Ghosts and climate crisis and queer performance, oh my! Although at first encounter my interdisciplinary research interests may seem to make strange bedfellows, my work as an artist-scholar is to make clear to my reader-spectator how responding to the demands of our ecological moment requires that they pay attention and play attention with the more-than-human ghosts that surround us. My research reacts to Una Chaudhuri’s 1994 insistence that the theatre initiate environmentalist change: “Ecological victory will require a transvaluation so profound as to be nearly unimaginable at present. And in this the arts and humanities – including the theatre – must play a role.”[1] Crucial to Chaudhuri’s call is the concept of transvaluation: theatre is not only a space of communication, education, and mediation regarding the facts, figures, and anthropocentric storying of the climate crisis, but also a space of cultural negotiation, wherein we can experiment with how to play together by a different set of rules and values, ones that do not prioritize corporate profit or human expediency above the interdependent liveliness of all creatures. As a queer artist-scholar, I have found queer ecology to be a provocative lens for uncovering theatre’s potential for transvaluation; queer ecology simultaneously questions how the Human and the Natural are historical cultural constructs rooted in white supremacy, settler colonialism, cisheteropatriarchy, and extractive capitalism, while enacting queer ecological futurity otherwise. In turning to theatrical cases that I see as performatively substantiating such queer ecological transvaluation, I encounter a seemingly counterintuitive phenomenon in the medium of the live and the politic of flourishing life: haunting. To cultivate the more-than-human relations needed to foster queer ecological futures, the case studies of my project inevitably conjure ghosts.
As an artist-scholar committed to research-creation, my task does not stop at providing that context and critique needed to illuminate the work of the queer ecological ghosts brought forth by other artists; I also hold my own séances. My work responds to calls for the arts to “offer modes of the sensuous, aesthetic attunement, and work as a conduit to focus public attention, elicit public discourse, and shape cultural imaginaries”[2] as modes of facing the challenges of climate crisis, and for research-creation work in particular to generate “situated forms of knowledge, combined with new ways of developing and disseminating that knowledge.”[3] My research method interweaves the close reading, critical theorizing and historiography of the scholar-dramaturg, with the experimental design and play of the artist-director, and the accessible pedagogy of the public scholar.
[1] Chaudhuri, Una. ““There Must Be a Lot of Fish in That Lake”: Towards an Ecological Theatre,” Theatre, vol. 25, no. 1, 1994, 25.
[2] Loveless, Natalie. How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation. Duke University Press, 2019, 16.
[3] Chapman, Owen and & Kim Sawchuk. “Research-Creation: Intervention, analysis, and ‘family resemblances,’” Canadian Journal of Communication, vol. 37, 2012, 11.
As an artist-scholar committed to research-creation, my task does not stop at providing that context and critique needed to illuminate the work of the queer ecological ghosts brought forth by other artists; I also hold my own séances. My work responds to calls for the arts to “offer modes of the sensuous, aesthetic attunement, and work as a conduit to focus public attention, elicit public discourse, and shape cultural imaginaries”[2] as modes of facing the challenges of climate crisis, and for research-creation work in particular to generate “situated forms of knowledge, combined with new ways of developing and disseminating that knowledge.”[3] My research method interweaves the close reading, critical theorizing and historiography of the scholar-dramaturg, with the experimental design and play of the artist-director, and the accessible pedagogy of the public scholar.
[1] Chaudhuri, Una. ““There Must Be a Lot of Fish in That Lake”: Towards an Ecological Theatre,” Theatre, vol. 25, no. 1, 1994, 25.
[2] Loveless, Natalie. How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation. Duke University Press, 2019, 16.
[3] Chapman, Owen and & Kim Sawchuk. “Research-Creation: Intervention, analysis, and ‘family resemblances,’” Canadian Journal of Communication, vol. 37, 2012, 11.
Publications
Forthcoming. “Forever unliving and yet never dead: The Queerly Ecological Hauntings of Nathalie Claude’s The Salon Automaton”, Modern Drama.
Forthcoming. “Radio-Active Ghosts: The Spectral Dramaturgy of Marie Clements’ Burning Vision,” Performance Research, Volume 29, Issue 7 - On Ghosts.
2024. Fostering Environmental Stewardship in Theatre and Performance Training Programs. Kimberly Skye Richards, Hope McIntyre, Selena Couture, and Kelly Richmond. Pressbooks, https://pressbooks.pub/sustainableguide.
2023. "Équilibrer la catastrophe, émotion et enchevêtrement: L’objet à risque dans un cirque néomatérialiste." Translated by Janine Léopold. Le théâtre et les Nouveaux matérialismes, edited by Hervé Guay, Jean-Marc Larrue and Nicole Nolette, Presses de l’Université de Montréal and Presses Universitaires de Rennes, pp. 129-150.
2018. “Freak and Queer: Towards a Queer Circus, Queer Hatchings, Monsters in the Cabinet, and Queering Circus Sessions” Charles Batson, Hayley Moulin, Kelly Richmond, and Taylor Zajdlik, Performance Matters. Vol 4, No 1., pp. 163-199.
Forthcoming. “Radio-Active Ghosts: The Spectral Dramaturgy of Marie Clements’ Burning Vision,” Performance Research, Volume 29, Issue 7 - On Ghosts.
2024. Fostering Environmental Stewardship in Theatre and Performance Training Programs. Kimberly Skye Richards, Hope McIntyre, Selena Couture, and Kelly Richmond. Pressbooks, https://pressbooks.pub/sustainableguide.
2023. "Équilibrer la catastrophe, émotion et enchevêtrement: L’objet à risque dans un cirque néomatérialiste." Translated by Janine Léopold. Le théâtre et les Nouveaux matérialismes, edited by Hervé Guay, Jean-Marc Larrue and Nicole Nolette, Presses de l’Université de Montréal and Presses Universitaires de Rennes, pp. 129-150.
2018. “Freak and Queer: Towards a Queer Circus, Queer Hatchings, Monsters in the Cabinet, and Queering Circus Sessions” Charles Batson, Hayley Moulin, Kelly Richmond, and Taylor Zajdlik, Performance Matters. Vol 4, No 1., pp. 163-199.
