Modes of Planetary Relationality: Embodied Imagination and Reflection in the Performance Dying Together/ Earth

Abstract

A planetary awareness is emerging amidst unprecedented times of climate emergency and environmental degradation. A planetary thinking shows that we cannot take for granted our human existence on earth, where planetary entanglements of both humans and non-humans are to be preserved if we want our planet to flourish. According to historian and postcolonial scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty, the matter is not how to create a sustainable world in which the role of non-human life is to assure extended durability of human life. But instead, how to create a planetary thinking in which habitability is the guiding principle that assures the existence of complex life, including human life. Planetary thinking prompts us to address the question of how to relate to other forms of life; therefore, the planetary is always thinking in and through relations. In this thesis, I intend to reflect on this emergent way of thinking, which I term planetary relationality, and to explore its potential in relation to the field of theatre and performance studies. I argue that the theatre allows for focusing more prominently on embodied ways of thinking and experiencing planetary relationality. To this end, I focus on the theatre performance Dying Together/ Earth (2019) by Dutch theatre maker Lotte van den Berg. This is a participatory performance that invites spectators to physically represent beings and things that were present in situations of collective death on earth. In order to show how planetary relationality takes shape in the performance, first, I draw on the ecological approach to theatre by scholar Carl Lavery to argue that theatre and performance can be considered as ecological practices, where spectators are encouraged to develop more interconnected and embodied ways of thinking thanks to the networked quality of the stage in which the human being is always part of a larger assemblage of objects, technologies, and processes. Secondly, for my analysis, I follow the enactive approach to spectatorship, a perspective that shifts the attention from what is represented on stage towards the relationship between what is staged and the modes of perceiving of spectators. To analyze such modes, I use theories of enactive perception to describe how spectators are positioned and addressed by this performance, and subsequently, how they are invited to engage with planetary relationality through acts of embodied imagination and reflection. At its broadest, my research aims to contribute to our understanding of ecological discourses and the practice of performance ecology through an enactive approach to spectatorship.