Animalizing Performance, Becoming-Theatre: Inside Zooesis with The Animal Project at NYU

When we "become-animal," what do animals become?

Synopsis

In summer 2004, three theatre collaborators—a director, a playwright, and a critic-dramaturg—began a new collaboration, "The Animal Project," conceived as an exploratory encounter between theatre and the emerging field of Critical Animal Studies. The work was guided especially by four texts: the chapter "Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible . . . ," in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia; the recently published The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, by Donna Haraway; John Berger's seminal essay "Why Look at Animals?" in his About Looking; and Nobel Prize–winning novelist J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals.

Initial readings and discussions were followed by a two-week summer workshop with eight actors, during which the Deleuzian idea of "becoming-animal" was explored through imagery and improvisation. The playwright drew from the work of these early stages to produce the first draft of a new play, Fox Hollow, or: How I Got That Story. The project then moved into development, soon including rehearsals as well as design and production meetings. Exploration of the original ideas and new ones continued through readings, film screenings, field trips, guest lectures, and workshops. The play was staged in the Linhart Theater in New York City and ran 14–23 April 2005.

Prologue

The team initiating The Animal Project consisted of Fritz Ertl (director), Steven Drukman (playwright), and Una Chaudhuri (dramaturg). Early in the project this team was joined by assistant directors Josh Hogland and Laura Shiffrin, and co-dramaturg Shonni Enelow, all undergraduates in the Department of Drama at New York University. Ertl, Drukman, and Chaudhuri had previously collaborated on "The Resistance Project," exploring the toll taken by globalized consumer capitalism on the bodies, minds, and imaginations of young Americans. Taking place in New York City in the months following 11 September 2001, that project had asked how college-age Americans think about their relationship to American cultural imperialism and how they feel about America's role in various international arenas. The play confronted the frustration attendant on trying to "resist" (in)America, on trying to counter an infinitely flexible, insidiously pacifying system and its seductive "weapons of mass distraction" (this potent punning phrase appeared in the play long before it became ubiquitous in public culture). Work on The Resistance Project resulted in a play, Youth in Asia, by Steven Drukman, directed by Fritz Ertl, dramaturged by Una Chaudhuri, and performed on the Mainstage of NYU's Drama Department in April 2002.

Setting

The Animal Project was structured as a credit-bearing conservatory course in the Playwrights Horizons Theater School, a training program of the Department of Drama at NYU. Twelve students took the course for credit, participating as actors or as part of the creative team. In addition there were two professional designers, David Szlasa (lighting) and Marc Gwinn (sound), and a choreographer, Jenny Koons. The course met six hours a day, three days a week, adding weekend rehearsals as time went on. The semiconservatory schedule, along with the university setting, helped to define the project as both practical and academic: a research project that would use performance as well as traditional research methodologies to explore its subject. Reading and homework assignments were frequent, and proved essential to our explorations of the dense theoretical material. Our aim was not only to discover what Animal Studies had to offer theatre, but equally what theatre practice might have to offer to Animal Studies. Our central research question emerged in the course of the project: What kind of theatricality and performance style could capture and convey the kind of reality claimed by Deleuze and Guattari when they write, "There is a reality to becoming-animal, even though one does not in reality become an animal" (273).

To our knowledge, The Animal Project was the first self-conscious...