Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance - Volume 5, Issue 1-2, 2015

Stories are powerful forms of representation and cultural imagery in many Indigenous cultures, and performance is a site where these stories are shared, revealed and enacted, making it a powerful site of cultural imagery for Indigenous ecological knowledges and cosmologies. I argue that an Indigenous ecological ethos is a necessary addition to thinking about performance and ecology, one that resists patronizing and simplistic stereotypes of the ‘eco-Indian’ and acknowledges diverse, complex and evolving epistemologies. Drawing on Huggan and Tiffin’s postcolonialism ecocriticism, as well as May and Kuppers experience as non-Indigenous scholars and practitioners, this article considers the role postcolonial ecology might play in the field of performance and ecology and how non-indigenous scholars and theatremakers might engage with it. I suggest strategies for locating an Indigenous ecological ethos, through Däwes, Nolan, Howe and Halba and their critical reflections on Indigenous performances specifically attuned to ecological concerns. I draw on plays and performances that highlight the inseparability of land, identity and morethan- human (Salmon is Everything, NK603: Action for Performer & e-Maiz, Woman for Walking); work that is non-linear and recognizes the simultaneity of past, present and future (Burning Vision, Chasing Honey); and work that takes up ecological justice issues (Sila). These aspects suggest ways of locating an Indigenous ecological ethos and developing a more multivocal and inclusive field of performance and ecology.

This article aims to do two things. (1) Describe aspects of the performance methodology and philosophy of the site-specific ecological performance group, the Environmental Performance Authority (EPA), in a series of performances entitled Coastal Scales, developed in conjunction with the Hobsons Bay Council in Melbourne, Australia. (2) Make an argument for the efficacy of the EPA’s work, through concepts from Heidegger’s later writings, with particular reference to the ‘turning’, and the occurrence of truth as the strife between earth and world, as developed in Contributions to Philosophy (1999, 2012) and ‘The origin of the work of art’ (1977a).

How to Duet with a Saguaro was a contemplative performance project exploring relationships with the iconic Sonoran Desert cactus, Carnegiea gigantea. Through a series of ‘somatic’ experiments, including one that involved standing with the cactus for an hour, the artist uncovers new meanings of both ‘duet’ and ‘performance’.

How can we produce performance events in an ethical manner, which are built ofs dialogues between the event and the ecological processes in which the event will take place? This article is an investigation of this question through a reflection on the making of Nomadic Arts Festival, Poland 2014. It proposes that an ‘ethical creativity’ can be found in the relation between body and environment, in which an approach of nomadic homemaking is encouraged.

These Artist Pages describe the process of, and the ethical problems raised by my creative interaction with wood ants (Formica rufa) in a Kent forest (England) in 2014. I draw on Haraway, Massumi, Baker and Jevbratt to touch on questions around collaboration, rules, knowing and responsibility.

This article examines the way climate change narratives have mobilized melodramatic frameworks, by examining An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim, 2006) as paradigmatic. It engages with recent scholarship that recuperates melodrama from the realm of the pejorative to observe how it structures political discourse and expands on that scholarship by introducing a performance studies methodology to examine how melodrama offers the broad outlines of a script that the would-be hero is asked to improvise within. The essay examines the tropes of melodrama – which include Manichaean dichotomies of good and evil, the implication that suffering is a marker of virtue, and the imperative of a dialectic of pathos and action – in order to analyse their implications for the potential to solve the impending tragedy of devastating climate change. This essay engages in close readings of performances structured by generic scriptive discourse to argue that, for climate change activists, the forms that environmental narratives take, may communicate as much as the content of those narratives.

Friches Théâtre Urbain’s Hope is a Wooded Time is an ongoing community-based eco-art project outside Paris that draws inspiration from its site’s evocative heritage as part of les Murs à Pêches, ‘living walls’ for espaliered fruit trees in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, and its contemporary reality as a wooded wasteland. The project encourages ethical encounters between ecological processes of biodiversity and human interventions by its neighbours, ethnically and culturally diverse populations of Sinti and Romany gypsies, Russian and North African immigrants and native French.

This article uses community writing to explore the ethics and engagements of the Salamander Project, an eco-performance project by The Olimpias, a disability culture collective. In the project, disabled people went swimming together and explored themes of stricture and freedom, access and play, biodiversity and border creatures, hanging out together in the wild..

These Artist Pages are a response to the question, ‘how can a performance practice be ecological?’ By critically reflecting on a recent performance project, Wild Life, I conceptualise a ‘wilding performance practice’. I suggest an ecological ethics arises by attending to performance as an ongoing entanglement of human and non-human wills and trajectories.