The Performance of Counter-Sorcery in Lemi Ponifasio’s Tempest: Without a Body

Abstract

Created in 2007, and toured through 2013, Polynesian director and choreographer Lemi Ponifasio’s striking Tempest: Without a Body marks a new phase in environmentally-focused, postcolonial discourse. Shakespeare’s The Tempest plays a central role in Ponifasio’s move in the direction of political theology, as does the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Giorgio Agamben, and Isabelle Stengers. By linking the imagery of Shakespeare’s text to Samoan conceptions of temporality--how past, present and future interpenetrate--Ponifasio identifies the linearity of Western temporality as a crucial source of disempowerment for colonized people. Ponifasio’s awareness of Western philosophical and literary history arms him against this form epistemic capture, and allows him to enlist Shakespeare in his counter-assault on Enlightenment temporality. Stengers’s analysis of “capitalist sorcery” (developed with Philippe Pignarre) helps illuminate the relevance of this reconfiguration to the study of Shakespeare. Through the Deleuzian figure of the sorcerer we come to see how Shakespeare’s work connects to contemporary postdramatic theater in a new era defined by global protest politics and the shadow of the Anthropocene.