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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.
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Bird Brain Dance

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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.
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Simon Whitehead

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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.
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Fern Shaffer and
Othello Anderson

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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.
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Ballet Atlantique-
Régine
Chopinot

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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.
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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.
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Critical Art Ensemble

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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.
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PLATFORM

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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.
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r e a d e r

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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.
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John Lyall

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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.
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Hester Reeve

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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.
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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.
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Welfare State
International

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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.
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Shelley Sacks

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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.
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David Haley

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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.
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Basia Irland

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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.
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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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