Performing Ice ed. by Carolyn Philpott et al. (review)
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How does ice perform? How does ice impact us as humans, and how do we impact ice? These are the core questions tackled in this first essay collection in Palgrave's Performing Landscapes series, edited by Australian academics Carolyn Philpott, Elizabeth Leane, and Matt Delbridge. Examining "the myriad ways in which ice and humans have performed with and alongside each other over the last few centuries, so as to better understand our entangled futures" (2), Performing Ice focuses on the cryoscapes of the Arctic and the Antarctic, which have assumed a special ecological urgency during the Anthropocene. The volume carefully differentiates these two polar regions in terms of their geography, politics, cultures, and histories of human habitation. In a novel move, the contributions displace the existing scholarly emphasis on the Arctic to foreground Antarctica, with most authors hailing from the southern hemisphere and having lived in the Antarctic Gateway cities of Hobart, Australia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. The editors' wide-ranging and informative introduction to contexts, histories, and theories of performing ice locates the utility of a performance studies perspective in ice's transformative, liminal, resistant, contingent, and ephemeral aspects—which, they argue, form an analogy for performance itself. In the following nine essays, established and emerging commentators across a range of disciplines ponder these intersections, moving from consciously aesthetic experiments, to cultural and activist performance, and to performances of sovereignty, politics, and everyday life.
The first trio of essays explores literal and figurative engagements with icescapes in the performing [End Page 256] arts. Hanne Nielsen presents eloquent close readings of two poignant and complex plays, Manfred Karge's Die Eroberung des Südpols [Conquest of the South Pole] (1985) and Patricia Cornelius's Do Not Go Gentle … (2010), which evoke "Antarctica" metaphorically. The characters' reenactments of heroicera attempts on the South Pole offer meaningful frameworks for a group of unemployed men in a coal mining town and the elderly and/or mentally ill residents of a nursing home, respectively, restoring dignity to everyday, forgotten "heroes" and their struggles. Douglas Quin diverges from the metaphorical to privilege "a direct bodily-kinesthetic engagement with the Antarctic landscape itself" (84), profiling four dance and performance artists (Christina Evans, Shakti Avattar León, and the performance duo VestAndPage) who have made work with and on Antarctic ice. His well-contextualized case studies probe the artists' visceral, tactile, and empathic relations with the environment, while creating space for appreciating how the ice itself operates as a nonhuman actor. Philpott's essay on polar-related popular music introduces us to several works by US hip-hop artist, composer, writer, and educator Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid). Philpott analyzes how Miller's combination of musical motifs and sounds recorded during his polar fieldwork generates innovative pieces that encourage large audiences to connect emotionally with environmental issues impacting the polar regions.
The next batch of essays is concerned with social and cultural performances. Mike Pearson chronicles the adventures of Thomas Bagshawe and Maxime Lester, two members of the grandly named but generally forgotten British Imperial Antarctic Expedition, who constituted the smallest expedition to overwinter in Antarctica during 1921–22. Pearson interprets their sojourn as a form of durational or endurance performance art, involving attention to survival, routine, time, and the improvisatory repurposing of a limited repertoire of material things. He further suggests that such a perspective might prompt us to reflect critically, in turn, on the idea of solo male endurance artists as "heroic," and to view their works as less individualistic and more entangled with the material environment. Pearson's use of avant-garde performance theory to reread historical events finds affinity with Riku Roihankorpi's essay, which uses Artaudian ethics to reevaluate the contemporary significance of the Great Finnish Famine of 1695–97. The theme of endurance art likewise resurfaces in Tace Kelly and Kit Wise's chapter on ice- and cold-water swimmers. Following a fascinating cross-cultural history of these risky, sublime immersions, the authors examine present...
