Choreographies of Mourning

Abstract

The language of 'climate grief' has recently been popularized across the English speaking world, with many in North America beginning to host regular 'climate grief circles'. These gatherings allow for the collective processing of feelings associated with climate-related grief. If the 'grief circle' is one common strategy for moving through personal grief within one's immediate context, the monument scales many of the same functions. Moved by Robert Nixon's provocative question, ‘what is a war casualty?’ (2011: 200), this paper considers how performance-based commemorative devices might calibrate to the paradigm shift of ecological collapse, so as to allow us to see, grieve, and respond to the more-than-human loss of military conflict.

Mobilizing a choreo-political analytic to examine techniques of memorialization which cultivate affective resilience and complexity in response to anthropogenic loss, this paper examines the durational performance installation and living (counter-)monument Operations (1945-2006): Movements, developed by boundaries/conditions performance assembly. Operations stages a dynamic encounter between human dancers and non-human actants. A field of sod which blankets the performance space interrupts the dancer's choreographies with its unwieldy presence: the more it is worn down by their repetitive movements, the more it discloses its vibrant materiality (Bennett 2009). I argue that Operations champions the affective polyvalence explored by Timothy Morton's dark ecologies: through its particular strategies of durational commemoration, Operations allows for the slow emergence of affective response which relay between the dark and the sweet.

Notes

1 It is evident that the Anthropocene is a dangerously homogenizing term, one that risks flattening responsibility for climate destruction, or of framing the problem of addressing climate change as one of individual actions and consumer choices. However, I will continue to use the term Anthropocene as a good-enough stand in for the concept of a human-impacted environment.