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


 

A work extends beyond its performing, in the stories passed along after it is gone. This exhibition begins as a story. On their pages, the artists offer descriptions, performance texts, poems, essays – all to give a sense of their feelings and intentions, and of the contents and methods of their work.

Here, I offer introductions and three groupings to draw out emerging qualities in this field. Of course, each work connects, unsettles and bridges in some way. Considering how a work emphasizes one of those aspects is a way to understanding how a work ‘works’, and how performance is a unique mode of understanding nature.

Connect

These works open up the intimacy and vitality of a responsive connection between the human and the other-than-human: place, landscape, the animal, the processes of nature. Movement is the animating core - journeys, transitions and dance. Through these, the patterns which connect the human and nature are shown, and the necessity of that relation is experienced - by the artist, by the audience/viewer. That experience may be celebratory, ritual-like, painful, healing.

 

 

Bird Brain Dance

Bird Brain Dance, Jennifer Monson’s company, follows the migratory patterns of osprey, whales, geese and other animals. With dance works and associated projects, Bird Brain Dance investigates the animals’ biophysical and metaphorical relationship to humans as fellow travellers. Those non-human journeys between continents and ecosystems mirror human dance as journeying, navigation and communication.

 

Simon Whitehead

In movement artist Simon Whitehead’s work, to walk, to journey in order to encounter the other are essential processes. Through the movement of the body, his work is sensitive to place. Some works involve ritual reconstruction, live performance and sound media transposed to a distant place. His work happens in motion - walking between rural wellsprings, or with a horse’s pace across a drover’s road, or travelling to plant an apple tree.

 

Fern Shaffer and
Othello Anderson

Fern Shaffer and Othello Anderson have developed new forms of ecological ritual over a 9-year cycle. Enacted in landscapes of significance, their rituals express feelings of protection for an environment, for the interconnectedness of human and natural energy and balance, and bring spirit and healing energy to those places – among them Death Valley, Temagami Island, the Blue Ridge Mountains, Newfoundland.

 

Ballet Atlantique-
Régine Chopinot

Ballet Atlantique-Régine Chopinot brings to theatre-based dance the experience of geomorphological time, the building up and falling away that are the deep rhythms of nature. Collaborating with the sculptor Andy Goldworthy, Chopinot creates a presence of nature through choreographed movement and the improvised meditation of dancers’ real-time tasks using rocks, soil, leaves, stone – an experience of presence which transcends the stage.

 

Unsettle

To make strange, to provoke, to alter the habitual, to create a world which, even temporarily, all ground has shifted and uncertainty prevails – these are the demands of performance. These artists use different methods to enter into radical and uncomfortable questions – of life itself, of the political, of truth and power. The experience of change they offer is disquieting – perceptually, emotionally, ethically. Nature and the human may be other than expected.

 

 

Critical Art Ensemble

Critical Art Ensemble creates events which reveal and challenge the effects of biotechnology and its relation to pan-capitalism. Dedicated to exploring the intersections between art, technology and radical politics, CAE’s events include those that invite public participation in actual experiments - an action which demystifies the scientific process and, combined with dialogue, contributes to an informed and critical public discourse on the promises of biotech and on questions of life itself.

 

PLATFORM

As the early work of PLATFORM poetically unearthed the buried rivers of London, they now are investigating the effects of other flows through The City - that of corporate culture, global capitalism and fossil fuel dependency. PLATFORM’s methods of dialogue and listening, and of an intimate and affecting activism continue in their live art walks through London’s financial district and their day-long durational performances/experiences – exposing corporate power, its psychology, ubiquity and colonial legacy. 

 

r e a d e r

r e a d e r inhabits theatre and intervenes in everyday life making works which resemble the ludic surprises of evolution. From regions of human imagination not usually found near environmental work, r e a d e r makes associations between the human and the animal, wonder and hubris.  ‘Nature’ is shaped into a transition like that between day and night, the becoming of a species, the formation of a planet. As the human experience of theatre is teased open, nature floods in, unexpectedly.

 

John Lyall

John Lyall’s performance and sculpture uses the ironic dramaturgies of post-modern performance, its humour and dis-associations, to probe the regions of the feral – not only those of living species, but the ‘ferality’ of hyper-reality and digital technologies. But his work surpasses those dramaturgies, connecting again to complex views of reality, to profound discomfort, and in the opera featured in this exhibition, to an unanticipated emotional responsiveness to extinction.

 

Hester Reeve

Through live art Hester Reeve explores both the material and metaphysical realms of the human-nature landscape and of what it means to ‘perform’ nature. Along with her drawing and philosophical writing, her performances question what ‘truth’ can be revealed through or beyond language, the relation of truth and nature, and how critical thought can be method for caring for the other than human.

 

Bridge

These actions cross and enable diversities – aesthetic, disciplinary, social, moral. They are composites of different forms, different audiences and collaborators. They bring together estranged voices - the differing perspectives of artistic and scientific disciplines; the communities gathered in a bio-region; the distanced peoples and lands dependant on each other. The artists’ skill includes creating occasions in which conversation between participants balances the creative, the equitable, and the imperative for change. To perform is also to listen, deeply.

 

 

Welfare State
International

Welfare State International has pioneered the arts of celebration. Their work L o n g l i n e, is based around the ecologies of Morecambe Bay, England. Like those tidal reaches, the work crosses and draws together the Bay’s life systems, its migrations, its myths, its industries. Bringing together scientists, artists, musicians, industrialists and communities, the work is composed of installations, story gathering, scientific experimentation and music, culminating in an Opera in 2005.

 

Shelley Sacks

Shelley Sacks is enlarging the field of social sculpture through her practices in art, education and public dialogue. Creating an aesthetics of interconnectedness, Shelley’s works offer models of processes for conversation and action between people - processes which combine the functional and the symbolic, and which bring about an experience of responsiveness. The effects of food production, the soul-consciousness of democracy, the necessity of imagination in healing are explored in her installations, dialogues and actions. 

 

David Haley

David Haley's practice begins with water, and like an increasing stream, water’s properties and metaphors carry his work forward to expressions and investigations of the moral and creative imperatives of surviving climate change. In performative installations and community dialogue events, in urban settings and along river basins, David integrates poetry, narrative and ecological science in works which embody disciplinary and aesthetic diversity.

 

Basia Irland

Water inspires the work of Basia Irland, as sculptor, installation artist, poet and activist. ‘A Gathering of Waters’ featured here, is a performative, symbolic carrying of the waters of the Rio Grande River from its source to the sea. Sanctifying the river, each community hands water to the next along the river’s length. Dialogue, celebration, ritual action and sculpture each magnify the other, in a work which is itself a journey, a gifting, and which belongs to those that make it.

 

These artists come from Europe and North America, but the span of performance and nature work is global, finding forms specific to each culture and place. There are hundreds of artists and practitioners who could be included in this exhibition - people working with children, with puppets, with ritual, with music and sound art, dance, social practice art, storytellers, community theatre, street theatre, in educational and workshop settings, with new media. And all with equally diverse perspectives on ‘nature’.

Many of the artists here on the greenmuseum.org site incorporate performance in their work in some way. More are working unmarked by the critical performance or art worlds, in every landscape across the planet, creating events through which change enters.

 

 

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