Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2015

There is little doubt that humankind faces an environmental crisis in which the dinosaurs’ extinction will look like a children’s tea party staged by drunken clowns. But still the vast majority – at least in so-called developed countries – behave as if that prospect is a chimera. Globally such denial is now ecologically systemic, and so I call that behaviour ‘performance compulsion’. This conundrum is explored below through an elementary conceit. While humans assume that they possess agencies unique among the species, we are fundamentally performed by Earth’s ecologies. Hence, the only hope of averting our extinction is to perform more responsively and ethically with those ecologies.

Disability, Public Space Performance and Spectatorship: Unconscious Performers, Bree Hadley (2014) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 224 pp., ISBN: 9781137396075

Enacting Nature: Ecocritical Perspectives On Indigenous Performance, Birgit Däwes and Marc Maufort (eds) (2014) Brussels: Peter Lang (2014), 262 pp. ISBN-10: 2875741462; ISBN-13: 978-2875741462

Playing for Time: Making Art as if the World Mattered, Lucy Neal (ed.) (2015) Oberon Books, London, 466 pp., ISBN: 9781783191864, p/bk, 16.99 GBP

Performing Indigeneity: Global Histories and Contemporary Experiences, Laura R. Graham and H. Glenn Penny (eds) (2014) Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 431 pages ISBN 978-0-8032-5686-6 (paperback), $36 USD

Salmon is Everything: Community-based Theatre in the Klamath Watershed, Theresa May, Suzanne Burcell, Kathleen Mccovey and Jean O’Hara (2014) Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 188 pp., ISBN: 9780870717468, p/bk, $19.95