Performance on Behalf of the Environment ed. by Richard D. Besel and Jnan A. Blau. Lanham (review)

Performance on Behalf of the Environment is a collection of essays that represents a timely interdisciplinary addition to the growing body of scholarship on performance and ecology. The book has its origins in communications studies, with several of the essays stemming from a panel on environmental performance at the 2010 National Communication Association Convention. As such, the methodological approaches adopted by many of the authors provocatively intersect the fields of rhetoric, communications studies, performance studies, and theatre studies. As a whole, the book provides an interdisciplinary cross-pollination that may help shape and direct future scholarship on ecology and performance, as well as future environmentally oriented theatre and performance work.

The book is organized in three sections. The first section, “Performers and Audiences,” primarily has contributions from communications studies scholars and focuses on performer/audience interactions. The range of topics here includes a chapter by David Terry and Anne Marie Todd that considers the formation of community through the coincident performance of the San José Bike Party, and an essay by Alison Bodkin looking at the role of humor in environmental messaging. A strength of this opening section—for theatre scholars, perhaps, in particular—is the use of the tools of rhetorical theory to try to draw some conclusions about the efficacy of political and environmental performances vis-à-vis their audiences. For example, in his chapter on animal liberation activism, Jason Del Gandio argues that by practicing “radical immediacy: i.e., the immediate evocation of one’s desired world” (42), the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front (two groups often accused of “ecoterrorism” because their tactics include destroying the property of businesses they see as harmful to animals or the environment) create “ruptures” in the assumptions we take for granted. While the messages of these groups may be subject to debate, their embodied enactment of the world as they wish it to be has the desired effect, he argues, of awakening attention to the radical “other” side of practices that dominant culture takes for granted.

The communicative effect of embodied performance is also the subject of Richard Besel’s “Embodied Perspective by Incongruity: Environmental Critique in an Age of Everyday Performance.” Besel looks at the everyday performance of Daniel Suelo, a self-described “vaga-bum” who began living without money in the fall of 2000 as both a personal life-choice and performative critique of capitalist consumption and waste. Besel’s analysis makes productive use of Kenneth Burke’s concept of perspective by incongruity to explain why Suelo’s embodiment of an alternative lifestyle might have potency for audiences. Besel reads Suelo’s everyday performance of moneylessness as a tactic that violates hegemonic assumptions and thereby provokes perspective by incongruity. In his analysis, Besel traces both the efficacy of that tactic (insofar as it may lead an audience to question deeply held pieties) and its shortfalls (insofar as its divisiveness can alienate potential audiences and therefore fail to persuade). His chapter thus uses this case study to raise important and still unanswered questions about the most effective means for communicating environmental messages through performance.

The second section, “Places and Spaces,” groups together essays that pay attention to the situatedness of a variety of (openly defined) environmental performances, with an eye toward teasing out how such performances shape and challenge our relationship to our surroundings. Barbara Willard opens this section with a chapter that looks at the “performance of reinhabitation” effected by urban garden spaces in Chicago, which have come to have important community-building functions in formerly blighted neighborhoods (93). Thinking about the relation of people to place in a different key, in his chapter on ecotourism in Peru, Jnan Blau draws on personal narrative and performance theory to explore the complicated terrain of ecotourism as an experience, a practice, and a performance. The ruminative nature of Blau’s essay is echoed by Julia Handschuh’s “’On Finding Ways of Being’: Kinesthetic Empathy in...