12 Feb talks and workshops

Other talks

‘Environmental justice and arts policy’ for the Federation of Scottish Theatre (2020).

‘Performing the Future’ as part of workshop and event by Rachel Jacobs, Nottingham Contemporary (2018).

Panel member for Creative Resistance? Resilient Futures? at Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, as part of GAIA: Resonant Visions, the artistic programmes for the Society of Ecological Restoration (SER) conference curated by James Brady (2015).

The rich build walls against the wild and so they desire it’, a talk for The Wild Project at Primary, Nottingham (2014).

Keynote and respondent for ‘A Return to Pre-Modernity’, film programme curated by Victor Wang at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, August 2014. The films were: Amphibious (Login-Logout) by Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla;  Tônus | 2012 by Rodrigo Braga; and ‘Beau Geste’ by Yto Barrada (2014).

22 Jan Conference Papers

21 Mar Witnessing the ethical and re-placing the human in outdoor dance practices

Paula Kramer, being-not-being a tree, 2011, photo: Stephen Bottoms

This paper came out of collaborations with the outdoor movement artist Paula Kramer and the workshop we provided at Tanzkongress, Düsseldorf 2013.

‘I’ll describe improvised movements by a dancer while touching the vegetation, the rocks, the soils and waters of a location, influenced by gravity and by weather and by a witness. My argument is that these improvisations make possible a novel experience of the ethical for the witness, an experience that moves through the body, as likened to Irigaray’s porous movement from within to outside the body…

Paula works with questions of how the human body can perceive and respond to an agency of matter, or the capacities of collections of entities. How does the shift in human consciousness allow for, what she calls, the rising of other presences that the dance can accept and move with, as if they were autonomous – but always unknowable … As a witness one experiences a kinaesthetic empathy. For the witness, though, the ‘other’ is not the tree or stone, but the human in relation with the stone. They don’t form one smooth entity.

Then, when Paula moves away, the rock, the tree, the river bed has become different, if only for a moment. It has become something that compels the witness to go and touch it, too, to acknowledge it. It has not been made ‘special’ by human attention. It’s as if the human – in attempting to be receptive, or to be like matter herself – has somehow entered the time, the duration of the material, not only touched its surface, volume or depth. There is a moment of mutual letting go, when there is a lingering between the human body and the tree, and even the witness can feel the changes that have been effected – as ephemeral and dissipating as they might be’.

key words: Paula Kramer, Mick Smith, Luce Irigaray, new materialisms

at International Society for Environmental Ethics, University of East Anglia 2013

21 Mar The tick, the epiphyte and the camel

Can a place learn? Can the capability for learning be found not solely within the organism, or the organism responding with its immediate surroundings? Can learning be a capacity found within the wider field of relations between many life forms, a field that includes the non-living?

The question whether a place can learn might act to bring into existence a problem or contradiction. Or be an ingredient of a place that performance can show. Or lead to the invention of a field in which a problem finds its solution.

These variations are discussed by way of the tick, the epiphyte and the camel.

The talk is in two parts. In the first part, the question is treated as if it could be researched, as if experimentations could be made towards its solution. In the second part, the question is treated like a speculative concept, one that is added to a problem and changes the way the problem is understood, but the question itself is not answered.

key words: Isabelle Stengers, Gregory Bateson, AN Whitehead

at Aberystwyth University ‘Ecology and Environment’ Series, Theatre, Film and Television Studies & Geography and Earth Sciences 2013

21 Mar Performing insensible relations

‘Most of the organisms of the world live beyond human sensing of them, and beyond the ways that humans make sense of the world. How to respond to those beings at temporal and geographical distances, and to the human-induced loss of this diverse biological life that is outside human sensing are problems for relational, ecological ethics, the strand of ethics that begins with the immediate relations between humans and others. For philosophers, this include how to write about the non-relational, about the beings and entities outside the categories and classifications that make the world make sense…

There is a phrase in the policy and science literatures to describe when these species disappear, which is ‘anonymous extinction’ – a phrase that comes close to describing the banality of extinction – but does nothing to describe its violence.  And the phrase does nothing for describing how to live together with the ‘anonymous’. Of course, we do live with the anonymous, and we always have done, they preceded humans. Many probably do not need or want close human contact. It may be that the most enduring relation is one of distance and indifference.

These problems, too, are taunts for performance, at least in theory: how to show and perform the non-relational in an art-form that works between humans and holds hard to the present tense. How might performance contribute its own responses to these problems’.

key words: Jean-Luc Nancy

at ‘Performance and Ecology Symposium’, Central School of Speech and Drama 2013

21 Mar Investigating the Aesthetics of Ecological Design and Eco-Scenography

‘I have this idea that before too long, the arguments will not be about how to green the theatre, how to convince people to use less energy, how to make productions, buildings and transport less intensive in their uses of carbon. The arguments will flip. And the convincing – at least on materials and energy – will be going the other way. Those who want massive spectacles, world tours, and blazing lights will have to openly justify and account for those excessive drains. Theatre and performance will have changed. And it will looked changed.

Theatre is always changing, with new technologies and with new versions of what constitutes the human – what we think the human is.

I’ll talk about two of the ways that ecological ideas interact with aesthetics –

Firstly, To talk about conventions is to talk about relations between systems of ideas, to talk about breaks and revolts, about habits and about the power of the artist. It is to talk about social power, the tacit everyday kind and the institutional kind. It is to talk about what suddenly can be heard, when the convention breaks and what previously has been allowed to be heard goes stale, and what needs to be heard and seen comes into being, and is able to be sensed. And this changes – changes the public realm, the public space, the space of theatre…So to talk about aesthetic conventions is also to talk about politics.

Secondly, matter. Materials have histories. They pass through a production and move along – which they do whether they are considered waste to begin with, or are relatively new materials, whether they are used again in some way or sent to landfill to continue their history there. They are in movement, and in the brief moment of performance, they have a meaning, in that field of engagement. In performance, what is the balance between the agency of matter – as waste – and the intentions, force and design of the artist? To talk about matter is to talk about consequences, transformations and relations over time….So to talk about the aesthetics of matter is also to talk about ethics’.

at ‘People, Profit, Planet’ at World Stage Design, Cardiff 2013

21 Mar Changing theatre: fugitive natures in darkened rooms

This talk was the warm-up act for two performances: ‘Volcano’ by Clerke and Joy and ‘The ‘See You Later’ Capital’ by Massive Owl.

‘I was asked to talk about ‘environmental theatre’, but discovered that both Clerke and Joy and Massive Owl do not want to be identified with anything environmental. How could these two plays about the vastness and unpredictability of geology – the volcano –  and the indeterminacy in the metabolisms of human social, economic and artefactual systems – which is the transience of the city and capital – not be thought of as ecological?

It’s a common response. There’s an embarrassment about ‘nature’ that has to do with the history and habits of theatre …

Theatre borrows. It’s a porous form. Much current environmental-ist theatre borrows the languages from other kinds of environmental knowledge, and accepts them, works with them, even places them onstage.  This borrowing of languages can often represent a limitation of experience and of imagination, as if sufficient knowledge existed through these other disciplines and practices and it was up to theatre just to adapt or translate in a theatre-kind of way.

I want to argue strongly for developing methods for inquiry, methods for devising and practice that will open up experience and creativity in ways that explore and meddle with nature-human relations, and for being impatient with the existing practices and conventions of theatre.

I’m looking forward to the day when, in addition to the critical work that finds what is essential about theatre at any given historical time, that marks its evolutions, whether that’s by the ideas of presence, or the unmarked, or the post-dramatic, there will be concepts that we haven’t thought of yet, concepts that describe theatre’s way of making evident, of showing, of bringing into presence, the human as related to the other than human’.

at University College Falmouth 2013