Coal’, The Conversation, 15 February 2017, at https://theconversation.com/that-lump-of-coal-73046, accessed 1 July 2021.
47 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 11 (italics in original).
48 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, p. 14. The usage here is indebted to Timothy Gould, ‘The Unhappy Performative’, in Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, eds., Performativity and Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 19–44, here p. 24 (capitals in original).
49 Hamilton, ‘That Lump of Coal’.
50 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 94.
51 Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill, ‘The Anthropocene’.
52 ‘No-one alive has ever seen the conditions we are seeing today’. Commissioner Shane Fitzimmons, NSW Police, December 2019.
53 Head, Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene, p. 14.
54 Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, ‘Art and Death: Lives between the Fifth Assessment and the Sixth Extinction’, in Davis and Turpin, Art in the Anthropocene, pp. 3–29, here pp. 3–4.
55 Head, Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene, p. 167.
56 Lavery, ‘Ecology in Beckett's Theatre Garden: Or How to Cultivate Oikos’, p. 12.
57 David Abram, The Spell of Sensuousness and Perception and Language in a More-than-Human-World (New York: Pantheon, 1996).
58 Jennifer Parker Starbuck, ‘Becoming Leech: Animal–Human–Technological Hybrid Exchanges’, Performance Research, 25, 4 (2020), pp. 26–35, here p. 35.
59 ClimActs, at https://climacts.org.au, accessed 1 July 2020.
60 Judith Brett, ‘The Coal Curse: Resources, Climate and Australia's Future’, Quarterly Essay, 78, 1 (2020), pp. 1–75, here p. 6.
61 Lavery, Carl, ‘Introduction: Performance and Ecology – What Can Theatre Do?’, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 20, 2 (2016), pp. 229–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
62 See Varney, Denise ‘“Not Now, Not Ever”: Julia Gillard and the Performative Power of Affect’, in Diamond, E., Varney, D. and Amich, C., eds., Performance Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 25–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
