Paper short abstract:

Artists are turning to devising ecological performances that address questions of climate change by drawing our attention to the rapidly changing environment and profound feelings of loss. The sensibilities of nô theatre are sources of inspiration for contemporary ecological performance.

Paper long abstract:

Artists are turning to devising ecological performances that address questions of climate change, species loss and human futurabilty by drawing our attention to the rapidly changing environment and profound feelings of loss. The sensibilities of nô theatre - its insights into showing slippage between worlds, the presence of uncanniness and its essential 'nonlocality' - are sources of inspiration for contemporary ecological performance. For the philosopher Timothy Morton, nonlocality is a way of drawing threads between events, forms, and transformations and while he doesn't reference nô directly, dramaturgically, nonlocality is an apt description of how contemporary performance might relate to nô. The painful emptiness of nonlocality is an interiorizing gesture that speaks to the living in a time of loss and extinction. My paper will consider two contrasting cases, works by Kris Verdonck and Okada Toshiki, and explore how these artworks make visible the idea of nonlocality. The outcome, what we can learn from these nô-like performances or performances with nô sensibilities, accords with Morton's idea of ecognosis: 'like knowing, but more like letting be known. It is something like coexisting' (2016:5).

Reference cited: Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology, Columbia University Press, 2016.