Performing Animality

Animals in Performance Practices

Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, L. Orozco, L. Orozco

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137373137
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Performing Animality provides theoretical and creative interventions into the presence of the animal and ideas of animality in performance. Animals have always played a part in human performance practices. Maintaining a crucial role in many communities' cultural traditions, animal-human encounters have been key in the development of performance. Similarly, performance including both living animals and/or representations of animals provides the context for encounters in which issues of power, human subjectivity and otherness are explored. Crucially, however, the inclusion of animals in performance also offers an opportunity to investigate ethical and moral assumptions about human and non-human animals. This book offers a historical and theoretical exploration of animal presence in performance by looking at the concept of animality and how it has developed in theatre and performance practices from the eighteenth century to today. Furthermore, it points to shifts in political, cultural, and ethical animal-human relations emerging within the context of animality and performance.

Part I

Setting the Stage

1

From Homo Performans to Interspecies Collaboration

Expanding the Concept of Performance to Include Animals

Laura Cull

As Martin Puchner has noted, ‘our understanding of the human depends on our conceptions of [nonhuman] animals’ (2007, p. 21). But more than this, humans have long since relied upon the animal in order to produce ideas around the exceptionalism of their own species. In this respect, Puchner draws on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the ‘anthropological machine’ to address

the repeated, almost automatic act of drawing the distinction between the human and the animal, an act through which the two categories are produced. Some animals are separated out from all the others and given a special name, ‘human’, which is then placed in opposition to a second category, defined by the exclusion from the human realm: ‘animal’. (2007, p. 23)

In this way, the history of Western thought is replete with what Frans de Waal calls ‘anthropodenial’: ‘the a priori rejection of shared characteristics between humans and animals when in fact they may exist’ (2001, p. 69). Suffering from anthropodenial, philosophers and scientists have claimed and defended the exceptional status of the human animal with reference to a variety of different and purportedly unique characteristics. Most common perhaps, are the arguments that the fundamental ontological distinction between human and non-human rests on, firstly, the possession of language, or secondly, on the capacity for a special kind of thought: variously described as (self) consciousness, reason or representational thought.

Focusing for now on the matter of language, Puchner affirms that ‘the strict denial that animals might possess a language or different languages has been a chief ingredient of philosophical humanism, of the philosophical editions of the anthropological machine since Aristotle’ (2007, p. 28). However, he also notes how easily the machine might be halted, were we but to expand ‘the notion of language to include embodied communication’ – which is clearly as important (if not more important) a part of how humans as well as nonhumans relate to one another as signifying language (2007, p. 28). In other words, human exceptionalism is often based on the argument that animals do not have language, but such claims are based on a reductive definition of language that not only excludes the animal in advance, but also neglects to attend to other dimensions of human language. In contrast, Puchner argues, an expanded concept of language ‘opens up a domain somewhere between mimesis and gesture. Once we admit such a domain, we can speak of different types of expressive systems that do not rely on a binary logic that attributes the distinction between human and animal to a lack, in animals, of language as such’ (2007, p. 28).

Given this argument about language, this essay is concerned with the idea of a correlative expansion of the concept of performance. Could it be that – as part of developing a more animal-oriented Performance Studies (or, research at the intersection of Animal and Performance Studies) – we also need to rethink dominant concepts of performance along similar lines? The first part of the chapter deals with this question with respect to performance scholarship; the second addresses it in relation to two specific examples of contemporary performance practice.

Expansion in Scholarship: From Schechner to Animal Performance Studies

From one perspective, it could be argued that many concepts of performance are already more potentially inclusive of the animal than the reductive definition of language that Puchner cites above. After all, as Una Chaudhuri has claimed, many of the core concerns and values of Animal Studies are already shared by Performance Studies, such as ‘embodiment, presence, process, event [and] force’ (2009, p. 521). On this basis, Chaudhuri designates a particular role for performance (as research method and outcome) to generate important responses to ‘the question of the animal’ alongside those of science, philosophy and so forth, not least on account of performance’s commitment to exploring non-verbal modes of relation. As Chaudhuri puts it, ‘If language is indeed a barrier [to understanding between the species], then the quest for a deeper, richer mode of understanding the animality we share with nonhumans might logically lead one to the embodied arts of performance’ (2009, p. 521).

However, there are still those commentators who define performance in strictly human terms. ‘True’ performance is particularly associated with notions of self-consciousness, reflexivity and intention such that it is often assumed that ‘one must intend to perform in order to be considered a performer in the strictest sense’ (Scott, 2009, p. 49). For example, Richard Schechner’s collaborator, Victor Turner, famously defined the human as homo performans, going on to clarify that performance is essential to the nature of the human ‘not in the sense … that a circus animal may be a performing animal, but in the sense that man is a self-performing animal … in performing he reveals himself to himself’ (1986, p. 81). Correlatively, John Simons argues that whereas ‘animals do not perform being animals … It is performance that defines and enables us, to some extent and on some occasions, to escape the seemingly overwhelming deterministic influences of history … A human, then, is an animal that can perform’ (Simons, 2002, p. 9). In turn, to give one final example, Shelley R. Scott proposes that ‘[a] distinction not up for debate is that humans can pretend to be others while animals cannot. A possum can play dead, but it cannot take on the character of a raccoon’ (2009, p. 49). In this way, I would suggest that the concept of art, in general, and performance in particular, continue to be called upon to shore up human exceptionalism in ways that an animal-oriented Performance Studies – or perhaps what we might simply call ‘Animal Performance Studies’ – may wish to contest.

One possible way for Animal Performance Studies scholars to respond to this reductive account of performance, and hence the exclusion of the animal from the category of performance proper, is to note the extent to which animals in fact do possess the characteristics that are said to be essential to performance: the capacity for self-conscious behaviour, reflexivity and intention. To give an early example, we can see precisely this move at work in Schechner’s Performance Theory (1977), which makes the then (and perhaps still) radical step of including the activities of primates – specifically wild chimpanzees – within his ‘broad spectrum’ account of performance. Consolidated and reiterated in the subsequent editions of his introductory textbook, Schechner’s argument – which forms the basis for the identity of Performance Studies as a discipline – is that ‘performance must be construed as a “broad spectrum” or “continuum” of human actions ranging from ritual, play, sports, popular entertainments, the performing arts (theater, dance, music), and everyday life performances to the enactment of social, professional, gender, race, and class roles, and on to healing (from shamanism to surgery), the media, and the internet’. In this way, Schechner conceives Performance Studies as a discipline that expands on the narrow, Eurocentric concept of performance hitherto espoused by the dominant model of Theatre Studies, in favour of studying ‘what people do in the activity of their doing it’ and on what that doing does to those involved in it and in relation to its context (Schechner, 2002, pp. 1–2).

And yet, in his earlier book Performance Theory, this focus on ‘people’ and ‘human actions’ is by no means determined; on the contrary, Schechner gestures towards a radical inclusion of animal actions in the broad spectrum, in a manner that might be understood to pre-empt one potential direction for Animal Performance Studies as it develops in the future. For instance, in the very opening of the text, he announces that ‘performance is an inclusive term. Theater is only one node on a continuum that reaches from the ritualizations of animals (including humans) through performance in everyday life’ (2003, p. xvii). Later in the book, Schechner also says that he detects ‘no break between animal and human behaviour’ and, just as he asserts a continuum model of performance, he also thinks in terms of a ‘continuum of expanding consciousness’ (2003, p. 208). In other words, there can be no discrete identity for the human (which excludes all non-humans) based on the possession of consciousness; rather consciousness is possessed to varying extents by all animals, making the difference between them a matter of degree rather than kind.

In particular, Schechner insists that the great apes – chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans – can be seen as engaging in performance without falling into what he calls ‘the error of anthropomorphism’ (2003, p. 96). To establish these human-like tendencies within primate behaviour, Schechner turns to an example of a wild ‘chimp performance’ described by the famous British primatologist, Jane Goodall. The performance is created by a male chimpanzee living in Tanzania, whom Goodall referred to as ‘Mike’. As Goodall describes (in great detail, as one might do in a close reading of human theatre), Mike’s performance begins as he picks up two empty kerosene cans from outside Goodall’s tent, in view of another group of male chimps. Significantly, as Schechner notes, although Mike improvises using objects that were only made available to him by the presence of humans, he was neither a tamed nor trained animal:

Armed with his two cans, Mike continued to stare toward the other males. After a few minutes he began to rock from side to side. At first the movement was almost imperceptible, but Hugo and I were watching him closely. Gradually he rocked more vigorously, his hair slowly began to stand erect, and then softly at first, he started a series of pant-hoots. (Goodall cited in Schechner, 2003, p. 237)

According to Goodall, the chimp then began ‘hitting the two cans’ together and hooting increasingly loudly as he started to charge towards the audience of other males, who fled to relocate elsewhere. This action is repeated by Mike a number of times, before culminating in an approach to the then alpha male of the group (‘Goliath’), whom Mike would go on to replace not long after (2003, p. 237).

As Schechner acknowledges, this event could easily be interpreted as nothing more than an instinctual challenge to the chimps’ social hierarchy, an action ultimately motivated by evolutionary impulses to achieve the alpha male status and the privileges, sexual and otherwise, assigned to it. However, Schechner argues that what is significant about Mike’s performance (and he is unequivocal in naming it as such), is that his challenge to another chimp’s rank ‘came not as a direct attack or life-and-death fight but wrapped in ritual, played out as a theatrical event. Just as “making fun” can be an indirect attack on the authorities [in human performance], so Mike’s charge, driving the kerosene cans ahead of him, was a rehearsed, yet still indirect attack on Goliath’s dominant rank’ (2003, p. 238). Schechner suggests that Mike’s charges at the lower-ranking males could be analysed as rehearsal: ‘Both “fun” and “rehearsal” seem to be part of the performance sequences of the great apes … The apes may not rehearse [in a conventional human sense], but they do practice and improve their performances through repetition’ (2003, p. 237). But then crucially, just as he acknowledges that chimps are not pre-human, Schechner also insists that:

Chimp performance is not a prototype of human performance, but a parallel. As such it is even more interesting than as a prototype. A prototype tells us nothing more than that human performance has antecedents; a parallel means that another species, developing its own track, is engaged in deliberate, conscious, chosen activity that can best be described as “performing” (2003, pp. 97–8).

So if chimps can perform, Schechner concludes that ‘so-called “aesthetics” is not the monopoly of humans’ (2003, p. 98).

On one level, Animal Performance Studies scholars might retrospectively see such work as a step in the right direction, a step that relates to ongoing debates surrounding the extension of human rights to primates, which has been supported by some animal rights activists like Peter Singer (Singer, 1999, n.p.). But on another level, we might question whether such a gesture goes far enough – in the first instance, simply, because it fails to include other animals, reintroducing a kind of exceptionalism albeit with a slightly expanded population, reactivating the anthropological machine but drawing a line now between primates and non-primates. For instance, Schechner ultimately concludes that ‘Performance probably belongs only to a few primates, including humans … Humans do consciously, by choice, what lower animals do automatically; the displaying peacock is not “self-conscious” in the way an adolescent male human is on Saturday night’ (2003, p. 98).

But secondly, I would argue that going down the line of trying to prove that animals do in fact share specific cognitive capabilities with humans is limited because it fails to prompt a rethinking of the category of performance to the same degree as Puchner outlines with respect to language. It leaves a human-centred definition of performance – as ‘deliberate, conscious, chosen activity’ – intact and applies that concept only to those animals that are perceived to be most like ‘us’.

So what is the alternative? How can research at the intersection of Animal Studies and Performance Studies take more radically inclusive steps in this regard? Firstly, I would suggest that we abandon those more reductive definitions of performance in favour of those that affirm a more expanded view of what counts as ‘conscious behaviour’, ‘pretence’, ‘intention’ and so forth. With regard to the first of these, this could involve exploring the idea that there are different levels of consciousness exhibited by different animals including humans. But it could also go further by acknowledging the possibility that animals might be differently conscious from each other (and indeed, from themselves) in a qualitative sense (without feeling the need to structure such differences into a hierarchy). Correlatively, it could be that what is required is to abandon altogether our need to approach animals with a predetermined definition of performance already in hand, in favour of allowing performance to remain open to perpetual mutation and reconceptualization in the face of our encounters with animals.

Secondly, I would like to propose that this radical inclusivity might also demand that we genuinely follow through on an expanded definition of performance in terms of both the types of behaviour, activities and events that we study in the field of Animal Performance Studies and how we study them. That is, to expand the concept of performance to include animals need not just, or not only, mean analysing animal behaviour, activities and events (in the wild or elsewhere, with or without interactions with humans) ‘as’ performance. Rather, or additionally, the particular value of performance might lie in its capacity to produce new research methods to those already established in Animal Studies. The emphasis here would be on performance as a lived, embodied process of coming into contact with the ways in which animals are differently conscious from themselves and one another, regardless of whether or not it culminates in the production of ‘performances’ for a human audience. This is ‘animal performance as research’, then, where practitioners’ insights into the animals they work with or alongside might produce a counter-knowledge to the dominant scientific accounts of animal life (recalling Chaudhuri’s suggestion above). Or better, perhaps, such uses of performance may not be geared towards the production of knowledge about animals at all, so much as an embodied proximity to animals’ own ways of thinking and performing that remains resistant to any attempted paraphrase into discourse. ‘It is when we don’t understand and have to leave behind our certainties that we can gain the greatest insights’ (Bowie, 2007, p. 11). As we shall see, such a move need not be seen as a mere retreat to notions of ineffability and mystery so much as a rethinking of performance as a felt ‘knowledge of “unknowing”’ (Mullarkey, 2009, p. 211) in relation to animal life as that which perpetually resists ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Setting the Stage
• Part II Bulls, Dogs, Pigs, Bears and Horses: Animals in Performance
• Part III ‘Performing’ Animals and ‘Theatres of Species’
• Part IV Looking at/Loving with animals
• Index