Performing Animality: Animals in Performance Practices

233 Pages·2015·5.21 MB·English

by  Lourdes Orozco

Performing Animality
Also by Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
CYBORG THEATRE: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia
Performance
Also by Lourdes Orozco
THEATRE & ANIMALS
Performing Animality
Animals in Performance Practices
Edited by
Lourdes Orozco
University of Leeds, UK
and
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
University of Roehampton, UK
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Lourdes Orozco &
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck 2015
Individual chapters © Contributors 2015
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-37312-0
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First published 2015 by
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Contents
List of Figures vii
Notes on Contributors viii
Acknowledgements xii
Introduction 1
Lourdes Orozco and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
Part I Setting the Stage
1 From Homo Performans to Interspecies Collaboration:
Expanding the Concept of Performance to Include Animals 19
Laura Cull
Part II Bulls, Dogs, Pigs, Bears and Horses: Animals in
Performance
2 The Art of Fierceness: The Performance of the Spanish
Fighting Bull 39
Garry Marvin
3 ‘Genus Porcus Sophisticus’: The Learned Pig and the
Theatrics of National Identity in Late Eighteenth-Century
London 57
Monica Mattfeld
4 ‘A Very Good Act for an Unimportant Place’: Animals,
Ambivalence and Abuse in Big-Time Vaudeville 77
Catherine Young
5 Acrobatic Circus Horses: Military Training to
Natural Wildness 97
Peta Tait
Part III ‘Performing’ Animals and ‘Theatres of Species’
6 Massive Bodies in Mortal Performance: War Horse and the
Staging of Anglo-American Equine Experience in Combat 117
Kim Marra
7 Embattled Animals in a Theatre of Species 135
Una Chaudhuri
v
vi Contents
8 Animal Pasts and Presents: Taxidermied Time Travellers 150
Jennifer Parker-Starbuck
9 Effacing the Human: Rachel Rosenthal, Rats and Shared
Creative Agency 168
Carrie Rohman
Part IV Looking at/Loving with animals
10 There and Not There: Looking at Animals in
Contemporary Theatre 189
Lourdes Orozco
11 It’s Hard to Spot the Queerness in this Image 204
Holly Hughes
Index 218
List of Figures
Cover: Loungta. Les chevaux de vent by Zingaro
1.1 How to play clarinet along with a singing
humpback whale. Diagram by David Rothenberg, 2008 27
1.2 Sami Sälpäkivi and Bobi Girl in the first ever horse
theatre in Finland, Hiano Mailma 31
3.1 A caricature illustrating the performing animals on the
London stage charging personifications of the arts
and virtues 61
4.1 A 1903 newspaper clipping promises animal novelty
and nearly all ‘top-line’ entertainment at a Keith
vaudeville theatre in Rhode Island 80
6.1 Interior of Astley’s Amphitheatre 120
7.1 Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo 143
8.1 Taxidermied dog heads at the Horniman Museum, London 154
8.2 Franko B and Fox heads in Because of Love, Volume 1 164
9.1 Illustration from Tatti Wattles: A Love Story, by
Rachel Rosenthal 180
10.1 Loungta. Les chevaux de vent by Zingaro. Photo by
Antoine Poupel 198
10.2 Inferno by Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio 198
vii
Notes on Contributors
Una Chaudhuri is Collegiate Professor and Professor of English, Drama
and Environmental Studies at New York University. Her publications
include Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama, Rachel’s Brain
and Other Storms: The Performance Scripts of Rachel Rosenthal, Land/Scape/
Theater (co-edited Elinor Fuchs), Animal Acts: Performing Species Today
(co-edited with Holly Hughes), and The Ecocide Project: Research Theatre
and Climate Change (co-authored with Shonni Enelow). Her current
research explores ‘zooësis’, the discourse of species in contemporary
culture and performance, and ‘Anthropo-Scenes’, theatrical responses to
the practical and philosophical challenges of climate change.
Laura Cull is Head of the Department of Theatre and Dance at the
University of Surrey, UK. She is author of Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze
and the Ethics of Performance (Palgrave, 2012), co-editor of Encounters
in Performance Philosophy with Alice Lagaay (Palgrave, 2014), editor of
Deleuze and Performance (2009) and co-editor with Will Daddario of
Manifesto Now! Instructions for Performance, Philosophy, Politics (2013).
Laura is a founding core convener of the professional association
Performance Philosophy and a co-editor of the Performance Philosophy
book series for Palgrave Macmillan.
Holly Hughes is a writer and performer whose work has been presented
internationally at diverse venues from the ICA and the Drill Hall in
London to museums such as the Walker Art Center, the Guggenheim
Museum, the New Museum (NYC) and the Hammer (Los Angeles), to
theatres including Victory Gardens, New York Theater Workshop, and
the Red Cat (LA) as well as countless alternative arts spaces. Her first col-
lection, Clit Notes: A Sapphic Sampler (Grove Press), was nominated for
a Lambda Book Award. Hughes is co-editor of three other collections:
O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance (Grove Press), co-edited by David
Roman Grove Press, the recent Animal Acts: Performing Species Today
(University of Michigan Press), co-edited with Una Chaudhuri, and the
forthcoming Memories of the Revolution (University of Michigan Press),
co-edited with Carmelita Tropicana. She has taught at Northwestern
University, Harvard, New York University, University of Colorado,
viii
Notes on Contributors ix
Duke and Kalamazoo College, before being hired at the University
of Michigan, where she holds appointments in the Penny W. Stamps
School of Art and Design, Women’s Studies and Theatre and Drama,
and directs the BFA in Interarts Performance. She lives in a state of com-
mitted polyamory, involving one human, several dogs and a forgiving
feline.
Kim Marra is Professor of Theatre Arts and American Studies at
the University of Iowa. Her publications include Strange Duets:
Impresarios and Actresses in the American Theatre, 1865–1914 (2006);
the co-edited volumes Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading
Players in American Theater History (1998) and its sequel Staging Desire
(2002); ‘Riding, Scarring, Knowing: A Queerly Embodied Performance
Historiography’, Theatre Journal (2012); and ‘Horseback Views: A
Queer Hippological Performance’, in Animal Acts: Performing Species
Today (2014).
Garry Marvin is a social anthropologist and Professor of Human–
Animal Studies at the University of Roehampton, London. He has
conducted ethnographic research into, and published on, the Spanish
bullfight; zoos; English foxhunting; the experiences of game hunters;
hunting trophies and taxidermy; human–wildlife conflicts. Among his
recent publications are Wolf (2012) and, co-edited with Susan McHugh,
The Handbook of Human–Animal Studies (2014).
Monica Mattfeld is an Instructor at the University of Northern British
Columbia and is interested in human–animal relationships and their
influence on performances of gender during the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries in Britain. Her current research examines the role of
animals in political satire, their inclusion in the eighteenth-century
illegitimate theatre, and the early nineteenth-century craze for grand
equestrian extravaganzas, or hippodramas.
Lourdes Orozco is Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the Workshop
Theatre, University of Leeds. Her research interests are in Contem-
porary Theatre and Performance in Europe. Her most recent research
focuses on the presence of animals and children in theatre and per-
formance contexts. She is the author of Teatro y Politica. Barcelona
1980–2000 (2007) and she is the author of Theatre & Animals
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She has published articles on animals in
contemporary theatre and is particularly interested in issues around