Band 8, Heft 1 - Special Issue: Theater of Crisis: Contemporary Aesthetic / Responses to a Cross-Sectional Condition

The idea of the “Anthropocene” is rapidly gaining currency as an ecocritical lens through which to view theater and performance. But as a lens for critical analysis, the concept of the “Anthropocene” is problematic, primarily because it fails to differentiate among humans, many of whom are in conflict precisely because the benefits and costs of the “Age of Man” have been distributed unevenly. Neo-Marxist critics take such conflicts into fuller account in their argument that a better nomenclature and concept for our epoch is the “Capitalocene,” a term that captures the fact that our ecological crises have been precipitated not by humans in some undifferentiated and generalized way, but more specifically by the global spread of capitalism and its socio-economic-ecological injustices. These are also conflicts at the heart of many plays, both historical and recent. This essay offers an overview of a number of works that might productively be categorized as “Tragedies of the Capitalocene,” insofar as they dramatize stories that trace the dynamics of “Capitalocene” exploitation of both human and nonhuman resources. Plays considered include Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints (1992), Rahul Varma’s Bhopal (2001), Kia Corthron’s A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick (2010), Annabel Soutar’s Seeds (2012), Robert Schenkkan’s The Kentucky Cycle (1991), and Colleen Murphy’s The Breathing Hole (2017).

Montreal-born playwright, translator, and climate change theater activist Chantal Bilodeau is currently based in New York City. As a co-founder of the biennial Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA), which is a growing international initiative to foster climate change awareness through the performance of very short plays commissioned from playwrights in dozens of countries, she has been dividing her time between coordinating theater-based activism, publishing, and curating a blog series on HowlRound.com , and writing short plays as well as an eight-part series of full-length dramas. As she argues in her 2015 article “In Search of a New Aesthetic,” it is necessary “to move beyond writing plays about climate change to writing plays that are climate change – plays that embody, in form, content, and process, the essence of the issues we are facing. Plays where the concept of climate change is so integral to the work that the term doesn’t even need to be uttered. New problems cannot be solved with old solutions. A new consciousness requires new artistic constructs.” On the eve of the CDE conference, Chantal Bilodeau spoke about her research-based creative process at a public event in downtown Graz. At the conference, she presented a keynote on how her work in climate change theater addresses crisis as an ongoing condition. This interview provides detailed insights into Bilodeau’s artistic concepts, theater practices, and climate change activism.

Based on considerations of the connection between fascination, crisis, and the “Medusa effect,” this paper argues that contemporary drama tends to challenge the audience’s sense of safe spectatorship by stimulating perceptual crises, returning the spectators’ gaze, and exposing their tendencies of (in)attentional blindness. Besides plays by Martin Crimp, Carol Ann Duffy, and Rufus Norris, the analysis focuses on James Graham’s Quiz (2017), which dramatizes one of the most popular scandals in the history of British game shows and challenges the audience’s capacity of moral attention. As I argue, Quiz engages the audience in multi-levelled crises (a crisis of knowledge, a crisis of perception, and a crisis of judgement), which stimulates conceptual blending, tests spectators’ response-ability on an ethical, aesthetic, and political level, and eventually allows them to overcome the perceptual crisis created in the course of the play.

Since the British EU Referendum in 2016, there has been an ongoing media narrative of division: Remain voters against Leave voters, experts against ordinary people, the capital rich against the capital poor, and metropolitan centres against regional peripheries. This article explores the way in which theatre might offer a response to the perceived failure in understanding between these entrenched positions, using the lens of place. Making an argument for an ideological and dramaturgical shift from questions of voice – which have so far dominated theatrical critical discourse in response to Brexit – to place, I explore the potential of this change in focus and scale in relation to Matt Hartley’s play Here I Belong (2016) which toured with Pentabus Theatre – a professional rural touring company from the Midlands – to rural communities across England in 2016 and 2018. It is through this contact with rural communities that I propose that theatre can make a critical intervention: telling smaller stories about local places offers a way to reconnect with such communities during this crisis of communication.

British playwright Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children (2016) tackles the imaginative challenge of depicting environmental crisis, in particular the risks of nuclear destruction and climate change. With questions of intra- and intergenerational justice being at the heart of the dramatic text, this article draws on conceptions and insights from cultural risk theory to argue that human risk behaviour and decision-making is the play’s main focus and determines characterisation as well as structure. Interrogating the tension between aesthetic form and content, it shows how The Children naturalizes the (post-)apocalyptic condition and strives for a balance of scales with regard to collective and personal crisis. Characteristic of the rapidly growing corpus of contemporary “cli-fi” drama, and in accordance with many of the strategies proclaimed by climate communication theory, the play stages the catastrophic implications of environmental destruction predominantly as collective risk management and in a predominantly realist manner, discarding formal experimentation as well as futurist setting. Yet this article argues that it remains ambiguous what kind of risk management is proposed and whether we should read it as a call for action or as an imaginative means of accepting finitude.

This article discusses how in Howard Barker’s recent work the idea of the subject’s crisis hinges on the introduction of an impersonal or transpersonal life force that persists beyond human agency. The article considers Barker’s metaphorical treatment of the images of land and stone and their interrelationship with the human body, where the notion of subjective crisis results from an awareness of objective forces that transcend the self. In “Immense Kiss” (2018) and “Critique of Pure Feeling” (2018), the idea of crisis, whilst still dominant, seems to lose its intermittent character of singular rupture and reveals itself as a permanent force of dissolution and reification. In these plays, the evocation of nonhuman nature in the love relationships between young men and elderly women affirms the existence of something that goes beyond the individual, which Barker approaches with a late-style poetic sensibility.

During his short lifetime, Reza Abdoh (1963–1995) was hailed as a trailblazing theater artist in the avant-garde art scenes of both Los Angeles and New York, where he created a series of massive performance spectacles that sought to intervene critically in the American political status quo. His 1992 piece The Law of Remains stages a furious response to the US American AIDS crisis, depicting it through the allegorical lens of a film being made by Andy Warhol based on the life of queer serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer. Performed in the ruins of an abandoned hotel ballroom, the piece drew attention in The New York Times for being “one of the angriest theater pieces ever hurled at a New York audience.” This article analyzes the political dimension of Abdoh’s theater by focusing on specific gestural elements that occur at key moments in The Law of Remains . Doing so, it brings together theories of gesture from Hans-Thies Lehmann, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and Walter Benjamin, and configures these viewpoints into a constellation through which the politics of gesture in Abdoh can be illuminated. What emerges in Abdoh is a politics of “hopeless hope,” one uniquely meaningful for our planetary present tense.

This article examines short plays as a political aesthetic of crisis using examples from Black Lives, Black Words (2015–2017) at the Bush Theatre, London, which respond to concerns arising from the #BlackLivesMatter movement about Black deaths in police custody. I focus on Black women playwrights’ portrayals of Black mothers’ anxieties about protecting their sons, and of Black mothers and sisters grieving the loss of sons, brothers, and fathers in incidents where excessive force is deployed by the police. I consider how Black Lives, Black Words connects to the radical aesthetics of the 1960 s Black Arts Movement by promoting the use of theatre for activist purposes. I argue that the politicising potential of the Black Lives, Black Words initiative is accentuated by the use of a short play format as a political Black aesthetics for responding to contemporary crises. By analysing pivotal moments in a sample of the fifteen-minute plays, I demonstrate how the content of the plays combines with their performance styles to maximise the potential for audience empathy despite their short playing times.

This essay looks at how four contemporary South African plays use performance to render, address, and acknowledge personal and national trauma. By staging acts of cruelty that happen as “ordinary” experience, as perpetual pain, or as representation of life-in-crisis, these plays not only question and complement the national narrative by telling stories that have not found a stage or a listener before, but they also inform and speak to topical societal issues in South Africa such as that of apathy to violence and the question of complicity. Yael Farber and Lara Foot employ a distinctly South African theatre language that draws on theatrical concepts of the European avant-garde, especially those of Antonin Artaud, as well as on the tradition of oral storytelling and ritual to render cruelty as the “ordinary” and crisis as an ongoing condition in the sociohistorical context of apartheid and the apartheid-influenced post-1994 world. By excavating, tracing, and acknowledging “ordinary” cruelty as experienced personally and collectively, the plays explore revelations about the human condition, open up a discussion on the nature of memory or (collective) amnesia, on trauma, complicity, and the crucial role of the witness.