Animal Acts: Performing Species Today
254
Animal Acts: Performing Species Today
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Overview
Work by leading theater artists Holly Hughes, Rachel Rosenthal, Deke Weaver, Carmelita Tropicana, and others joins commentary by major scholars including Donna Haraway, Jane Desmond, Jill Dolan, and Nigel Rothfels. Una Chaudhuri’s introduction provides a vital foundation for understanding and appreciating the intersection of animal studies and performance. The anthology foregrounds questions of race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, and other issues central to the human project within the discourse of the “post human,” and will appeal to readers interested in solo performance, animal studies, gender studies, performance studies, and environmental studies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472051991 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 01/22/2014 |
| Series: | Critical Performances |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 254 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Holly Hughes is a performance artist and playwright as well as Professor of Art and Design, Theatre and Drama at the University of Michigan.
Read an Excerpt
Animal Acts
Performing Species Today
By Una Chaudhuri, Holly Hughes
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2014 University of MichiganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-07199-9
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Animal Acts for Changing Times, 2.0: A Field Guide to Interspecies Performance
by Una Chaudhuri
Things are moving fast in the human-animal world. So much so that an upgrade seems warranted on my earlier take on it, or rather my take on that part of it that intersects with the world of performance, theatre, and performance studies. Version 1.0 of this bulletin appeared in American Theatre magazine a few years ago, and the double meaning lurking in its title has proved to be prophetic. The interspecies performances that are going on in our changing times, both onstage and off, are also good for producing change, not only in the ways we live with animals and the ways we think about them but also by transforming our values more broadly, resetting our priorities, rebooting our sense of what it might mean to be human: "animal acts," in short, are a powerful way to change the world.
In the past few years, a spate of conferences, scholarly monographs, critical anthologies, book series, college courses, new journals, and special issues of journals have variously registered "the animal turn" in the humanities and social sciences. This academic burgeoning reflects a rapidly dawning "animal consciousness" in the culture at large, recorded in countless recent works of fiction, art, film, and popular culture. The impetus for this heightened attention to animals (or, as we've now learned to say: to the other animals) is, of course, varied and complex, but its link to both the animal rights movement and to the accelerating environmental crisis of our times is undeniable. The former, a centuries-old discourse whose current and extremely forceful phase was launched by the publication, in 1975, of Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, has reached deep into both social and legal practice, transforming the fields of scientific animal experimentation and animal farming. Numerous horrifying exposés of the latter have resulted not only in major changes in the way so-called food animals are raised and killed but also in a growing army of vegetarians, silently performing a daily refusal of meat culture. While no one working on behalf of animals feels the end of animal exploitation is near, many of us have come to hope that it is possible.
In recent decades, attention to the plight of the other animals has come from a source that tends to be more compelling for most people than concern about animal suffering: human self-preservation. The increasing ravages of climate change have registered most dramatically on certain animal species, including, for example, one of the most beloved of the "charismatic mega-fauna" (a phrase from zoo jargon) who are responsible for bringing in the big Sunday crowds: the polar bear. As the forlorn gazes of these and other "poster animals" of climate-change-extinction peer at us from Time magazine covers and Times Square billboards, we begin to acknowledge what we've always known and also carefully "not-known": their lives are contingent, exactly as ours are, on the delicate ecology of the planet we share with them. Now, we have to be concerned about the other animals not only for their sakes but also for ours.
As ecological thought itself moves into a sophisticated new phase, eschewing the conceptually crippling binaries — especially the one that so disastrously divided "nature" from "culture," making the one into a distant spectacle or recreational escape and the latter into a thing of pure, unconstrained artifice — the cultural conception of species is being transformed as well. Increasingly, it is the continuities and connections between species that are emphasized rather than the differences. At the same time, the crude dualism that put the human species on one side and all others — the millions upon millions of others — on another side, separated by a Great Wall of human exceptionalism, is breaking down. The multitudes of other species that we have so lazily and offensively corralled into one single word — "The animal! What a word!" as Jacques Derrida famously exclaimed — are now roaming across the vast territories of sameness and difference that make each one unique while each one is also multiply enmeshed in the web of all planetary life.
Be it in the work of animal rights, in the texts of animal studies, in the myriad animal practices found in every human culture, or in the vast field of animal representation, "animal acts" of all kinds are changing us, are changing our times, and will change the future of our species. The performances and commentaries in this book invoke all these realms while also contributing to them. They reveal the shaping force of animal discourse in every significant cultural category: gender, class, race, nation, age, profession, sexual orientation, marital status, and, of course, species. Their scope and extension tempt me to resort to one of the characteristic methodologies of traditional natural history: the taxonomy. I am tempted, for example, to identify the many ways that class mediates the human relationship to animals, ranging from the upper-class traditions of equestrianism discussed in Kim Marra's piece to the desperate survival tactics employed by Sawong, the mahout who teaches Deke Weaver to ride an elephant in Thailand. I'm tempted to classify the many ways human gender and sexuality are policed through animal practices, ranging from the way Marra's mother struggles to get her "out of the barn and into a dress," to the biblical animals whom Jess Dobkin's unicorn will gloriously challenge: "You know this part: They pair up. Check, check. Two, two. Two, two. Ladies and Gentlemen, dogs and frogs, step right up. They comply. They obey."
These taxonomic temptations could launch a thousand college papers or journal articles. But it quickly becomes evident that it is not only the standard sociological categories that are being reshaped and inundated with animal effects here but other, more surprising ones as well, mocking the taxonomic impulse with their sheer strangeness. For example, is my originally serious schema going to survive intact if I include décor as one of the categories remade by animal acts? Yet how could I ignore it? In fact, how could I not give it pride of place, when I read that Joseph Keckler's cat lady is "the Dr. Moreau of interior decorating"? Or when I read this: in order to accommodate their growing family of dogs, Holly Hughes's lover suggests they buy a sectional sofa, a moment at which, reports Hughes, "A part of me dies."
Clothing is a close second in frivolity to home decor, and it also turns out to be an unexpectedly busy arena for animal input. But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that animals — whom we have long believed to differ from us in their inability to be naked and hence to feel shame — should make us think about how much we signify ourselves through our costumes and adornments. No dog would ever need to wear a t-shirt like the one Hughes finds herself in, that says "This is what a feminist looks like"; yet the chains that Jojo the elephant, in Weaver's piece, must not only wear but also carry to his captors might have something in common with those outfits worn by women at agility trials, the ones that say, according to Hughes, "I just give up!"
If the range, variety, and strangeness of animal effects causes the taxonomizing impulse to shrivel and die, the task of selecting works for this collection proved equally resistant to system and method. The usual categories for guaranteeing diversity and inclusion — gender, race, ethnicity, nation — quickly proved to be irrelevant. A briefly indulged fantasy of selection by species soon appeared equally nonsensical. We decided simply to include pieces we loved and admired for the freshness they brought to the animal subject (pun intended). Limitations of place made us leave out many works that fit that description and to excerpt others. We would have loved to include more than one work by some of our artists, but in the end we limited that impulse to the one exception of Deke Weaver, whose lifelong project, The Unreliable Bestiary, seemed — in its focus, dedication, and methodology — to warrant representation by more than one piece.
The process of pairing the performance scripts with scholars to comment on them was guided by a desire to engage a variety of important voices from the fields of animal studies and performance studies. Our request to the scholars was for responses to the scripts rather than introductions to them, with the assurance that we were open to whatever approach — theoretical, analytical, personal, historical, and so on — they felt would work best for them in the unfortunately short space we had available. Our wish was to create as open and generative an arena as we possibly could for a conversation that we felt was long overdue, among the fields of performance, performance studies, and animal studies, in a way that would be pedagogically useful as well as theoretically interesting. Both these goals were challenged by the difficult fact (so familiar to scholars and teachers of theatre and performance) that we were encountering these words on the page — as silent, linear, one-dimensional text — rather than in the eventful three- dimensional space of performance for which they are intended. Some of the commentators had the opportunity to see a performance of the piece they were writing on; most didn't. They did what we urge our students to do: to read for performance, to extrapolate live effects from textual clues, to see and hear the piece in the mind's eye and ear. Readers of the book — and the students and teachers who we hope will use it to study this new disciplinary intersection — will have to do the same, but they will also have some help from the video excerpts of most of the performances on the University of Michigan Press's website: http://www.press.umich.edu/p/animal-acts. The taste of live performance these excerpts provide will, we are confident, combine with the close reading that printed scripts make possible, and with the insights of our commentators, to offer a fertile meeting ground for the fields of animal studies and performance studies.
The many shifts recorded in the pages that follow are bookended by two statements that express a pair of fundamental principles of interspecies performance. In the book's first script, Holly Hughes begins her performance by declaring that it's really about dogs: for her, animals are not a metaphor. In the book's last script, Rachel Rosenthal ends her performance by telling us that all the animals who participated in the performance of The Others were adopted. Thus the first article of faith of interspecies performance is that we are trying hard to talk about actual animals now, even when (as very often, including very often in the works that follow) we cannot help but also see them as symbols for our ideas and metaphors for human dramas. One sure way of determining that a piece belongs to the category we are defining here — interspecies performance, the new kind of "animal act" — is that, whatever else animals may come to mean in the piece (and they will undoubtedly mean many things), we will be reminded — or we will want to remind ourselves — of their real existence, their actual being as members of a biological species with a specific morphology, geography, and history. And this will be so, I want to assert paradoxically, even when the animal being discussed belongs to an imaginary species, like the unicorn in Jess Dobkin's piece, whose difference proves to be a sharp new lens, as Jill Dolan shows, for gaging the baneful effect of dualistic thinking on all species.
The geographies of most animals today are vastly diasporic, their histories surprisingly intertwined with those of humans; charting these dispersals and tracing these stories are a major interest of interspecies artists. A primary mode of interspecies performance, then, is literalization, a steady focus on — or regular return to — the animal or animals around whom the performance revolves. Notwithstanding sporadic — or even regular — manifestations of those flights of symbolism and those tides of anthropomorphism that have long characterized animal discourse — before Aesop and since — the animal acts being forged today are committed to never forgetting the animal and to always asking: "Where are the real animals in all this?" This is no easy task, because the realities of animals' lives have for so long been submerged in the ugly feelings that attend cruelty to others, making them hard to see clearly. As Rosenthal says, "The sewers of the human psyche are clogged with the corpses of children, animals, women, animals, slaves, animals, prisoners, animals, animals, animals ..." Animals are and have always been powerful metaphors; they have been not only "good to think with," as Claude Levi-Strauss famously said, but even better to imagine with, to make poetic sense of our lives with. John Berger writes that just as "the first subject matter for painting was animal" and that probably "the first paint was animal blood, it is not unreasonable to support that the first metaphor was animal." The reason for this powerful metaphoricity is, however, rooted in the specifics of animal lives: in their shapes, colors, patterns, movements, sounds, behaviors, habits, and habitats. The animal acts of our changing times are interested in these specifics as much as in the vital human meanings they produce.
This is probably the place to make a crucial distinction between the kind of interspecies performance presented in this collection and the kind many people think of when they hear that word: namely, performances that involve actual animals doing things alongside human performers. The circus is the classic site of that kind of interspecies performance, and its history and stories are endlessly fascinating to the artists and scholars in this book. On occasion, that kind of interspecies performance has spilled out of circus and into theatre, performance art, and dance. When it has, it has brought with it many of the questions that arise in the study of circus, about the ethics of training, captivity, and the commercial use of animals. Those questions are often intensified around the category of art practice that Meiling Cheng has called "animalworks" and defined as "performances and installations that use animals as either materials or performers." I have long argued that the figure of the animal requires a more capacious concept and have proposed the term "zooësis" to refer to the vast field of cultural animal discourse and representation. The neologism is inspired partly by Platonic "poïesis" and Aristotelian "mimesis," but it also owes a debt to early feminist theorist Alice Jardine's concept of "gynesis," which she defined as "the putting into discourse of 'woman' as [...] intrinsic to the condition of modernity; indeed, the valorization of the feminine, woman, and her obligatory, that is, historical connotations, as somehow intrinsic to new and necessary modes of thinking, writing, speaking." Obviously, I want this term, zooësis, to mark the ways the animal is put into discourse, but I also share Jardine's progressive hope that it will contribute to the valorization of animals and teach us that they are "intrinsic to new and necessary modes of thinking, writing, speaking."
The performances in this book, with one notable exception, do not bring real, living, nonhuman animals onstage. Rather, they are records of and reflections on the relationships — real and imagined — between human and nonhuman animals. Their claim to the adjective "interspecies" derives from their keen interest in the lives and meanings of the other animals. It derives too from their commitment to letting the experience of those lives mold and deepen and change the ways we understand our own — human-animal — lives.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Animal Acts by Una Chaudhuri, Holly Hughes. Copyright © 2014 University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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Table of Contents
Animal Acts for Changing Times, 2.0: A Field Guide to Interspecies Performance
Introduction Una Chaudhuri 1
The Dog and Pony Show (bring your own pony) Holly Hughes 13
Commentary Donna Haraway: Agility Is Performance Art
Stay! Vicky Ryder Lisa Asagi Stacy Makishi 37
Commentary Maria Carlson: What Happened to the Black Dog?
Cat Lady Joseph Keckler 55
Commentary Erika Rundle: Theatre of the Cat Lady Who Is Not
With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit? / ¿Con Qué Culo Se Sienta la Cucaracha? Carmelita Tropicana (aka Alina Troyano) 69
Commentary Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes: Martina, Catalina, Elián, and the Old Man: Queer Tales of a Transnational Cuban Cockroach
No Bees for Bridgeport: A Fable from the Age of Daley Kestutis Nakas 93
Commentary Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson: A New Fable of the Bees
Horseback Views: A Queer Hippological Performance Kim Marra 111
Commentary Jane C. Desmond: Kinesthetic Intimacies
MONKEY Deke Weaver 141
Commentary Cary Wolfe: Apes like Us
Excerpts from ELEPHANT Deke Weaver 163
Commentary Nigel Rothfels: A Hero's Death
Excerpt from Everything I've Got Jess Dobkin 189
Commentary Jill Dolan: The Great Refusal and the Greater Hope
Excerpts from As the Globe Warms: An American Soap Opera in Twelve Acts Heather Woodbury 197
Commentary Ann Pellegrini: Zooglossia: The Unknown Tongues of Heather Woodbury
The Others Rachel Rosenthal 217
Contributors 239