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Editorial Comment: Interspecies Performance

2013; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 65; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tj.2013.0092

1086-332X

Ric Knowles,

Art, Technology, and Culture

Editorial Comment:Interspecies Performance Ric Knowles Theatre and performance studies have long had an interest in the “inter-,” most notably the intercultural and interdisciplinary. I come to interspecies performance not from the most familiar approaches, which I take to be eco-criticism and animal studies, but most directly by way of my interest in intercultural performance, including transnational Indigenous performance, where reciprocity with the nonhuman world is standard practice. This special issue was initially conceived as an extension of the critical interculturalist project that was the subject of Theatre Journal’s December 2011 issue (vol. 63, no. 4) on “Rethinking Intercultural Performance,” which I guest coedited with Penny Farfan before I came onboard as coeditor. My intention in proposing the current issue was to consider species—animal, plant, insect, and other—to be cultures, and interspecies performance therefore to be intercultural. As with intercultural performance, there is, it seems to me, an urgent need to reconsider interspecies performance as a horizontalist and rhizomatic project in which no one partner in the exchange and negotiation dominates—a consideration that has significant implications for the question of who the “target audience” is for interspecies performance, who initiates and dictates the terms of the event, and, crucially, who or what benefits from it. The study of interspecies performance also resembles interculturalism in its interdisciplinarity. In this case, the interdiscipline of performance studies engages most directly with disciplines less familiar to traditional theatre studies, including eco-criticism, animal studies, and perhaps also a reconfigured postcolonial studies. It is clear, for example, from zoos, and especially from taxonomic museum displays of stuffed and pinioned exotica from various colonizing “voyages of discovery” since the early modern era, that the Western colonizing project encompassed nonhuman as well as human animals, together with insects and plants. Minerals, which have less easily or often been understood to rest comfortably under the category of “species,” in spite of their inevitable biotic component (inevitable at least outside of laboratory conditions), were, of course, in their “precious” varieties (gold and silver) the site at which the collusion between colonialism and capitalism was clearest. But most such colonizing voyages included on their ships’ manifests “scientists” expressly charged with identifying, collecting, and cataloging various species for study and display, even as the Indigenous populations of the world, themselves considered more animal than human, were put on display in imperial centers by returning colonizers. And, of course, the colonial project has been as devastating for its nonhuman as for its human subjects. Una Chaudhuri, the progenitor of animal studies as it applies to drama and theatre, came to the field less by way of interculturalism and postcolonialism than through her work on eco-criticism, on theatre, space, and land/scape, and on performance artist and animal rights activist Rachel Rosenthal (although Chaudhuri also contributed significantly to the “intercultural performance wars” that circulated around Peter Brook’s Mahabharata during the 1980s and ’90s). Chaudhuri’s contributions are legion, but perhaps her best-known is the concept of “zooësis,” a neologism that combines traditional understandings of mimesis and poiesis with Alice Jardine’s “gynesis” and Cary Wolfe’s “zoontologies,” to refer to “the myriad performance and semiotic elements involved in and around the vast field of cultural animal practices.”1 For Chaudhuri, these practices range over history, from bear-baiting to pet-keeping, dog shows to circuses, and include the representation of animals in literature and onstage. Chaudhuri’s zooësis has been an extraordinarily significant contribution to the study of drama, theatre, and performance. As Lourdes Orozco argues, “the history of human–animal relations runs parallel with animal presence and participation in performance practices from cave painting to contemporary rodeos.”2 [End Page i] It is a distinct pleasure, then, to lead off this special issue of Theatre Journal on Interspecies Performance with Chaudhuri’s turn to bugs. In her essay “Bug Bytes: Insects, Information, and Interspecies Theatricality,” Chaudhuri examines the “insect imaginary” as revisioned in Tracy Letts’s 1996 play Bug and seen through the critical lens of animal studies, reminding us that “the bugs of the imagination have painfully real counterparts.” She begins by examining the human fear of insects, based on the...