The Performance of Leftovers

Abstract

This article examines the performativity of leftovers – recycled performance material and detritus from material society – through a retrospective enquiry into three performance works I collaborated on as director/choreographer, Slender (2005/6), Birds (2011), and Plastic Island (2012). Each piece, made from the leftovers of the one before, enacted a wrestle between spirituality and materiality through a literal wrangle with leftover material objects – wasted food and/or plastic bags – bringing their own agency into the theatrical arena.Looking back at these pieces, I explore how leftovers perform in the space of the theatre – the inanimate becoming animate, replete with meanings – and why dramaturgical structures shaping this performance can sometimes deaden the inherent resonance and energy of the leftovers, exhausting them and rendering them inert. In each piece, pre-existing associations conjured by wasted food and plastic bags outside the theatre led to the construction and imposition of narrative journeys, bringing apparent order and meaning to the performance material and leftovers. This now seems contrary to the motivation to use real debris – to play with a materiality that could not always be controlled.Through the enquiry I draw on theoretical discussions concerning artistic creation and entropy—the principle that in a closed system there is a natural tendency towards disorder and that all matter and energy evolves towards an inert homogenous state. I consider how structure and recycling of materials can be viewed as attempts to thwart increasing disorder and inevitable stasis and, conversely, how engaging with the inside of creative disorder itself may yield unknown potential, diversified forms and proliferated meaning. I conclude by looking at how the power of leftovers in performance may be harnessed through getting lost and discovering them anew, and suggest that down such an unmarked path may lie the route to their dramaturgy, too.