Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events Theresa J. May Baz Kershaw . Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. 353, illustrated. $99.00 (Hb). In Theatre Ecology, Baz Kershaw deploys "ecology" as both metaphor and theoretical model for thinking about the complex relationships among theatre, contemporary media, protest, and society. The book collects essays presented and published between 1999 and 2006, during which time Kershaw has "been charting a course up the narrowing straits between nature and culture" (4). Theatre Ecology will interest not only scholars making ecological connections in their work but also those discussing the performativity of contemporary culture, the impact of new media on theatre, the efficacy of public protest in an age of media spectacle, and the theatre as an apocalyptic harbinger. Parts of Kershaw's book are essential reading for those interested in protest as performance. It will also interest historians of contemporary British theatre, from which issue many of Kershaw's illustrations and case studies. Kershaw groups what might otherwise be a random collection of essays around present, past, and future. Part One, "In the Present: Qualities of Theatre and Performance," is rooted in the notion that performance has become "a new paradigm of knowledge" in the late-twentieth century (32). Its chapters interrogate "the changing vectors of the theatre's broad social context, of the ephemerality of performance, of the ethical/political limits of the performance paradigm" (32). Kershaw posits that theatre has an "ecology," which in recent decades has been "threatened" by the shift to performative society (i.e., a society in which everything including individual identities, places, and events of all kinds are performative). The "survival [End Page 247] of traditional drama and theatres" depends, he argues, on whether theatre can "adapt" to this changed and changing "environment" (32). The metaphor of "ecology" is thus deployed and in play for the remainder of the text. Kershaw's use of the term might puzzle readers who understand ecological issues as material, as having to do with the "branch of biology that deals with organisms' relations to one another and to the physical environment in which they live" ("Ecology"). In 1996, Bonnie Marranca similarly deployed "ecology" as a kind of whole-systems approach to performative analysis, even as Una Chaudhuri warned that theatre tends to privilege the metaphoric over the material to such an extent that the material gets lost in the spectacle itself. Still, for theatre to matter at all, we must think of it as an ecological actor. In Greening Up Our Houses, a book about sustainable theatre production, Larry Fried and I included a Metabolic Chart that recognized ideas and images as part of the "outflow" of the living organ/ism/ization of theatre (15–16). Kershaw's book takes a precarious position on the double edge of this s/word, requiring the reader to remain cognizant that the term "ecology" has taken on valences that reflect the paradoxical ways in which musings burn into the land and bodies around us. Kershaw observes that the very performativity of contemporary culture has done ecological damage to land and community. Performance has become central to the "daily lives of millions . . . [and] synonymous with progress, making theatre a pervasive model for separating culture from nature through production of hugely desirable man-made environments, the seductive badlands of anti-ecological modernity." Kershaw points us, then, to the interplay of history and memory. Part Two, "Of the Past: Histories of Theatre and Performance," suggests an eco-historiography for theatre and performance in which theatre economics, as well as theatre's other histories, are interrogated not only through the documentary record but also through a global archive of non-documentary human and electronic sources. Reminiscence, he argues, is a way of knowing, peppered with silences that deserve attention. In this section, Kershaw deploys the term "ecotone" – commonly used in ecology to describe the overlap between, for example, a river and its riparian zone – to describe "areas where two or more" elements, such as audiences and actors, "rub up against each other" (147). Theatrical ecotones become, for Kershaw, fertile ground for historiographic digs at sites such as Welfare State International...