The Stage Lives of Animals

Zooesis and Performance

Una Chaudhuri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317594567
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

The Stage Lives of Animals examines what it might mean to make theatre beyond the human. In this stunning collection of essays, Una Chaudhuri engages with the alternative modes of thinking, feeling, and making art offered by animals and animality, bringing insights from theatre practice and theory to animal studies as well as exploring what animal studies can bring to the study of theatre and performance.

As our planet lives through what scientists call "the sixth extinction, " and we become ever more aware of our relationships to other species, Chaudhuri takes a highly original look at the "animal imagination" of well-known plays, performances and creative projects, including works by:

• Caryl Churchill
• Rachel Rosenthal
• Marina Zurkow
• Edward Albee
• Tennesee Williams
• Eugene Ionesco

Covering over a decade of explorations, a wide range of writers, and many urgent topics, this volume demonstrates that an interspecies imagination deeply structures modern western drama.

Chapter 1
(De)Facing the Animals
Zooësis and Performance

Figure 1.1 Damien Hirst, A Thousand Years, 1990, steel, glass, flies, maggots, MDF, insect-o-cutor, cow’s head, sugar, water, 83.9 × 168.1 × 83.9 in (213 × 427 × 213 cm) DHS1814. Installation view, Gagosian Gallery, London, June 2006.

Photo by Rodger Wooldridge. © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved / DACS, London / ARS, NY 2015.

How can an animal look you in the face? That will be one of our concerns.

(Jacques Derrida)¹

Did your food have a face?

(People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals poster, 2001)

As my two epigraphs suggest, the burgeoning field of animal studies encompasses a vast cultural territory, ranging—contentiously²—from philosophy to activism, and including anthropology, sociology, history, psychology, art history, cinema, and literary studies. This special issue of TDR [The Drama Review, Spring 2007] extends an exploration, begun several years ago,³ of the intersections of this new field with performance studies. In proposing the term “zooësis” to designate the activity at these intersections, I am conscious of indulging a neologistic impulse that has become a characteristic of animal studies; a symptom, perhaps, of its desire to intervene radically in established discourses and their terms of art. Coinages like “zoontologies” (Wolfe), “zoopolis” (Wolch), “petropolis” (Olson and Hulser), “carno-phallologocentrism” (Derrida 1991), even “zooanthropology” and “anthrozoology” run the gamut of disciplines and suggest a shared program of creative disciplinary disturbance.

To speak of zooësis is, at the very least, to index the history of animal representation that stretches, in the Western literary tradition, from Aesop’s Fables to Will Self’s Great Apes (1998); in the Western dramatic tradition, from Aristophanes’ The Frogs (405 BCE) to Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2000); in film, from Eadweard Muybridge’s “zoogyroscope” in 1879⁴ to Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005); in popular culture, from Mickey Mouse to the Animal Planet TV channel; and in popular performance from gladiatorial contests to the Las Vegas duo Siegfried and Roy. Beyond that, to speak of zooësis is to acknowledge the manifold performances engendered by such ubiquitous or isolated cultural animal practices as pet keeping, dog shows, equestrian displays, rodeos, bullfighting, animal sacrifice, scientific experimentation, species preservation, taxidermy, hunting, fur wearing, meat eating—each with its own archive and repertory, its own spatialities and temporalities, its own performers and spectators.⁵

The neologisms that frantically signal the need to “take animals seriously” reflect a new pressure on what an influential anthology calls “The Question of the Animal” (DeGrazia; Wolfe). The double meaning of this phrase is important for my understanding of zooësis: the question of the animal is raised in and by philosophy for us (with increasing contentiousness since Descartes’s pronouncement that animals were nothing more than machines), but it is also a question put to us—individuals and disciplines—by animals, with increasing urgency as their disappearance from modern life and extinction from the planet accelerates beyond denial.

The ethical value and urgent need for an approach to animals that is imbued with the traits of performance—embodiment, presence, expressive encounters in shared time–space—is suggested by one of the contemporary classics of animal studies, J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999), a work that adds generic distortion to the disciplinary disturbances characteristic of this field. Having begun its life as the 1997/98 Tanner Lectures at Princeton, the novel thematizes and fictionalizes its origins: it is a narrative about two lectures delivered at an American college by Coetzee’s intriguing creation, the novelist Elizabeth Costello. The first of these lectures is the subject of a chapter entitled “The Philosophers and the Animals”; the second one is entitled “The Poets and the Animals.” The disciplinary trajectory thus encapsulated begins with an attempt to tackle “the question of the animal” with the instruments of reason—an attempt Costello deems necessary but that ultimately proves to be fruitless—and progresses to the effort to discover and enlist other faculties, notably the poetic imagination, in this endeavor.

The novel itself seems pessimistic about Costello’s quest for a renewed relation between humans and animals: it ends on a note of exhaustion and disappointment, with the aging novelist reduced to tears, trembling in her grown son’s arms. But while Elizabeth herself may feel tired and hopeless, one achievement of her effort is quietly recorded in the titles of the chapters and of the novel itself: the insistence on the plural form of all the key ideas—poets, philosophers, lives, animals—anticipates a crucial admonition in Jacques Derrida’s exclamation upon the human arrogance of the use of the singular noun to refer to the myriad living beings and species with whom we share this planet: “The Animal,” says Derrida, “what a word!” In this word Derrida locates the origins of logocentric humanism:

Animal is a word that men have given themselves the right to give […] at the same time according themselves, reserving for them, for humans, the right to the word, the name, the verb, the attribute, to a language of words, in short to the very things that the others in question would be deprived of, those that are corralled within the grand territory of the beasts: the Animal.

(2002: 400)

In pluralizing the words in his title The Lives of Animals, Coetzee hands Costello a victory she herself despairs of: the plural marks her lectures as a step in the long journey it will take to face the consequences of the gigantic gap between our singular insensitivity to animals and the vast numbers of different species and individuals upon which that insensitivity has been wreaking havoc, now almost to the point of extinction.

Yet numbers do crop up regularly in contemporary discourse on animals: stunning, numbing numbers, often in a citational form I think of as “cows per hour, chickens per minute.” Besides sheer quantities, discussion of contemporary animal practices uses statistics regarding proportions and distribution in ways that invariably mark this subject as one that lies well below the threshold of cultural awareness. For example, most people would be surprised to know that 98 percent of all animals with whom humans interact in any way, even including pets and zoo and circus animals, are farmed animals—that is, bred for human use (Wolfson and Sullivan 206). An amazing statistic indeed: not only does it tell us that we eat animals much more than we do anything else with them; it should also help us to recognize that the self-identification as animal lovers that we perform every day in our homes (and on Sundays when we drag the kids around the zoo) is part of a paper-thin but rock-hard veneer on an animalculture⁶ of staggering violence and exploitation.

Whether approached with the tools of rationality or those of imagination—both of which Costello deploys—the lives of animals as currently configured generally resist meaningful cultural visitation on any significant scale. The search is therefore on, in the arts and the humanities, to identify new means of seeing, showing, and knowing the animals. The trajectory Costello follows is not just from philosophy to poetry but also from one kind of poetry to another. Contrasting two famous animal poems—Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Panther” (1902) and Ted Hughes’s “The Jaguar” (1957)—she identifies embodiment as the principle of a potentially meaningful human–animal discourse. Unlike Rilke’s panther, which is presented for our gaze, Hughes’s jaguar, she says, is given to us as an organism, alive in muscle, breath, and sinew like our own, a living stage for human–animal encounters of a deeper kind. Costello’s distinction between the seen animal and the somatically shared one provides an obvious invitation to performance and performance studies—with their emphasis on the body, on presence, and on shared experience—an invitation to join her quest for a reawakened animalculture.

That this invitation is also an opportunity for us to rethink certain key concepts of theater and performance is suggested in Albee’s play The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? Even before the published script of the play overdetermined the direction of critical analysis by featuring, on the title page, the parenthetical phrase, not quite a subtitle, “Notes toward a Definition of Tragedy,” critics had begun to discuss the interplay of genres evoked in the title—tragedy, from the Greek word for goat, tragos, and pastoral comedy, evoked in the play’s subtitle: “Who Is Sylvia?” which appears to quote Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona. There is certainly no doubt that Albee is interested here, as he has been before, in the question of modern tragedy. Early in the play, a character says, “I hear a kind of … rushing sound, like a … wooooooosh! Or … wings, or something.” Martin, the protagonist, jokes: “It’s probably the Eumenides.” His more practical friend responds: “More like the dishwasher. There; it’s stopped.” “Then it probably wasn’t the Eumenides,” says Martin, “they don’t stop” (22). It is one of many references to actual tragedies, ancient and modern, in the play, as well as to elements of tragic structure, including a hero at the pinnacle of his life, poised for a fall. In Martin’s case this pinnacle is, like so much else in the play, literal as well as figurative, with the literal being insistently associated with animality. Twice in the play, Martin tells the story of his first encounter with Sylvia and describes driving up to the top of a hill. Both times his listeners interrupt to correct him: “crest” they say, meaning that that is the right term for the top of a hill (38). The second time the interruption is uncanny enough to make Martin ask, in bewilderment, “Who are you?” (38). The question has several answers: the one supplying the correct word is not just his well-spoken wife, it is also the playwright, aspiring to tragedy, and beyond that, the conventions of a dramatic genre in which disaster befalls the hero at the crest of his fortunes. The presence of the animal, however, destabilizes those conventions and subverts those intentions.

The Goat is the story of Martin and Stevie, a sophisticated, successful and happy Manhattan couple whose perfect life is shattered when Martin confesses to an unthinkable transgression, his love affair with the enchanting but unfortunately non-human Sylvia. In the play, Sylvia is initially experienced as a smell. This sensory challenge to the ocularocentric medium of theater acutely deploys Freud’s sensory etiology of civilization, his account of the derogation of the “lower senses”⁷ (touch and smell), and the privileging of sight in the human evolution from quadruped to biped, from rooting about in the dirt to scanning the skies. So incongruous is animal odor in the space of drama (and in the sanitized, deodorized dwelling of these classy New Yorkers), that it is almost immediately displaced, and Sylvia is quickly transformed into a preposterous joke. Those to whom Martin reveals the affair invariably respond, first, by failing what people in animal studies call “the laugh test”—that initial refusal to take the subject seriously at all. Martin’s friend Ross is sure he’s kidding when he shows him a photograph of the person he’s having an affair with, and Stevie just roars with laughter at his confession. Later, Martin’s relationship to Sylvia is firmly framed as perversion, complete with calls for therapy and support groups. Martin admits to having found such a group (online, of course!) and to having attended meetings and shared stories and twelve-step resolutions with other troubled animal “lovers.” All these reactions to Sylvia teeter on the edge of wild hilarity, and much has already been written about Albee’s astonishing feat in drawing genuine pity and fear from a subject that is referred to in the play, repeatedly and hilariously, as “goat-fucking.”

This carnivalesque dimension of the play’s rhetoric makes its concluding assault on the logic of tragedy all the more devastating. In the final moments of Albee’s play, Stevie comes on stage, dragging behind her the slaughtered and bloody body of Sylvia. It is as shocking a stage image as the ending of Sam Shepard’s masterpiece Buried Child (1978), when Tilden walks on stage holding the tiny, mud-covered corpse of the play’s title. Like Shepard’s image, this one uses literalization to exceed and expose the conventions of its putative and contested genre, modern tragedy. The actual buried child, like the actual slaughtered goat, poses a po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Publishers’ Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Animals and Performance
• 1 (De)Facing the Animals: Zooësis and Performance
• 2 Animal Rites: Performing Beyond the Human
• 3 Animal Geographies: Zooësis and the Space of Modern Drama
• 4 “AWK!”: Extremity, Animality, and the Aesthetic of Awkwardness in Tennessee Williams’s The Gnädiges Fräulein
• 5 Zoo Stories: “Boundary Work” in Theater History
• Animalizing Interlude: Zoöpolis
• 6 Becoming Rhinoceros: Therio-Theatricality as Problem and Promise in Western Drama
• 7 Bug Bytes: Insects, Information, and Interspecies Theatricality
• 8 The Silence of the Polar Bears: Performing (Climate) Change in the Theater of Species
• 9 Queering the Green Man, Reframing the Garden: Marina Zurkow’s Mesocosm (Northumberland, UK) and the Theater of Species
• 10 War Horses and Dead Tigers: Embattled Animals in a Theater of Species
• 11 Interspecies Diplomacy in Anthropocenic Waters: Performing an Ocean-Oriented Ontology
• Index