Staging the Human Remnant in the Anthropocene: Breaking the First Wall in Bruno Latour and Frédérique Aït-Touati’s Inside

Abstract

The relationship between theatre and the Anthropocene remains an understudied topic. First, there appears to be a tension between the Anthropocene as a concept that, by radically foregrounding a host of non-human agencies, shifts the focus away from human agency, on the one hand, and the theatre as an all-too-human medium on the other. Second, the theatre as a here-and-now space seems irreconcilable with the vast temporal and spatial scale of the Anthropocene, which entails an almost unmanageable complexity and unpredictability. Staging the Anthropocene, then, remains a theatrical challenge because of the renegotiated assemblage of human and non-human agency and the subsequent spatio-temporal epistemological challenges. This essay examines the extent to which theatre is equipped to stage the Anthropocene by analyzing and critically assessing Bruno Latour and Frédérique Aït-Touati’s Inside (2016) as a work of Anthropocene theatre. Via the experimental format of the lecture performance, the authors look for a new way to represent humanity’s place in the Anthropocene. This is most explicit in the way the performance breaks what I call the first wall, one of the affordances of the theatrical space, which is everything on stage that is thought to have no theatrical — and by extension moral and political — agency. As Inside renegotiates the relationship between human and non-human agency, the human loses its central position as protagonist and sole agent. The performance, however, never completely erases human agency from the stage but minimally salvages it, as such problematizing the modern scientific gaze of theoria.