enter change Performance and Nature connect unsettle bridge
Bird Brain Critical Art Ensemble Welfare State International
Simon Whitehead
PLATFORM
Shelley Sacks
green museum.org Fern Shaffer and Othello Anderson
reader
David Haley
John Lyall
Ballet Atlantique-Regine Chopinot
Opening Essay Introducing the Artists Links and Readings
Hester Reeve Basia Irland

E N T E R  C H A N G E
the power of performing and nature

Here. Now.

These are the imperatives of performance.

This is an exhibition of transformations. A performed work of art is a process through which something is transformed, some alteration is made during that live, transient experience. The works of the artists presented here take the shapes of events, walks, theatre, dialogues, dance, ritual, experiments and interventions.

What may be changed is not so easily named.

The experience of change may be unpredictable, postponed, fragile - brought into being by tenuous and complex methods. The capacities of language, reflection, memory, metaphor and imagination are raised in the ancient relation between human performer and participant. Performance, which is face-to-face, must balance the demands of the poetic and the ethical – to be free to imagine all possibilities and to be answerable to the lives and suffering of others. The experience is immediate and sensuous; it is the creation of a world and a comment on the world.

The works of the artists presented here propose a change in the conception and experience of relations between nature and the human. But their views of nature and the human are widely divergent, as are their views of how change arises, what it entails and its direction. There is a horizon which encompasses them: one of questioning, an acceptance of the dis-comfort of transformation, and of care for the other. Like many other practitioners’ work, theirs alters both the performer and participant, the field of art-making, and the wider understanding of nature-human relations.

Performance and nature

Contemporary views about performance and performativity emphasise ephemerality, contingency, improvisation, adaptation - whether in the ‘doing’ of an everyday action or in the creation of an aesthetic event. It is a relational process through-and-through.

Those qualities can be seen to inhere in the processes of nature, the continual change of environments and in the actions of the beings and entities which are more-than-human. Rather than ‘nature’ as a background to human performance, or merely a subject for representation, the processes of human performance can be seen as continuous with those of nature – sometimes resonant together, sometimes not.

Enter change

There are many layers to transformation. Performance works may reveal what was hidden, speak what was previously unsayable. They can generate an occasion in which one enters an experience which is creative of new emotions and perceptions. They can make possible an expanded responsiveness to nature-human relations.

Traditional human-centred performance - whether theatre, dance, liveart, ritual - is being re-defined by practitioners engaging with nature as a metaphysical idea, as geophysical processes, as environments and the more-than-human living beings. The relations of human cultural practices, technologies, and social systems to those ‘natures’ is the material for many works. What is evolving are works which are modifications of conventions and hybrids of different methods. The beginnings of new forms of action and expression, new modes of knowledge are emerging – when the existing ways of thinking may no longer be adequate.

The direction of a work may – or may not - resemble an environmentalist position, be informed by science, philosophy, spirituality, historical ecology. But the performances that ‘work’ do so on their own creative and ecological terms, and it is the task of interpretation to find the language that can communicate what is special about that. This is a new, and uncharted area in performance studies and criticism.

But it may not be only the content or even the method that allows for change, but the tensions between the elements and forces in a performance, between the presence of nature and the voice of the human, between fear and joy, the poetic and the ethical – connections which open the possibilities for change, which show us back to ourselves in another way. There are no certainties, no guarantees that any change will happen. There is not a gauge for change-evaluation. It is a potential, an enlivening, a necessity to be invited and entered.

 

Wallace Heim

Wallace Heim is an independent curator.

She co-edited Nature Performed. Environment, culture and performance (2003. Oxford: Blackwell), contributing a chapter on ‘Slow Activism’ and the work of PLATFORM. She has also written on the work of Shelley Sacks and Basia Irland for Performing Nature. Explorations in ecology and performance (2005. Bern, Peter Lang)

She co-curated the conference/event BETWEEN NATURE: explorations in ecology and performance, at Lancaster University, 2000.

She is completing a Ph.D. in philosophy at Lancaster University, researching performance and nature, following a career as a sculptor and set designer.

 

 

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