Performing Species Kinship and Strange Emotions.

While artistic strategies that capture the anxiety of responses to climate change - the despair and fear - confirm the need to mourn for the future, texts calling for hope can struggle to be convincing. In the contrast between the Royal Court’s 2014 production, 2071, with science Professor Chris Rapley, and Australian Jill Orr’s 2015 performance, Antipodean Epic, Rapley’s human-centric focus seems to preempt hopelessness about the future, while Orr’s performance of multi-species identities juxtaposes playfulness with ominous threat. Performance needs to do more than inform spectators about the issues, otherwise it is more effective to simply put the scientist on the stage; that is, present science’s rational action on climate change. This article responds to the persistent question about what performance can contribute to climate change by emphasizing how dramatic theatre has always been a repository of social ideas of emotions and offers this knowledge. Kari Norgaard argues that it is the emotions underlying group dynamics that prevent action on climate change and present a challenge to science’s presumption of rational action on behalf of a social whole, itself a concept that Bruno Latour provocatively demolishes. This article elaborates on ideas of emotional species and ‘eco-phenomenology’ in relation to what Merleau-Ponty describes as ‘a strange kinship between the human and the animal’ and contends that Orr’s emotional strangeness encapsulates anthropomorphic radicalism. Kinship can denote a bio-emotional affinity and attachment arising from cohabitation within an ecosystem. But ‘kinship’ is a concept that theatrical performance as collaborative art can embrace, if only in its simplest depictions of emotional relations extended to the more than human. The sensory evocation of extremes of emotional feeling and affect disrupts and draws attention to the continual emotional fleshing of the non-human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]