Li The Rock, the Butterfly, the Moon and the Cloud Notes on Dramaturgy in an Ecological Age Augusto Corrierifence that the Western the term, «well as the building) was re-invented in the It naissance, in other words preci eetain ig aaistting crafted. Leonardo da Vinei famously drew tne ae arms and legs stretched to a perfect square an videred cosmography of the microcosm; unsurprising. in an Cis sketched the frst proscenium arch theatre, eee outlining the apparatus that has largely defined and hy fectively catformance ever since. This Humanist Renaissance inher, Perrguably the main paradigm for live theatre, whose drar Faure structurally anthropocentric. The history of much’ formance, especially from the cal avantgardes onwaree could be seen as a series of varied attempts at fee centring, and denaturalizing such a construction: [Sas x ‘ihe primacy of the theatrical text, aiming for a det, tacy of scenic elements, challenging the virtuous dancing bods, or recognizing the complex agency of spectators, ei sly challenged the Humanist inheritance embodied in The Anthropocene, however, presents a new Man. the edge of the sea’ (as Michel Fouc: ys sear et eee Ee man species, scales, and temporalities. The question, therefo Zi is whether we ean now imagine a non-anthropocentric theatre nds like a contradiction i i coy ameter oe meres nope a euEnatetlely and inde, courting neither ae spurred by a set of open-ended ques- tons i eur our anton away from the Human, and to ‘ards major dramaturay of sky and stars, air and water, quarks ii martes metal and carbon and plans and insects, do we irae taden theatre altogether? Iso, may such an act challenge to/within the = : oy ma artistically continuative (as a elcoertal na ete)? And how may we locate practi ing a dramaturgy of sky and stars The Pract Practice of Dramaturgy 947 ng performance in order to rat humans should Occupy eae Sate ideo work, a recent book of pho- omposition, 's and potenti of living beings within the the truism of theatre’ ize such a seeming ani i seturn to Since ‘the “copresenc dramattey vm of space and time emai Beto ser art forms helps to defat jy familiar theatrical apparatus. K soo en rocking at an Empty House, video artist is book Reasons for Kn a simple work in which, by his own account, of an unmoving rock. All of the background for the In i des a ae ‘to show the movements Fiat was required was the substitution Foreground, and theruse of slow motion. 1m the video we see a large to and some people walking past in te ‘background. At one point the video slows down, as is made obvious by the slow-mo- por walk of the human bodies. But since the main subject of the vara isthe rock, and people are only shown up to their waist Vnderstand what Viola's proposition is: that we are nev. watching thoock slowing down. Unseen yet clearly foregrounded, here are the slow unfolding movements of inanimate stone, occurring 16 jing movements of familiar bipedal differently than the slow unfold stibly and over a more extensive duration. animals, only impercep' Tt is a question of shifting between different scales, not unlike certain passages in Alice in Wonderland. Viola is first of all asking us to consider that the familiar human scale is always only one possibility among countless non-human others and, second, inviting us to tune in to the slower speed of the rock: to become rocklike in our perception and thoughts. This is not something that can be easily practised or grasped in our everyday lives, at east not firmly enough to produce a genuine shift in perspective, yet through the video work, as described by Viola, it becomes ‘The Rock, the Butterfly, the Moon and the Cloudwith the earth, with the stars, ih skin. In advance, and withouy 8 8f0u ; T being informed, everything is already ordered laser? 4 seq according to a scale which gives primacy to onc over another. And power to one thing, or to ong 4m" another. All the time. And in an unfounded manner'® “Ver er Helene C In his 1968 book The Empty Space, director Peter Brook f; ly declared that one person watching another walk sernq.@™0U stage ‘s all that is needed for an act of theatre to be ness 2 bare In a 2001 interview with Jérome Bel, when askea'sc, is a show for you’ the choreographer answered simply." Wt people in the dark who watch other living ones in the light ‘And in their 2007 book, dramatures and perfor scholars Cathy Turner and Synne Behrndt wrote: ‘Dramatne® .. produced through a dialogue between the play and a partie, community of people in a particular time and place” Whenever we speak of theatre and performance, we s of relations between particular humans — ‘living ones’ ~ bear’ ing or in dialogue with other humans. 7 ea far, the picture is rather clear and familiar, jowever, in her 1994 State of the Union a targ Marianne Van Kerthoven distinguished between trees of dramaturgy, a minor and a major. The first type refers to the theatrical production and its audiences, ‘those things that can be grasped on a human scale’, while beyond it, in ever-expan orbits, we find the major dramaturgy: ‘around the production lies the theatre and around the theatre lies the city and around the city as far as we can see is the whole world and even the sky and all its stars: In her address Van Kerkhoven urges that itis necessary, ‘awfully necessary, that we turn our attention to the major dramaturgy P ear, We cai audience (etymologically, ftom audire, to hear). tobe Pen to, cannot be an, relevant. If we try to resist this labelling, however, we may n, that something else is at stake here. Perhaps unwittingly the piece is staging a paradox and a challenge for our times: how to be pres. ent to an event that does not address us. What La Monte Youne’s composition places centre stage is not just an insect but, crucially, the question of how to engage with it, ifat all possible: how can we attend to events and phenomena that lay beyond the senses, such ? Can we form relations predicated upon a kind of non-relationality? As audience members who can no longer play the role of those who listen to sounds, we must rad- ly reorient ourselves, readjusting our expectations and desires, fe up a littl of our sovereignty: in an auditorium that is host tice to indiscernible ron-human phenomena (that is to say, each and every auditorium), we can no longer rehearse our ideal of ‘pres- ence’ in the here and now. Young's work is a reminder of that complex unfolding of sonorous energy that is, simply put, not ‘for us, yet forms a great part of shared sonic environments. Casting ;, the composition asks us to dwell in that ig is happening, yet so much always is. We may speculate what kind of dramaturgical model this piece offers, in man intention, will, mastery, matter for perception — a situation no longer defined by the opposite poles of production and reception, and in which the roles of artist and spectator are suspended ... but in favour of what exactly? er attended a presenta 1 have reminded of 1 wh Eo a catch sight of a m¢ - of Young's piece, but Wau these insect appearances a gnoa treated #8 nel rage the homan performers wrmappearance may eneend Fetetions onthe role of animals oject human dra Ty’ for us AG, theit appearance 100 alien ortant (I ed rodent or 8 bid imp We tend to regard i es, and flies). Ants OS itis tng tht for centuries a hat lies generated spontaneously from dirt on tre vastly outnumbered by smal weminds us: “The average size of nan, is almost that of a housefly. e In in et aeea fly buzz around te sage ring» dane naively anc sh performance, I think to mysell, perhaps ve ly: how can that the dancer? More © ‘cal apparatus configures mo -than-human’ lives, icket and take our seats, ‘Our scales are drat 1 am remin: : MN, esof attention and attendance nd iow each time we BUY 20 that exclusion is reaffirmed ‘On reflection, La Monte Young's piece, 28 framed by i 2 7 nm : current the but- Ceolopieal concerns, seeks not so much 19 sive the bat 7 tention as. the ‘same’ level of at 0 to intervene inthe very apparatus ofthe OT Oke eee nthropocentric listening habit a Ee xoth ax scales of sense and sensibility. The piece rom ny ede interupon 8DE9 3,'The Moon and the Theatre i for ‘sing with cosmic entities sist Katie Paterson has been Miaising Mtic-conceptual ody of . ae y-romantic-C some time, producing a kine of neo ere nd meteorites a8 Meh such as melting ‘lacirs, lightOne of Paterson's recurring strategies consists of pk ing human and planetary activites, often the oe Paytay of music. Her piece As the World Turns feats ing in time with Earth, ‘one revolution eve, Vivaldi's Four Seasons’. Lasting four years align. in by th Faterson staking a human artefact, Vivald’s recor see , and slow it down to match the speed of our host planets” ing compositio’s avowed content (the passage of the oar ithe gubjeted to an operation that silences orbackarouneh n) A foregrounding the planetary motion that Vivaldi nes ee referring to: something is no doubt lost, but much is 9° a a's invisible rock movements, and Young's audible coy Position, here the human senses are denied traditions] 1g the Ye, thus, sic, nally Planet outwards for approximately 800,000 miles, after which itis reflected off the moon's surface and returned to Earth two and a half seconds later; the sound effectively bounces from onc ‘body’ to another. Paterson first made use of E.M.E. transmis- sion by sending four minutes and thirty-three seconds of record. ¢4 silence to the moon and back, thus reframing Cage's 4°33" ag an interplanetary activity. In a later piece, the artist transmitted Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and because the moon's surface only reflected part of the content (Some is always lost in the moon's shadows), what returned to Earth was a slightly broken up version of Beethoven's composition. Visitors to the gallery could hear this ‘moon-altered’ edition performed live on a selfplaying grand piano. As though taking dramaturg Van Kerkhoven’s proposition to the letter (although admittedly not dealing with ‘theatre’), Paterson’s E.M.E. works connect the minor to the major dramaturgy, tracing orbits of interconnection in a yearned for affinity between cosmic and human acts. Paterson's moon works unfathomable, this time casting the artwork leged moment — for example, the visit to the gallery — within ungraspable processes involving prodigious bodies, distances, and timescales, ing the audience a capti a button to release a large continues her narration as though not The performer te a upwards both things happening, dete for perception, and myself struggling ° Hie attention. I turn my head repeatedly es ae Ee yerformer’s narration and towards the cloud, anc Bact ti former, unable to decide, to settle on either Rr ach aot to follow? Which event to give Satine eee it to the moon and back, in. xi oa erated as a place in which to witness ta ot and modes of existence; it is an ey a the undecidable rift between semantics and material, theatre fan vhere.. here and the elsewt Ne feta eo tis oo en asanoter example of vray of the background: whats being tested out, h Oca wl ic theatrical apparatus, is precisely -eentredness. And why is such an tri in the deeply anthropoce : ee cal catastro~ SE a ourtesy of ecological cat a Set Dae ‘imate change, an irrevocable shift in ee i i f the outside has burst Peep ua npn at ote a inside the auditorium; or rather,ide has always been inside. As Jane Bennett notes: “ry, e when human agency was anything other thay t® in y and nonhumanity: today in, the outsit was never a tim interfolding network of humanit ngling has become harder to ignore. The good news is that, despite our best efforts at conce the theatre has always been a place and a time for the mar me : ts. More than that ting of human and non-human even ee aevment in which humans observe and dialogue exclusively wat can acknowledge that performance isn ‘other humans, today I f tranifestation of ecological relations, an opportunity for attend, ing to the everpresent ‘interfolding network of humanity ang nonhumanity’. The invitation here is to remodel our understand. ing of events and phenomena, in line with Steven Shaviro’s radi. cal suggestion that in ‘the va 0 everything both perceives and is perceive ‘In practical terms, I am not referring to environmental shows about global warming, presented in theatres that run on solar power, nor am I referring to works that feature animals and objects, if this means simply making a little room for them on the human stage, for the duration of an evening. It is rather about rec- ognizing the transformation of the very category of the human, and how this transformation needs to be practised in the domain ding dramaturgies as yet undreamt. For too long performance has been caught up in tropes like presence, liveness, and ephemerality, in other words the here-and-now trap, which necessarily ignores non-human sub- jects. What forms may performance take when we recognize that it is always enmeshed in non-human spatial and temporal scales and durations? Why not loosen, or even risk losing, the human two-way traflic of theatre, to see what kinds of impossible drama turgies may emerge? It is not a question of ‘staging’ or ‘representing’ the Anthropocene, but rather of understanding, experimentally and provisionally, how this epoch and its emergent paradigms are changing representation for good, just like the outburst of a river bends and reconfigures a bridge, a dam, or a street. The challenge and the call to performance is to outplay its anthropocentric bias, ae oa aa : eee towards ecological relations (and , avi practices we held dear ‘ing to abandon concepts and of performance, Fram! ‘nema free itself ofthe dogma ‘hat human bel BI u Fi Materialism and Performance Studies : 12 Dillard, grim at Tinker’ Creek, p93. 13. Ponge, The Pebble’. 64. 16 ges of Decay, 17 The piece in question is La Monte ‘Young's Composition # 5 1960, which first read about in 2006. Infact, ‘the score is slightly less precise than ‘my memory of it any number of butterflies may be released in the essay on the appearance ofa swallow inside Vicenza's Tetro Olimpico. ‘See Corrieti, In Place ofa Show: AlSO ‘Nicholas Ridout’s ‘The Animal on ‘Stage’ begins with an account of & ‘mouse scuttling cross the flor during ‘a West End production: ‘so small, so accidental, the mouse may "prove ae