Performance, Climate, and Critical Art

Abstract

Performance, Climate, and Critical Art VK Preston (bio) My essay for the print edition of Theatre Journal (72.2, June 2020), "Queer and Indigenous Art: Performing Ice Times in Climate Crisis," engages with performance and video work from the Arctic that addresses climate warming. It began with my experience as an audience member at Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools during its opening run in the heart of Toronto's queer neighborhood in 2017. The production at Buddies in Bad Times installed itself in my reflection on contemporary and cultural life as an urgent and necessary performance. Its dramaturgy makes often uneasy contributions to engagement with epistemic gaps and rifts between Indigenous and settler communities, decolonization movements, histories, and experiences of climate crises. The work is part of a new wave of performance by Inuit artists and settler artistic collaborators that bring renewed attention to colonization and history, climate change, and sovereignty activism. For me, Kiinalik opened up a new sense of artists working in coalitional, dramaturgical conversation. This philosophy of approach animates videos by the Isuma Collective, who created new work for the 2019 Venice Biennale on climate change and extractivism in the north. So too collaborations, such as those among dance and interdisciplinary artist Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Evalyn Parry, Cris Derksen, Jamie Griffiths, Christine Tootoo, and renowned singer and novelist Tanya Tagaq, foregrounding cultural resurgence as well as ongoing extraction and colonization in the north. The artists' sharp contemporary relevance is amplified in these works' engagements with asymmetries of the north and south (here in reference to the far north and Arctic circle) with contemporary realization that global warming is happening far more quickly in the far north than in the south below the 60th parallel. This journey took me to performances in both my home neighborhood in Toronto and in the northernmost capital city in the world, Iqaluit, Nunavut (fig. 1). Created by Parry, Laakkuluk, Erin Brubacher, and Elysha Poirier, with Derksen, Kiinalik continues to tour at the time of writing, most recently appearing in the inaugural season of the National Arts Centre's Indigenous Theatre (2019–20), which identifies itself [End Page E-7] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Poster at the Nunatta Sunakkutaangit Museum advertising Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools. Pictured: Evalyn Parry and Laakuluk Williamson Bathory. A Buddies in Bad Times Theatre production hosted by the Qaaggiavuut Society at the Frobisher Inn in Iqaluit, Nunavut. Text in Inuktituk. (Photo: VK Preston.) [End Page E-8] as the first national Indigenous theatre department globally. Among Kiinalik's powerful contributions are its self-reflective moves to dismantle the structural and institutional silos put in place among practices of story, dance, theatre, media, and music in settler epistemologies. The interweaving of practices takes spectators on a remarkable voyage with the artists, who met during a residency on climate change in the Artic. As the work unfolds, the artists move across hierarchies of knowledge and the sensorium, entering into personal, cultural, and intergenerational questions that cross histories as well as institutionalized settler distinctions and dramaturgies of nationhood (fig. 2). With support from my university in 2018, I was able to travel to Iqaluit to see a rehearsal and performance of the "northern" version of Kiinalik in the subarctic capital city of Iqaluit, Nunavut. There for the first time I met Qaggiavuut Society personnel, as well as students and artists with the Qaggiq School of Performing Arts. Through the Qaggiavuut society, these artists are creating an arts and training center, shaping what they term an "Arctic-specific pedagogy" in a region where colonization's prohibitions on practices have had ongoing, violent impact. My visit followed on the heels of the company's expanded push to develop a performing arts center and hub of creative practice and research oriented to the circum-polar north. The initiative to create this space and venue called the Qaggiq Hub has been gaining considerable momentum. As a settler scholar working within the university system in the "south," at the center of a long history of material as well as cultural extraction, the works I spent time with while writing this piece have honed a sense of critical reexamination of my own and my...