Lively Spaces, Uncanny Bodies: performance, place, and (human) agency in the Anthropocene

This talk thinks through questions of agency provoked by the current climate crisis through a focus on the “liveliness of space” in contemporary theatre and performance. The talk is organized around three spatial paradigms that underpin the Anthropocene and that have served as models for theatre- and performance-making: landscape, environment, and network. The aim is to historicize how these paradigms have shaped ways of seeing and organizing human-place relationships and to share case studies of contemporary performance-makers that activate the agencies of space and pose questions about the place of humans within more-than-human ecologies. The human actor is not abolished in these case studies, but is instead displaced as protagonist, often appearing spectral, out-of-place, or replaced within spaces that act. This “uncanny body” recognizes its co-existence with its environments at the same time as it recognizes that those environments exist independently of a human observer and possess intentions that exceed the human scale. The talk searches not for a theatre without humans, but a theatre of humility—a non-anthropocentric theatre that rethinks the place and scale of human agency. Perhaps the most anthropocentric of arts, theatre also has the capacity to use that legacy to confront the anthropocentrism that underlies the Anthropocene.