Readings in Performance and Ecology

by Arons, Wendy; May, Theresa J.

• ISBN13: 9780230337282
• ISBN10: 0230337287
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-04-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This ground-breaking collection of essays focuses on how theatre, dance, and other forms of performance are helping to transform our ecological values. Leading scholars and practitioners explore the ways that familiar and new works of theatre and dance can help us recognize our reciprocal relationship with the natural world and how performance helps us understand the way our bodies are integrally connected to the land. They also explore how environmentalists use performance as a form of protest; how performance illuminates our relationships with animals as autonomous creatures and artistic symbols; and how performance can help humans re-define our place in the larger ecological community.

Author Biography

Wendy Arons is an associate professor of Dramatic Literature and Dramaturgy at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the author of performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Women's Writing, editors of a special issue of Theatre Topics on performance and Ecology, director of the performance and Ecology Project at CMU, and artistic director and organizer of the 2012 Earth Matters on Stage ecodrama festival and symposium. She contributed to Theater Histroiography; Critical Interventions(2010) Theresa J. May is an assistant professor of Theatre Arts and Environmental Studies at the University of Orgon. She has published widely on performance and ecology, including essays in performing Nature and a special issue of Theatre Topics on performance and Ecology. Her book, salmon is Everthing; Community-based Theatre in the Klamath Watershed, is forthcoming. She is Co-author of Greening Up our Houses and co-founder/artistic director of the Earth Matters on stage ecodrama festival and symposium. Her forthcoming monograph applies ecological theory to American theatre and performance.

Table of Contents

"Arons and May have pulled together a lively, perceptive collection of essays that takes as its key terms ecology and theatre, demonstrating the multiple ways performance and the environment are or should be linked. Using what the editors call 'ecodramaturgy,' the volume invites practical and theoretical engagements with questions of production and waste, suggesting environmentally green and sustainable theatre practices. The collection also offers insight into how animals, the environment, anti-nuclear activism, ethics, colonialism, class, and of course power are yoked together as much more than metaphor in dramatic literature and in live performance. Written with activist urgency and critical lucidity, these discerning essays vividly explore theatre's potential to help us reimagine how we co-inhabit the earth." - Jill Dolan, Annan Professor in English and Theatre, Princeton University