CREW's O_REX (2007) and Nicole Beutler's Antigone (2012)

Abstract

In the twenty-first century, a new ethical aesthetic has developed with regard to ecology. Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT) proclaims the end of corporeal agency as targeted action, for our capacity to act is embedded in a network consisting of human and nonhuman agents or actants. This kind of ecological thinking not only moves notions of identity and kinship beyond the persistent oppositions between nature and culture, human and inhuman, animate and inanimate. It also sheds a new light on contemporary radical redefinitions of mythological figures such as Oedipus and Antigone. In CREW’s O_REX Oedipus is radically reconfigured alongside technological innovations. In her version of Antigone, Nicole Beutler interconnects dancing bodies with ‘dead’ but ‘animated’ Bunraki puppets, and by doing so inaugurates a particular idea of agency and action. Both CREW’s Oedipus and Beutler’s Antigone are conceived of as what I call a composite body in the posthuman sense of the word. In both performances, the composite constellation of the mythical figure never folds into one character, impersonated by an actor. Antigone and Oedipus become a posthuman composite body, embodying the ever-shifting boundary between the human and the inhuman, the animate and the inanimate. Both composite bodies for that matter also develop a particular view on resistance and hence perform a particular “political ecology of things” (Bennett 2009) with regard to classical figures.