Abstract
This chapter explores the conceptual challenges of representing climate change and the theoretical underpinnings of the Ecocide Project and Carla and Lewis . Chaudhuri and Enelow propose the term “eco-cruelty” to describe the paths of their experiments, which, in contrast to conventional models of ecological theatre, focused on queer ecological intimacy and the lively materiality of the theatre space. Drawing especially from Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, as well as Timothy Morton’s theories of queer ecology, Lee Edelmans notion of the queer death drive, and Jane Bennett’s theory of vital materialism, this chapter locates the Ecocide Project within a broader philosophical conversation and rethinks the terms of traditional ecotheatre beyond place-based practices.
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Notes
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” New Literary History vol. 43 no. 1 (Winter 2012): 12.
Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958): 7–8.
See Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May, Readings in Performance and Ecology (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
Downing Cless, Ecology and Environment in European Drama (London: Routledge, 2010)
Baz Kershaw, Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Una Chaudhuri, “‘There Must Be a lot of Fish in That Lake’: Towards an Ecological Theatre,” Theater vol. 25 no. 1 (1994): 23–31.
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 39.
Timothy Morton, “Guest Column: Queer Ecology,” PMLA vol. 125 no. 2 (2010): 275.
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004): 29.
Antonin Artaud, The Spurt of Blood, trans. Ruby Cohn, in Theater of the Avant-Garde 1890–1950, ed. Bert Cardullo and Robert Knopf (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001): 379.
César Aira, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2006): 6.
Artaud used the phrase “body without organs” in his radio play, To Have Done with the Judgment of God; Deleuze and Guattari explore its implications extensively in A Thousand Plateaus in their chapter entitled “November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?” after the date that Artaud recorded his radio broadcast. See Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 555–574
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© 2014 Una Chaudhuri and Shonni Enelow
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Chaudhuri, U., Enelow, S. (2014). Theorizing Ecocide: The Theatre of Eco-Cruelty. In: Research Theatre, Climate Change, and the Ecocide Project: A Casebook. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137396624_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137396624_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-48467-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-39662-4
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