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‘A Twisted, Looping Form’
Performance Research Pub Date : 2020-02-17 , DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2020.1752575
Patrick Lonergan

In Dark Ecology (2016), Timothy Morton argues that one of the challenges presented by the impact of human activity upon the environment is that ‘[w]e are faced with the task of thinking at temporal and spatial scales that are unfamiliar, even monstrously gigantic’ (25). The advent of the Anthropocene era thus requires us to understand the agency of the individual in the context of a geological epoch that will persist for thousands of generations, and which seems likely to outlast the human species itself. This paper considers how theatrical form is being used to register the sense of ‘weirdness’ (to use Morton's word) that arises from this awareness, exploring representations of stage time in plays that dramatize ecological themes. These include work by Mike Bartlett and Caryl Churchill, but the primary focus is on Ella Hickson's Oil (2016), a play that explores humanity's shifting approaches to carbon-based energy from the late 1890s to the early 2050s, but which has a protagonist whose age increases only by approximately sixty years during that period. By using stage time metonymically to consider the relationship between the length of a human life and the progression of the natural world over centuries, Hickson shows that one function of art in the Anthropocene might be to demonstrate the impact of human activity across ‘monstrously gigantic’ spans of time and space. She also explores how the concept of theatrical realism may be an impediment to the formation of a necessary ecological awareness, demonstrating how experimental approaches to theatrical form may offer us new ways of understanding contemporary environmental and political concerns. By placing those achievements in the context of Morton's ideas about looping and weirdness, the paper concludes that that Hickson's Oil is using theatrical form to think deeply about dark ecology and its temporal consequences.

中文翻译:

'一种扭曲的循环形式'

在 Dark Ecology (2016) 中,Timothy Morton 认为人类活动对环境的影响所带来的挑战之一是“我们面临着在不熟悉的时空尺度上思考的任务,甚至是可怕的巨大的'(25)。因此,人类世时代的到来要求我们在地质时代的背景下理解个体的能动性,地质时代将持续数千代,而且似乎可能比人类物种本身更持久。本文考虑如何使用戏剧形式来记录从这种意识中产生的“怪异”感(用莫顿的话),探索戏剧化生态主题的戏剧中舞台时间的表现。其中包括 Mike Bartlett 和 Caryl Churchill 的作品,但主要关注的是 Ella Hickson s 石油 (2016),该剧探讨了从 1890 年代末到 2050 年代初人类对碳基能源的转变方法,但在此期间,主角的年龄仅增加了大约 60 岁。通过转喻地使用阶段时间来考虑人类生命的长度与几个世纪以来自然世界的发展之间的关系,希克森表明人类世中艺术的一个功能可能是展示人类活动对“巨大无比”的影响时间和空间的跨度。她还探讨了戏剧现实主义的概念如何成为必要生态意识形成的障碍,展示了戏剧形式的实验方法如何为我们提供理解当代环境和政治问题的新方法。
更新日期:2020-02-17
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