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This book is an innovative study that places performance and dance studies in conversation with ecology by exploring the significance of dirt in performance.
List of contents
List of figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Biogeocultography
1. Performative Taphonomy: Excavating and Exhuming the Past in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play
2. Staging Extraction: Peat’s Vitality in Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring
3. A Dirty Pas De Deux: Dirt, Skin, and “Trans-corporeality” in Eveoke Dance Theatre’s Las Mariposas
4. Mycelium in Motion: Choreographing Care in Iván-Daniel Espinosa’s Messengers Divinos
Conclusion: Moving with the Trouble
Index
About the author
Angenette Spalink is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Texas A&M University.
Summary
This book is an innovative study that places performance and dance studies in conversation with ecology by exploring the significance of dirt in performance.
Focusing on a range of 20th- and 21st-century performances that include modern dance, dance-theatre, Butoh, and everyday life, this book demonstrates how the choreography of dirt makes biological, geographical, and cultural meaning, what the author terms "biogeocultography". Whether it’s the Foundling Father digging into the earth’s strata in Suzan-Lori Park’s The America Play (1994), peat hurling through the air in Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring (1975), dancers frantically shovelling out fistfuls of dirt in Eveoke Dance Theatre’s Las Mariposas (2010), or Butoh performers dancing with fungi in Iván-Daniel Espinosa’s Messengers Divinos (2018), each example shows how the incorporation of dirt can reveal micro-level interactions between species – like the interplay between microscopic skin bacteria and soil protozoa – and macro-level interactions – like the transformation of peat to a greenhouse gas. By demonstrating the stakes of moving dirt, this book posits that performance can operate as a space to grapple with the multifaceted ecological dilemmas of the Anthropocene.
This book will be of broad interest to both practitioners and researchers in theatre, performance studies, dance, ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities.
