No Away

Abstract

Phantom Limb Company's performance, Falling Out, examines the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, Japan. The University of Utah will present the work in 2020, as part of an ongoing collaboration between the University's multidisciplinary presenter, sustainability office and an interdisciplinary faculty research centre. Timothy Morton states ‘…there is no “away” after the end of the world. It would make more sense to design in a dark ecological way, admitting our coexistence with toxic substances we have created and exploited'. Writing about Falling Out will serve as a record of the work's impact on the co-authors, and help grapple with our task of guardianship of the toxic world we have created for a future we cannot predict. Under the headings 1) Nature, 2) Body and 3) Time we consider ways that the work designs many bodies' coexistence with the toxic substances humans have created. In Nature, we introduce risk through questions of natural hazard resilience and representation. In Body, we use Mel Y. Chen's work on animacies and environmental justice scholarship on Fukushima to describe the entanglement of the puppet, human, human projected and garbage bag bodies in the work. In Time, we conclude with Amitav Ghosh's ideas of the uncanny to consider the cascading effects of the moment that strain in Earth’s crust reached the critical breaking point and the weight of the entire ocean propelled to land with the tsunami to the moment in an imagined future when the impacts of this fallout will no longer be felt. We consider how expanding our sense of time to include the millennia of geologic processes may make hope possible. On these time scales, all is renewed.

Notes

1 The first production in the series was 69°S (2011), a work inspired by the story of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 Trans-Atlantic Expedition, which brought the unknown Antarctica and climate change to the audience. The second in the series was Memory Rings (2016), where the epic tale of Gilgamesh was used to explore the poetry of tree cores and the age and wisdom of trees.

2 The ‘we’ here and throughout the remainder of this article refers to the co-authors Brenda Bowen and Liz Ivkovich.

3 During the final proof reading of this article, Salt Lake City experienced its strongest earthquake since 1992.

4 Simultaneously with finalizing this paper, we are grappling with the cancellation – hopefully postponement – of the performance due to COVID-19. All gatherings of more than 150 people have been cancelled by the University of Utah. The pandemic highlights how our relationship to risk must evolve to adapt to this changing climate.