Our friend and researcher Carl Lavery has often been concerned about how theatre and performance might produce and enable new forms of ecological perception and thought; and has, amongst other proposals, explored and developed the notion of ‘ecological image’.
A decade after we last performed this work, in his book chapter How does theatre think through ecology? (2019), he wrote:*
Rather the materiality of the image, the way in which it transforms and melts, produces a kind of exhilaration and joy in mutability and transformation. This is not performance as metaphor but as metonymy. Not only does the part stand for the whole, the signifier is radically indexical, a self-referential icon, an instance of living matter. There is something seductive about watching the ice forest crack and break, a pleasure or jouissance in observing the ‘trees’, in their always random and unexpected ways, hitting the floor, listening to their noise resonating throughout the room like a small, atonal symphony. There are other pleasures, too – pleasures of surface and sheen: the almost erotic image that folds into the retina when the ice loses its solidity and slowly flows beyond its boundary, becoming liquefied, rounded, deliquescent. In these moments far from equilibrium, a sense of intimacy is established between the spectator and the materiality that radiates outwards from the image s/he looks at. We are drawn into the refrain of movement, to the play of entropy, the drama of irreversibility. Time here is no longer linear, cyclical or causal; it is unexpected, evental, chaotic, a kind of ellipsis from which something new, something different emerges. Indeed, at times it appears that the performance operates on us at some pre- linguistic cellular level, a type of intuitive, corporeal knowledge that affirms the need for becoming other than what one is supposed, or constructed to be.
In writing these words, I am not suggesting that these materialized thoughts are unmediated by culture or somehow inherent to the ice itself. Far from it. I am simply proposing that the elemental presence of the ice in Some Things Happen All At Once, is a material catalyst for what could otherwise be deemed a somewhat abstract form of ecological and ontological thinking. The thinking that emerged from the performance is not in it per se; rather, in the same way that ice itself was subject to a process of transformation, so thinking emerges from it. Or better still, done in conjunction with it, through its unfolding. The performance is generative in that sense. It allows for thinking to be posited as a ‘more than human’ process; something impersonal that comes upon or strikes us, as opposed to something that we craft and control from the inside, the work of a disembodied mind, res cogitans. And, for me, it is in this opening to the outside, this sensitivity to matter, that the more profound ecological ethics of the performance reside; in, that is, our capacity to affirm the entropic processes of agentic matter.
* The complete text of this chapter can be read in Thinking Through Theatre and Performance, a book edited by Maaike Bleeker, Adrian Kear, Joe Kelleher and Heike Roms (Bloomsbury). A related online article in French, further exploring these ideas in relation to Some Things Happen All At Once, can be read here.