ABSTRACT
Power imbalances, offset by species differences, fuel cross-species forms of performance that are representative of human and animal relationships. This chapter focuses on experimental theatre performances with real animals that are concerned with the ethics implicit in the treatment of animals, which, in turn, define how animals are allowed to act and interact. It introduces the idealist concept of non-acting to describe how acting techniques (re-produced through cultural dressage) and natural behaviours (provoked by bodily animality) are interdependently shaped in artistic performances. Close performance analyses of Rose English's My Mathematics (1992–94), Joseph Beuys's Titus Andronicus/Iphigenie (1969), and Bartabas's Ex Anima (2019) provide insights into how these artists attempt to challenge anthropocentric practices of human and animal acting in their artistic performances, and how their human-animal performances expose the limits of theatre's metaphorical, prescripted, and illusionist performance form.
