“The Weather Changes”
Una Chaudhuri
For the first time in human history, the weather is about us. So now, when the weather changes, shouldn’t we? Aren’t we? Haven’t we already? What is it like to be the climate change generation—the ones who have to admit that it’s happening now, not later, and it’s happening to us, not just to others elsewhere? What emotions—beyond paralyzing guilt and despair—, and what genres—besides slide-shows and documentaries—speak to this ecological reality?
This project, like others we’ve worked on previously, unfolded as a “research theatre” process that began with a couple of texts, and a question.
The question was: how might current theories of biology and ecology be brought into the time and space of live performance? How might the theatre contribute to the recognition that Homo sapiens is one species among many, and one that is in need of new ideas and new lifeways in the face of catastrophic climate change?
The texts were a novel—An Incident in the Life of a Landscape Painter, by Argentine author Cesar Aira—and a brief theoretical essay, entitled “Queer Ecology,” by Timothy Morton, author of a recent and important ecocritical book, Ecology Without Nature. (Other texts that influenced our thinking as the process went on were: No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, by Lee Edelman; A Natural History of Sex: The Ecology and Evolution of Mating Behavior, by Adrian Forsyth; and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, by Daniel Dennett).
Aira’s novel tells the story of a landscape painter who is struck by lightning and plunged into a state of agonizing insight. Continuing to record the landscapes around him in spite of his debilitating condition, he achieves a kind of fantastic literalization of the visionary natural history of his teacher, Alexander Von Humboldt.
The result is something like living out a new relationship to nature: in effect, to becoming landscape. This furious “becoming” entails a violent merging of the artist’s body with the artwork and its subject, a material fusing—on the molecular level—that also reminded us of Artaud’s dream of a life-filled theatre.
Morton’s essay links the anti-essentialist, performative impulse of queer theory to an emergent anti-essentialist, fully relational yet non-systematic ecology, based on growing acknowledgment of the profound anti-essentialism of Darwinian evolutionary theory. In this view, evolution is neither linear, nor progressive, nor purposive. Rather, it is digressive and transgressive. Morton describes this “queer ecology” as one where boundaries are “blurr[ed] and confound[ed] at practically any level: between species, between the living and the nonliving, between organism and environment."
In combination with Donna Haraway’s theorization of Homo sapiens as a “companion species,” queer ecology offers an alternative to the environmental tradition based on capital-N Nature, “out-there” Nature, and to its synoptic visions and holistic fantasies. In place of the pristine wilderness and sacred “biotic community” of that tradition, queer ecology imagines a “coming collectivity,” ever emergent and ever evanescent.
Carla and Lewis is imagined both as a play and as an algorithm for producing a theatrical landscape hospitable to versions of this coming collectivity. We want to use the insights and marvels and conventions and tropes of postmodern theater to push towards something new. All the elements of theatre are invited to or pushed to partake in evolutionary logic: time, space, objects, persons, events, and gestures adopt a theatrical version of descent with modification: repetition and revision.
The resulting landscape—ever emergent and ever evanescent—feels like the right setting for the story we want to tell. Like Aira’s, ours is also a story of furious becomings, unique intimacies, sudden shifts, endless accumulations.
Carla and Lewis borrows its central figure for the contemporary discourse on ecological catastrophe from a classic of queer theory: Eve Sedgewick’s Epistemology of the Closet. The skeletons in the closet now are no longer linked to sexual identity but to species identity. The Climate Change Closet is stuffed with the denials and anxieties of a culture that has been at war with the non-human world for centuries.
We can see now that Artaud sensed its presence, and tried to resist its epistemologies: “All our ideas about life must be revised in a period when nothing any longer adheres to life; it is this painful cleavage which is responsible for the revenge of things.” Artaud seems to echo the old man in Ibsen’s visionary proto-ecodrama, The Wild Duck, whose explanation for tragic loss is “The woods take revenge!”
In Carla and Lewis, the mud of Bangladesh takes revenge, and its action is no longer operating at a distance. Just as contemporary artists seek actual encounters and meaningful proximities, and just as the forces of global capital compel transnational flows of images, things, and substances, climate change takes its revenge—or makes its points—in person, face to face, body with bodies.
Carla and Lewis is an attempt to link the resources of live performance—the shared experience of living bodies inhabiting the same time and space—to the pervasive, intrusive, and above all intimate modalities of ecology understood in all its queerness.
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