21/10/2024
Excerpt from the article
A Matter of Relationships: Dramatising, Staging and Planning Ecological Performances"
by Emanuele Regi from the University of Bologna.
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.../itinera/article/view/20811
"In this context, Maura Baiocchi, dancer, performer, and choreographer, has been at the center of the development of a new performative model. She has been creating environmental performances since 198833. In 2010, she coined the term ecoperformance, which is based on this principle of tension: «the assumption of energy interrelationship between all forces and forms of life (including performance) and postulates tension as the necessary condition of creativity»34. Therefore, ecoperformance works through a «porosity, and interactivity» of the body, capable of becoming «natural landscape, cityscape, light-, color- and soundscape which, in turn, become part of the body»35. In this sense, the theses of ecoperformance, conceived by Maura Baiocchi and Wolfgang Pannek, reform Schechner’s axioms to include all the elements that inhabit the environment and establish a strong relationship with eco-ethical and eco-ethics form. Firstly, ecoperformance consists of a reciprocal relationship between environment and performers: «Ecoperformance conceives environment and body as an inseparable dimension of life and performative creation»; «Environments are complex and interactive games between heterogeneous forces and forms»; «Ecoperformances can occur in any kind of environment - natural, urban and virtual»; «Ecoperformance conceptualizes itself as an environmental process and considers environmental interactions as performative»36. Not only is the environment a part of the performing process but it is an active entity because all the elements interact as a co-creator.
Another crucial aspect underlined by ecoperformance theses is the relationship of the performer’s body to the environment: «The body is an environment»; «Ecoperformers are receptive and active agents moving and acting with the environment in terms of intensity and transformation»; «Ecoperformance is inseparable from the eco-poetic and eco-ethical presence of the performer»37. Ecoperformance is strongly linked to a “poethic” and political framework in the creative process that includes the environment as an active presence rather than a screen or a scenography: «Ecopet[h]ic presence is always co-presence and motivated by perception of a (problematic) mutual immanence between environment and body»; «Consequently, ecoperformance should not be confused with self-aestheticizing poses, gestures, and movements in front of picturesque and passive backdrops»; «Ecoperformance is political because it generates and problematizes forms of life and coexistence of natural and cultural beings of the environment»38. These last theses help us to understand that ecoperformance and ecological performances are constitutively capable of embodying political issues, without characterizing them as a problem of dramaturgy, but 'simply' with the presence and mutual interactions together with the environment. In this sense ecoperformances perfectly embody all the ecological relations and make them part of the artistic process and performing result.
In conclusion, Ecodramaturgy and ecoperformance are not fixed categories, but an open methodological and practical framework that can be freely crossed by the creators and performers about the environment. The variety and the many possibilities of these approaches can relate to sustainability financial programs, as we will analyze considering two case studies."
