Abstract
ABSTRACTHumankind is heading for an environmental crisis shot through with conundrums. The warming planet of climate science leaves most people cold. Life-saving technical wizardry is overloading Earth’s capacities. Homo sapiens’ amazing adaptations are leading to extinction. These express largely unacknowledged ‘performance compulsions’ among humans. My title indicates key vectors of those processes, each linked to different performance research eco-productions: theatre installation, site-specific spectacular, environmental maze. Drawing on Bateson’s ‘ecology of mind’, Agamben’s ‘states of exception’, Bennett’s ‘vibrant matter’ and Sennett’s ‘Animal laborans’, this article teases out the three productions’ ecological relevance to human survival through an elementary conceit. Though we commonly consider Homo sapiens possesses an agency unique among species, it is fundamentally performed by Earth’s ecologies. So perhaps our only hope of averting planetary crisis is to begin performing exponentially more responsively with Earth’s environment. Especially as coming events cast their shadow before and the future is always before its time.
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