Curator: Denise Rogers Valenzuela
Location: Room 1411 – Pavilion André Aidenstadt – 2920 chemin de la tour – Université de Montréal
(Building 19 on the UdM Map)
In-Person Session
Sponsored by the Department of English Language and Literature – Carleton University
Mastery is understood, at the intersection of decolonial and critical posthumanist new materialist discourses, to be integral to a dynamic that would carve identitarian boundaries between things, so that “what is on one side of a border [is subordinated] to the power of what is on the other” (Singh, Unthinking Mastery 13). In this panel, we acknowledge that the Anthropocene—a moniker offered for the current geological age in which human actions are understood to be chiefly responsible for the planet’s changing climate—was consolidated in the Industrial Revolution via boundary carvings that emphasise human mastery: society/nature, active/passive, human/object, mind/body, thinking/doing. Such dispositions, ultimately and fundamentally speciesist in nature, set the stage for supremacist power relations that fuel a colonial, racist, sexist, ableist, and extractive capitalist status quo. To complicate such reductively binarizing and hierarchical oppositions in Western thought, the presenters on this panel seek to collapse traditional academic distinctions between theory and practice to offer a set of praxical offerings in which each presenter’s arguments are developed in mutually constitutive, participatory, and material-discursive ways. We ask: How can specific performance practices, such as juggling, puppetry, or acting, enact increasingly ethical engagements with the other-than-human? How can a performance form’s unique ontological dynamics inform mutually sustainable relationships with the other-than-human in the world at large? And how might we reimagine these performance practices, as Fancy does in this panel, as having an affirmative capacity for agency that is unique to, and distributed across, what can be described as the ‘performance commons’?
To engage these questions, each of the presenters on this panel imagines justice to be constituted in part as an epiphenomenal result of critical posthumanist creative and artistic processes. Such processes explore and invite the expression of potentialities in performance, as well as in relations with audiences and communities, and as such can express, in neo-Spinozan terms, a transversal ethics of mutual emergence and care.
‘Juggling Notation as a Temporal Framework for Grappling with the Climate Crisis’
Juggling is conventionally described as throwing and catching more objects than you (a human) have hands. Due to this conventional description, juggling has historically been understood in terms of human mastery over the natural world. Inclusive social circus educator Craig Quat, though, argues that juggling shouldn’t be defined by its inaccessible physical expression. Conventional juggling practice is only possible because of “the relationships [juggling] allows us to form with… time” (Functional Juggling 17). In this paper I investigate how, in juggling, temporality acts as a mediator between juggler and prop, which are categories assigned to ontologically indeterminate beings through the phenomena of juggling as an intra-action (Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity”).
Juggling notation, called siteswap, does not make assumptions about the ontology of juggler(s) or prop(s), the physical expression of juggling (ex. throwing, rolling, etc.), or the context in which juggling happens (ex. the amount of gravity). In siteswap juggling, time is reciprocal and overlapping. Each beat in a siteswap simultaneously represents an action performed in the present and an action that will take place in the future. These temporal aspects of juggling make it a useful framework for grappling with the climate crisis in which present greenhouse gas emissions are also future concentrations in our atmosphere.
Ultimately, I argue that, to engage in climate justice, new temporal frameworks are needed. How does “juggling time” differ from other temporal experiences; for instance, chrononormativity (Freeman, Time Binds), disappearance (Phelan, Unmarked), or syncopated/theatrical time (Schneider, Performing Remains)?
Morgan Anderson, York University
Morgan Anderson is a hobbyist juggler and PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University. Her research focuses on the relationships between jugglers and their props. She is a member of the International Jugglers’ Association and Cirkus Syd, and co-founded the Limestone City Juggling Festival in 2014.
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‘The performance commons, posthumanism, and the Anthropocene’
Critical posthumanism imagines the ways in which humans and other-than-human entities alike are always already constituted by a range of inhuman forces: materialities, affects, and energies organized in assemblages that escape strict identitarian formulations. With such a move away from historically normative versions of a Western liberal individual subject, performance and politics are also invited to be thought differently. What constitutes what we call human performance from his perspective, and how do such performances engage performances of the other-than-human? With the decentralization of human subjectivity as a key locus of political agency, how do performances engaging the human and the other-than-human express the political in such a circumstance of redistributive perspectives on volition and agency? This paper makes a case for intensifying the influential notion of ‘the commons’ as articulated by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri with a specific focus on what I am calling ‘the performance commons.’ Hardt and Negri argue that the commons, as a kind of access to the world’s riches and wonders shared among all humans, precedes the emergence of late Modern distinctions between public and private property in bourgeois law that has lead to the becoming-resource of all the world in service to an ever ubiquitous capitalism. In order to contribute to moving beyond such capture, human performance, when pursued via an open-ended processual assemblage of the human and other-than-humans in a way that amplifies potentials for non-supremacist alliances and post-identitarian aesthetic experiences, can be understood to generate a rich network of relations of care, solidarity, love, and liberation: a performance commons. Performance events exploring the artistic collaboration between human and other-than-human forces will be featured.
David Fancy, Brock University
David Fancy, PhD, is Professor in the Department of Dramatic Arts, Brock University. He publishes in the areas of performance and the climate crisis, performance and technology, and performance and inclusion. He is an experienced theatre maker.
‘The radicality of the potato people’
In The Radicality of the Puppet Theatre, Peter Schumann writes, “Puppets are not made to order or script. What’s in them is hidden in their faces and becomes clear only through their functioning.” (1990, 8) Schumann’s observation reveals that, contrary to popular use of the term “puppet,” puppets are not passive, docile things that readily bend to human control. Puppeteering is a relational practice that requires puppeteers to move with puppets instead of on or against them. By scrambling the presumed vertical power dynamic between subject and object, puppeteering can challenge the anthropocentric notion of human mastery over matter. But perhaps it can do more than that.
In this paper, I focus on a set of puppets from Bread and Puppet Theater—the naked population puppets—to explore puppeteering as an instantiation of justice through human and more-than-human ethical relations. The puppets, nicknamed “potato people,” are semi-flat, papier-mâché puppets that often perform the role of a mass of people in Bread and Puppet’s shows. Based on my experience as a puppeteer working with these puppets in improvised group scenes, where there is no established leader and the main prompt is to follow one another, I examine the power dynamics and emergent relationships that arise to think about the ecosocial potentialities of performing in a collective with these puppets. I ask: How can destabilizing the proscenium stage’s spatial hierarchies and the ensuing relations of puppeteers and puppets be extrapolated to the urgent rethinking of relations that the climate catastrophe demands?
Denise Rogers Valenzuela, York University
Denise Rogers Valenzuela is a Chilean puppeteer and Ph.D. candidate in Theater and Performance at York University. Her doctoral research focuses on puppetry and cardboard in relation to ecosocial crises. Denise works with Bread and Puppet Theater and is a founding member of puppet troupes Corrugated Spectacles and Teatro Ji.
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