Nature Performed: Environment, Culture and Performance, and: Performing Nature: Explorations in Ecology and the Arts (review)

"Performance" and "nature" are two terms that, in the Western tradition at least, are not easily yoked together. The former encapsulates the essence of what it is to be human in the world, in opposition to the latter, which, ostensibly, is there despite (or in spite of) what we do. But this notion of nature as the passive scenery against which we play out our dramas—or upon which we project cultural and social meanings—is precisely what is challenged by these two collections of essays, both of which grew out of the interdisciplinary conference and arts festival, "Between Nature," held at Lancaster University in 2000. Conceived as "companion volumes," the books explore how performance can illuminate our understanding of the relationship between humans and the nonhuman environment. Nature Performed: Environment, Culture and Performance is aimed primarily at a social science audience, Performing Nature: Explorations in Ecology and the Arts, at a performance studies readership.

The essays in Nature Performed seek to expand the way we understand nature by recasting the relationship between the human and nonhuman world in terms of dynamic interactions; "performance" in this volume is applied both to the activity of humans as they shape, map, describe, categorize, comprehend, and interact with the nonhuman environment and to the nonhuman actors that respond to and/or resist those human activities. In contrast to a long tradition of Western conceptualizations of nature as the background to human culture and activity and as an object to be used and exploited or protected and conserved, the chapters in this volume shed light on the various ways nature and culture are co-produced, dynamic, and relational. The argument of the book, broadly stated, is that it is the "concept of a nature unperformed, one which simply endures as an object, which is problematic and needs explaining" (4).

The collection of essays is grouped into four sections. The first section, "Making Worlds," contains three essays that consider how performed action connects us to, and thereby enables us to create, the natural world. The chapters in the second section, "Living Here," address the ways in which individuals and communities enact and perform a responsibility to their cultural and natural environments. The third section, "Embodying Abstraction," investigates how knowledge of the material environment is not only produced through performance—through human interaction with and upon the natural world—but also constitutes a performance in and of itself. Here, contributors call attention to the performance of fundamental knowledge-gathering practices such as observing, classifying, mapping, measuring, and data recording to make the point that the natural world only comes into being as a classifiable and knowable other through our dynamic interactions with it. The final section, "Unsettling Life," is comprised of essays that will likely fall more squarely in the comfort zone of theatre and performance studies scholars: the subjects here include the work of artist John Lyall, the performance/installation art of PLATFORM, and Hannah Arendt's taxonomy of human activity.

Unfortunately, many of the essays in this volume will likely challenge the patience of the average performance studies scholar because the writing tends, in the aggregate, to the overuse of both social science jargon and the passive voice, and many of the essays seem more interested in rehearsing sources or describing phenomena than in staking out new claims. Moreover—and this is the most serious criticism of the volume—in many cases it is unclear what importing the term "performance" into what is otherwise a sociological or geographical analysis helps to achieve: the terms "performance" and "performativity" here are unmoored signifiers that can be applied conceptually to any "relational" or "dynamic" interaction between any two (human or nonhuman) entities. The lack of rigor with which many of these social scientists bat around...