ABSTRACT
My point of departure is an improbable one for a project in theater ecology: a formulation by F.T. Marinetti, founder of the modernist theatrical movement that was arguably the least interested in, if not most hostile to, the claims of the natural world. The Futurists’ unabashed technophilia was the cutting edge of that programmatic suppression of the non-human upon which modernity’s ideal of progress increasingly depended. That suppression returned, as often happens, in metaphor, and among the many metaphors with which Marinetti, like other modernists, theorized the emerging theater are two that interest me especially: the zoo and the circus. Marinetti compared the zoo to the conventional psychological theater, which he despised, and the circus to his Futuristic ideal of a theater of action and energy:
The conventional theater exalts the inner life, professorial meditation, libraries, museums, zoos, monotonous crises of
conscience, stupid analyses of feelings, in other words, psychology, whereas on the other hand the circus and variety theater exalt action, heroism, life in the open air.
