Synopses & Reviews
Readings in Performance and Ecology is a groundbreaking collection of essays focusing on how theatre, dance, and other forms of performance are helping to transform our ecological values. Leading scholars and practitioners explore the ways that familiar and new works of theatre and dance can help us recognize our reciprocal relationship with the natural world; how performance helps us understand the way our bodies are integrally connected to the land; how environmentalists use performance as a form of protest; how performance illuminates our relationships with animals as autonomous creatures and artistic symbols; and how performance can help humans re-define our place in the larger ecological community.
Review
"This collection of essays brings ecocritical studies into a necessary dialogue with dramaturgy and offers rich and suggestive ways to explore a new framework and a different vocabulary through which to interpret the dialogic roles of the environment within the episteme of theatrical community . . . The book features a very strong collection of essays, which reshape theatre in a field of diverse practices . . . In short, this book tried to explore the challenge of understanding ecological values and the power of theatre from a new standpoint. It has not been possible in this brief account to do justice to all the good things that his book offers, but I have certainly found it fascinating and thought-provoking.' - Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism
"[A] refreshing addition to Palgrave Macmillan's What Is Theatre? series ... The real strength of this edited collection is Arons and May's guiding vision of 'the fierce, inexorable interconnectivity between nature and human culture' ... these essays successfully interweave performance and story to show us why and how our telling matters." - ISLE
"Readings in Performance and Ecology assembles a broad range of essays that take as their respective foci ecological debates, animals in performance, ecoactivisim, landscapes and bodies, ecocriticism in dramatic literature, and the practicalities of theatremaking. This expansive scope evidences the editors' assertion that performance theorists and practitioners should adopt ecocentric approaches to their work . . . Whereas ecocriticism has emerged from the discipline of literary criticism as a rich subfield, terms such as 'ecodramaturgy' and 'ecodirecting' have not yet carved out a place in the vernacular of theatre and performance studies. This anthology seeks to do this." - The Drama Review"Arons and May have pulled together a lively, perceptive collection of essays that takes as its key terms ecology and theatre, demonstrating the multiple ways performance and the environment are or should be linked. Using what the editors call 'ecodramaturgy,' the volume invites practical and theoretical engagements with questions of production and waste, suggesting environmentally green and sustainable theatre practices. The collection also offers insight into how animals, the environment, anti-nuclear activism, ethics, colonialism, class, and of course power are yoked together as much more than metaphor in dramatic literature and in live performance. Written with activist urgency and critical lucidity, these discerning essays vividly explore theatre's potential to help us reimagine how we co-inhabit the earth." - Jill Dolan, Annan Professor in English and Theatre, Princeton University
Synopsis
This ground-breaking collection focuses on how theatre, dance, and other forms of performance are helping to transform our ecological values. Top scholars explore how familiar and new works of performance can help us recognize our reciprocal relationship with the natural world and how it helps us understand the way we are connected to the land.
About the Author
Wendy Arons is Professor of Dramatic Literature and Dramaturgy at Carnegie Mellon University, USA. She is author of
Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Women's Writing, editor of a special issue of
Theatre Topics on Performance and Ecology, and artistic director and organizer of the 2012 Earth Matters on Stage ecodrama festival and symposium.
Theresa J. May is Associate Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Oregon, USA, and co-founder/artistic director of Earth Matters on Stage ecodrama festival and symposium. She is author of Salmon Is Everything: Community-based Theatre in the Klamath Watershed and has published widely on performance and ecology, including essays in Performing Nature and a special issue of Theatre Topics on Performance and Ecology.
Table of Contents
Introduction; Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May
PART I: ECOCRITICISM AND DRAMATIC LITERATURE
1. Theatre, Environment, and the Thirties; Barry Witham
2. Bringing Blood to Ghosts: English Canadian Drama and the Ecopolitics of Place; Nelson Gray
3. Other Others: Dramatis Animalia in Some Alternative American Drama; Robert Baker-White
PART II: ANIMALS AND/IN PERFORMANCE
4. The Silence of the Polar Bears: Performing (Climate) Change in the Theatre of Species; Una Chaudhuri
5. Dancing with Monkeys? On Performance Commons and Scientific Experiments; Baz Kershaw
6. Everything à la Giraffe: Science, Performance, and a Spectacular Body in Nineteenth-Century Vienna; Derek Lee Barton
PART III: THEORIZING ECOPERFORMANCE
7. Ethics, Evolution, Ecology, and Performance; Bruce McConachie
8. Natural Disaster, Cultural Memory: Montserrat Adrift in the Black and Green Atlantic; Kathleen M. Gough
9. Stillness in Nature: Eeo Stubblefield's Still Dance with Anna Halprin; Arden Thomas
PART IV: ECOACTIVISM AND PERFORMANCE
10. British Alternative Companies and Antinuclear Plays: Eco-Conscious Theatre in Thatcher's Britain; Sara Freeman
11. Bikes, Choices, Action! Embodied Performances of Sustainability by a Traveling Theatre Group; Meg O'Shea
12. Earth First!'s "Crack the Dam" and the Aesthetics of Ecoactivist Performance; Sarah Ann Standing
PART V: CASE STUDIES IN GREEN THEATRE
13. Ecodirecting Canonical Plays; Downing Cless
14. Devising "Green Piece": A Holistic Pedagogy for Artists and Educators; Anne Justine D'Zmura
15. Sound Ecology in the Woods: Red Riding Hood Takes an Audio Walk; Cornelia Hoogland
16. The Labor of Greening Love's Labour's Lost; Justin A. Miller
17. Theatrical Production's Carbon Footprint; Ian Garrett
Epilogue: Thinking Forward . . .; Wallace Heim