Issue #3 - Peter Petkovsek

Promise

Abstract 

Promise is a performed improvisational movement exercise representing one scene within a larger workshop showcase performance entitled Asul Asul / Nick of Time, presented in 2023 in Seoul, South Korea. The research is concerned with ways of performing concepts of Indigenous cosmovisions and theories of new animism on a Global North stage, with the aim of confronting the climate crisis on an individual and community level through an ‘ecological and ethical re-situating’ (Plumwood). The article discusses how the applications of the essentially unspoken rules of cosmovision and new animism were applied in Promise and briefly explores how they merged with Western approaches to acting, movement (Chekhov, Lecoq) and imagination (Bachelard).  

Article 

Animism can be defined as “the understanding that the world is a community of persons, most of whom are not human, but all of whom are related, and all of whom deserve respect” [1]. It is increasingly (re)emerging in Western scholarship (Latour, Bird-David, Harvey, Ingold, Conty etc.) in response to the split between subject and object, human and nature, mind and body, of traditional occidental thought. These entrenched binaries lead to environmental catastrophes, such as the climate crisis we are facing today [2]. New animism1 therefore has two main tasks: “the first is to re-situate the human in ecological terms, and the second is to re-situate the nonhuman in ethical terms” [3]. It derives from traditionally animistic Indigenous worldviews. In Amerindian Indigenous cultures these are called cosmovisions, of which a primary characteristic is “the intersubjective communication with non-human animals, plants, water, inorganic matter, such as rocks and crystals, celestial bodies, and even meteorological phenomena such as clouds and lightning” [4], all considered as kin to humans.  

The environment is understood in cosmovision and new animism very differently to the dangerous and othered ‘wild’ of occidental thought. In animism, the world around us is devoted to mutuality, and there are rules, ethical and practical, about how to relate to it. Rather than seen as mute matter, it is life-giving, profuse with feeling, like kin to us, includes and needs man as a part of it, requires gratitude, and is transparent to thinking, sensing, feeling and intuition [5]. With the help and mentorship of Alejandra Aillapan Huiriqueo, an Indigenous Mapuche lecturer and activist living in southern Chile, I grouped these concepts into an Indigenous-inspired methodology ‘set’, consisting of permission, respect, kinship, reciprocity, ritual, and gratitude. These rules can be written down and discussed but they are essentially unspoken: they function only in an embodied practice of cosmovision and in the action of relating to nonhumans that co-exist with us in our local environment.  

Promise is a scene from the workshop performance titled Asul Asul / Nick of Time, a practice research exploration of following these unspoken rules of cosmovision and new animism on a theatre stage. In the workshop, the participants performed these concepts in all senses of the word, with the aim of helping to re-situate the (Global North) human and non-human in ecological and ethical terms. Through this engagement, the practice was developing tools for the confrontation with anthropic climate crisis. The workshop was conducted in downtown Seoul, South Korea, in July 2023, with a group of interculturally trained professional actors. The participants were introduced to the Indigenous-inspired value-based methodology through exercises or Actions that reflected (new) animism’s four basic interrelated ideas: personhood (subjectivity of every being), relationality (interconnectedness of everything), location (relating to the local environment), and ontological boundary crossing (imagining the point of view of others) [6]. Promise was developed from the Action called ‘Dialogue’, which brought each participant face to face with a natural element, performed by the rest of the group. The preparation for the Action included participants reflecting on their relationships with the four natural elements. Memories of particularly meaningful interactions with the elements led to writing sentences starting with ‘Thank you, [element], for…’ ‘I’m sorry, [element], for …’, and ‘I promise, [element] I will … ‘, or ending with, ‘… Will that help?’. The prompt for the Action was as follows: 

One actor steps out of the group. 

The rest become the chosen element. 

The element establishes itself through group movement and sound. 

When the element is established, the actor approaches it.  

The actor speaks to the element sentences of gratitude, apology, and promise. 

The element responds, or not. It is unpredictable, alive, ancient. 

The actor and the element continue interacting. 

The individual actor therefore interacted with others performing the element – in the case of Promise, water. Experiences, observations, and memories of water were discussed and carried out during the workshop. In the moment of action, however, water was present only as it always is: in the bodies on stage, in the air and materials around them. Embracing the challenge of a ‘laboratory stage’ (and the practicalities and rules of a Western-style studio space), the human and non-human were instead blended through performance and imagination.  

 

Watch Promise - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXoSTmC3_-0

 

During the improvised Action the unspoken rules of the elements were identified and made alive through movement and the embodied practice of cosmovision and new animism. Repeated improvisations quickly started showing signs of emergent structure – the beginnings of a codified ritual or ceremony. Water increasingly established itself by first traversing the stage in different intensities of movement and regrouping to find a common wave; the protagonist approached it in stages, building trust through the memory until embodied recollection matched the present moment through the soaking of her feet in water. The anguish of the element, expressed in a variety of forms, invariably resulted in a powerless freeze and shutting into itself; only the expression of gratitude was able to open it again and find a final balance between the two fragile beings on stage. 

Having the performed element (water) as an interlocutor invited the idea of widened personhood, of all entities having “purposive agency, expressing themselves and, through enunciating, assembling and dissembling subjectivities [as well as] collectivities” [7]. On the other side, the individual performer used memory, that of playful moments of going to the river as a child, to address water directly, evoking relationality and interdependence, and grounding it in a specific local setting of importance. Expressing gratitude, regret, and promise immediately set up a relation. Besides confirming personhood, relations also act against anthropocentrism, cultivating “more self-reflection and gratitude for the support and bounty the non-human world provides for us” [8]. An expression of gratitude leads directly to a relation of respect, an understanding of one’s place within a relationship [9] evoking another rejection of anthropocentrism and imbalanced ontological hierarchies.   

The group representing the element performed the crossing of an ontological boundary and performatively shared itself out into water. This action is possible in cosmovision and new animism through the idea of a shared humanity, understood here not anthropocentrically, but as the basic ethical characteristic of all persons, giving each its own subjectivity [10]. Additionally, a renewed awareness arose in the participants of (literally) being one with water and the elements, with the whole earth. As Andrea Olsen puts it: “our breath, blood, muscles, and bone are of the earth; they are the air, rivers, animals, and minerals inside us, not separate but same” [11].  

The Indigenous-inspired value methodology was blended not only with the East Asian locale but also with Western approaches to acting, movement, and imagination. Preparation for the group performance of water (and other elements) was based on the ‘School of Fish’ exercise, an ensemble-building and movement game learned from Complicité’s alumna Lorna Marshall. Inspired by the work of Jacques Lecoq, the exercise’s movement of an animal (non-human) collective, its focus on open attention and synchronicity, and a decentralising approach make it a useful entry into the performance of crossing ontological boundaries, evoking interconnectedness and respect within the group [12]. The explored movements and gestures (included in the preparation for the Action) were indebted to Michael Chekhov’s model of elemental movements, inspired by the anthroposophic theories of Rudolf Steiner: moulding, flowing, flying, and radiating. In Promise, Chekhov’s the basic approach was the water-connected Quality of flowing (complemented by a variety of other overlapping Qualities). When flowing, “every movement is slurred into another in an unbroken line” and “the movements /…/ have neither a beginning nor an end but must flow into one another organically” [13]. The first regrouping of water mentioned above is a result of the performers flowing across the stage and finding each other to create the image of “supporting the surface of a wave” [14]. On the other side of the dialogue, the performer presenting the human found herself in a world of water reveries, evoking Gaston Bachelard’s understanding of the elements, happening through the material imagination of the chorus performing clear water, running water, deep water, maternal water [15], and so on. Water was explored and imagined not only as “cool blue, watery green and transparent silver of white” [16] but in a wider array of forms and states of matter, from rushing waterfalls to glaciers to bloodstreams within our own bodies and particles of humidity in the wind. What is achieved in cosmovision and new animism through a spiritual ontological crossing can be translated into Bachelard’s material imagination, examining “with fresh attention how we respond to the physical world” and realising that water is “an essential destiny that endlessly changes the substance of the being” [17]. 

The same characteristic of being in flux is a defining trait of the world of cosmovision and new animism, constructed through ever-changing networks of interconnectedness between the persons inhabiting it. Promise is the final result of iterative explorations of the given Action. However, it always remained a free flow improvisation, reforming and reconnecting itself in new ways each time, while the depth of the participants’ embodiments of the element (water) and the connections with the protagonist grew more complex. The Feeling of Ease (in Chekhov’s vocabulary) that developed from these reveries on stage allowed for the emergent performance and practice of unspoken rules, challenging the ecological and ethical terms of the relationship between the human and non-human.  

 

Endnotes: 

[1] Graham Harvey, ‘Animism and ecology: Participating in the world community’, Ecological Citizen, 3 (2019), 79–84 (p. 80) 

[2] Val Plumwood, ‘Nature in the active voice’, in The Handbook of Contemporary Animism ed. by Graham Harvey (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 441–453 

[3] Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 8-9. 

[4] Miguel Astor-Aguilera, ‘Indigenous Cosmovision’, in Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology ed. by Willis Jenkins, Mary Evelyn Tucker, & John Grim, (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 158–167 (p. 162) 

[5] Andreas Weber, Sharing Life: Animism as Ecopolitical Practice. (Heinrich Böll Stiftung India, 2020), p. 60. 

[6] Arianne Conty, ‘Animism in the Anthropocene’, Theory, Culture and Society, 39(5) (2021), 127–153. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211039283 

[7] Conty 2021, 134 

[8] Val Plumwood, ‘Journey to the Heart of Stone’, Nature, Culture and Literature, 5 (2007), pp. 17-36, (p.20) 

[9] Annette Watson & Orville Huntington, ‘Transgressions of the man on the moon: climate change, Indigenous expertise, and the posthumanist ethics of place and space’, GeoJournal, 79(6) (2014), pp. 721–736, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-014-9547-9 (p. 731) 

[10] Eduardo Viveiros De Castro, ‘Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism’. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4(5) (1998), pp. 469-488 

[11] Andrea Olsen, Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide (Middlebury College Press, 2002), p. 192) 

[12] Jacques Lecoq, The Moving Body (2nd ed.), (London: Bloomsbury, 2009) 

[13] Michael Chekhov, On the technique of acting (2nd edition), (HarperCollins, 1991), p.45 

[14] Chekhov 1991, o. 46 

[15] Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (15th ed.).
(Dallas: The Pegasus Foundation, 1983) 

[16] Sinead Rushe, Michael Chekhov’s Acting Technique: A Practitioner’s Guide. (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), p. 131 

[17] Ellie Nixon, Imagining Bodies and Performer Training: The Legacies of Jacques Lecoq and Gaston Bachelard. (London and New York: Routledge, 2024), p.13 

Bachelard 1983, p. 6