ABSTRACT
This chapter will discuss performance, and the way in which performance in a theatrical context might highlight and add complexity to perceptions of the environment, along with associated questions about dwelling and the relationship between individuals and environmental objects. Its central point of enquiry will concern people and weather, with particular regard to the way in which performance may act as a form of mediation or negotiation between human and nonhuman actors. The key work bridging the discussion of performance and weather will be a
physical theatre piece, Dawns Ysbrydion 09.02.63/Ghost Dance 09.02.63 (hereafter referred to as Dawns Ysbrydion), devised by the Welsh performer Eddie Ladd, with music and sound by Rhodri Davies and Lee Patterson, and poetic texts by the author. The show was staged in June 2013 at Aberystwyth University and centred on a significant event from the recent political history of Wales, namely the bombing of an electrical transformer at the building site for the Tryweryn dam in 1963 (on 9 February, as the full title of the performance suggests). Dawns Ysbrydion linked this human event to the nonhuman action of the weather by virtue of the fact that the bombing took place during a remarkably harsh winter-by UK standards at least-which saw unusually widespread and longlasting snowfall and freezing temperatures across the country between late December 1962 and early March 1963. The show tried to highlight the interrelatedness of the bombing and the harsh weather: a central feature of its form and subject matter. Moreover, it was linked to a discussion of weather in its association with a series of outputs in an extended project titled ‘The Snows of Yesteryear: Narrating Extreme Weather’, which took a broad multidisciplinary view of the ways in which extreme weather events had been remembered, documented and mediated in the UK since the eighteenth century. In terms of both its narrative sources and its academic provenance, therefore, it operated as a speculative statement about the possible status and efficacy of performance as a method of enquiry into the relationship between human and nonhuman actors. Performance has a (very considerable) number of features which may affect its
salience as a method of enquiry, and it would be far beyond the scope of the current chapter to try to account for these in any kind of definitive way. For the
sake of the present discussion, however, we may note the importance of the following: performance is specific to a place and time, and its exposition is either directly or residually embodied; it is also allusive in character, and implicitly posits situations, experiences and events other than those being embodied; similarly, while it is either directly or residually sensuous or affective in character, it also involves the deployment of conceptual materials and comprises a very particular and ongoing negotiation between these affective and conceptual dimensions; and finally, the sense of reality which it creates is always contingent and speculative. These characteristics, while they may not be exclusively the preserve of performance, define it as a process which dynamically and continuously reconstitutes itself in its audience’s awareness. These features of performance will become key to the way in which I discuss its relationship with issues of environmental perception and ecological awareness below. I will relate much of this discussion to the work of the anthropologist Tim Ingold. Meanwhile, there is one other related feature of performance which is worth noting here: that its various specificities create some equally specific challenges in relation to describing and documenting its action. Like a number of the other kinds of cultural situations and phenomena which yield the methodological studies in this volume, accounting for performance through the ‘suspension’ of writing raises many questions and problems in terms of its relation to the reality which it describes and the ways in which it relates to its broader environmental, human/nonhuman context. I will also examine this point below, with particular reference to the theatre/archaeology of Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks. Before going on to discuss the challenges associated with formulating a
description of the nonhuman agency of the weather, it is worth noting quickly some of the ways in which Dawns Ysbrydion dealt with its implicitly human material, particularly its political-historical and cultural narrative. The story of the drowning of the Tryweryn Valley is a very well-known and celebrated political cause in Wales, and has often been cited as a key moment in the progress of Welsh nationalism; but here it was reframed by looking at it as a parallel to the Native American Ghost Dance of the late 1880s, as adopted and enacted by the Lakota Sioux prior to the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. Dawns Ysbrydion proposed a common feature between the two events, namely that both were, to apply Rebecca Solnit’s (2004) phrase, “a technology … a device for altering the world or the experience of the world” (p. 114). As such, it argued that the bombing, like the dance, was carried out in response to a situation which was already largely beyond repair and where catastrophic loss had already occurred; like the Ghost Dance, it was seen as performance in extremis – as a bold, almost absurd, assertion of hope at the prospect of transformation, acted out against the material degeneration of the host’s world and dramatically altering their sense of their own continuity and the meaning of their persistence. For those who may be unfamiliar with these two historical acts, I will provide
a brief working overview of both the Ghost Dance and Tryweryn here. In both cases, readers are referred to some of the more specialised literature on the subject, particularly, in the case of the Ghost Dance, Hittman (1997), Coleman
(2000) and Smith (1981); and with regard to the bombing of the Tryweryn dam, Thomas (2013).1
