Anthropocene Movement

 

 

Introduction

Since a couple of years the theatre stage changed: Or rather, the things being presented there changed.  Suddenly the stage does not portray people anymore, their quarrels, love or despair, it is not about stories. Or it is, but in a strange way: Actors, performers and dancers, it seems, lost their place on centre stage; they step back, fade into the background or else don’t appear on stage at all! Instead, a donkey shows up. A tree started to talk. Stones rolled around, a group of huge moles performed a concert and the glitter of a trillion plastic shreds created every-new images. The stage does not belong to the human alone.

All that was unseen, but somewhere there, in the background, underneath the stage, or high above fluttered down and occupied the stage; as the fly sitting in the heavy curtain now being in the spotlight. What does that mean for the stage? How to understand performances that do not deal with plot, not with emotions, not with action even, but - apparently - just with bodies in motion? With bodies, furthermore, that are not human, but animal, vegetal, mineral? And most important: What world does the stage depict? What strange time is this, where animals walk the stage while Sahara-sands cloud the summer-sky of Berlin and the Siberian Permafrost thaws? Climatologists, geologists but also researchers from the humanities and the well-informed public will have an answer: The world didn’t change, but the times did. Why? Because we’re in the Anthropocene now!
 

The age of mankind. The geological epoch that is more than just a name: It signifies the moment when mankind’s destructive force became so powerful that its impact on the planet earth will be recognizable in the distant future. The concept originated in the earth-system science, a research area that studies the effects of interrelated biogeochemical cycles: The moving of the tectonic plates, the cycle of water in the seas, the freshwater and rain, the output and the intake of chemical compounds. The Anthropocene represents a shift in the quality of those cycles, brought about by humankind. Those changes are usually expressed by the raise in C02 in the atmosphere, a drastic decline in biodiversity, the change of the biogeochemical cycles and the enormous transformation of land; all are directly connected to the history of industrial capitalism: with the global movement of natural resources, goods, waste and people that was made possible by the steam engine, the 'prime mover'!

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The historical reasons for the 'Anthropocene' as well as and its characteristics as presented by earth-system-science employ notions of movement. Tracing and describing historical and current patterns of (non-)human movement from a global(ized) perspective helps to understand the anthropocene not only as a scientific concept but as the accumulated stories of social, economic and political movement in and with nature around the globe.

 

But the anthropocene is not only is a concept to describe in what ways capitalist production and consumption continues to destroy the world we are living in; the Anthropocene is for many scholars and activists a paradigm that allows for a different way of thinking about humanity, nature and its relation. If the Anthropocene is the ‚age‘ in which humanity works as a ‚earth-like force‘, and inscribes itself in the seemingly unchangeable face of the planet, the notion of a stable ‚nature‘ totally distinct from (human) culture seems to be untenable. Nature and culture, human and non-human actors, animals and the animal called ‚human‘ interact, collaborate and evolve within and throughout each other. As the Anthropocene unfolds more and more connections and interrelations between so-called ‚culture‘ (human) and ‚nature‘ (animals, plants, non-living nature) become apparent. To retrace and retell about the ways how human and non-human relate and interact, means to track not human or natural action, but movement: The physical and also metaphorical ways in which bodies relate to each other in space and time by constantly co-creating the worlds, they are inhabiting. As every human action starts with, ends and is manifested in and as movement, so does  the non-human. In describing the interrelatedness of non-human and human movement gives account to the creation of a common anthropocene habitat.

 

Finally, the anthropocene is a topic within the arts, be it theatre, visual arts, performance, literature or dance. Here, it does not only gains artistic representation that may differ from the scientific discourse. The aesthetic field opens possibilities of new ways of looking, listening, feeling, experiencing and telling stories about the earth, humanity or the non-human others. In writing about artistic movement in the anthropocene, I want to describe aesthetic forms of movement and human/non-human interactions. Also, I want to argue for the importance of theatre, the arts and the aesthetic for our perception of human/non-human relations in the anthropocene.

This blog is a logbook of a loose research on the relation between the ‚anthropocene‘ - the suggested name for the recent epoch in earth history, that acknowledges the stratigraphic effect of humanity - and (artistic) movement. In the following posts I want to write, think and discuss in what ways the anthropocene and movement are interlinked. How can we rethink the history of the anthropocene through the lense of movement, be it the movement of melting ice, of Jumbo jets or the earth crust itself? How does movement constitute the spaces we inhabit and share with other beings? How do we perceive and experience movement - be it our own or the movement of plants, of animals, of minerals or the elements? What strategies finally do artists employ to emphasize, question or criticize the relation of bodies, space and movement on stage? And how does the stage relate to what is going on outside, to the space or rather: the time we’re in?
The following posts will thus in one way or another be connected to the above-mentioned intersections of the anthropocene and movement: the historical and present interconnectedness of the movement and the anthropocene; the interrelatedness of human and non-human movement and finally artistic notions of (non-human) movement. The posts do not follow any distinct order. They do not build on each other. They may complement each other, they may also contradict in some cases. They may venture into academic discourse or pop culture. They represent an ongoing process, partly research into the anthropocene itself, partly research into a yet different plain of movement: the movement of writing.