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.
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20 Ray Lawler, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (Sydney: Currency Press, 1957).
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24 Lesley Head, Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 42.
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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.
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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’.
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52 ‘No-one alive has ever seen the conditions we are seeing today’. Commissioner Shane Fitzimmons, NSW Police, December 2019.
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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).
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