Mapping the “naturecultural turn” in performance studies

ABSTRACT

This essay maps an emerging philosophical and praxiological turn in contemporary performance studies toward the concept of “natureculture.” Natureculture – a concept established in counterpoint to the bifurcated spheres of “nature” and “culture” – offers performance studies scholars new opportunities for research and aesthetic production. The opportunities described in this essay include new interdisciplinary partnerships, expansions of performance theory into nonhuman arenas, and revised theories of the relationship between performance and embodiment.

KEYWORDS:

• Performance
• posthumanism
• natureculture
• materiality
• more-than-human

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As one reviewer pointed out, this section largely traffics in the language of “animals” as a substitute for “nonhuman agencies.” Partially, this is a result of the large body of work about animal performance (and performance with animals) that served as the initial vehicle for these more-than-human considerations, in the pieces I have cited. The quotations that do the heavy lifting are themselves focused on animals because their authors were focused on animals. But where possible, I have shifted the terminology in my own writing to reflect a broader concept of performer/performed agency to include plants, fungi, microbes, and abiotic matter. Animals were—and remain—the easiest conceptual and analogic means of thinking about nonhuman performance, as I have documented elsewhere regarding the difficulties of theorizing plant performance (Brisini 2–3). But readers should be mindful to treat “animal” in these sections as only one of a variety of nonhuman performers/performances. The flat ontology of natureculture makes this equivalency possible, nay mandatory.