ABSTRACT
This essay examines dance as an art form to engage environmental issues and communicate unsettling slow violence (Nixon) in two contemporary performances by Mourad Merzouki’s dance troupe Compagnie Käfig: Agwa (2008; Water) and Pixel (2014). Given the fact of the copious and constant presence of plastic cups and pixels in both performances, it explores the connections and conversions between the accentuated physicality of the human body and the transparency of plastic cups and immateriality of pixels. By doing so, it invites the rethinking of notions of presence and materiality from an ecocritical perspective, grounded in performance studies. Moreover, it examines the challenges of creating and referencing metaphors of intrusion and interference in the context of dance. Based on dance’s nonchronological form and emphasis on collaboration, both performances become counter- and postmodern reflections on the fragility of ecosystems, conceived as sites of dynamic and synchronous interactions of human and nonhuman agents. It is precisely the dancers’ and their audiences’ shared bodily perception that alerts viewers to the interferences related to the more than material spaces we inhabit and that carves out a potential of agency that goes beyond the mere individual.
