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.