ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the containment of the 51-mile-long Los Angeles (LA) River, which was encased in concrete by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1960. The chapter considers how the river’s concrete channelization has created contesting containment narratives and ruptures between people and place, a theme explored in two very different performances. The first, the film Chinatown (1974), focuses on corruption in water management and places the properties of water in the film center stage. The second performance, Cornerstone Theater Company’s Touch the Water: A River Play (2009), critiques the channelization and attempts to reconnect the river to displaced Tongva and Latinx peoples. Despite their stylistic differences, both eco-performances trouble the river’s domestication by playing with water and the shifting spatial narratives that surround it. With ambivalence and uncertainty, they contest both environmental containment and the myth of a return to an ecologically pristine state.
