Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Tait, Peta

Titel

Site-specific Ecological Loss

Ist Teil von

• Performance research, 2018-07, Vol.23 (4-5), p.192-194

Ort / Verlag

Abingdon: Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Quelle

Taylor & Francis

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Performances of Repatriate by the Australian/Tongan artist Latai Taumoepeau presented a powerful response to climate change and ecological loss. The filmed version of Repatriate I exhibited in 2017 is discussed in relation to continuity in environmental performance and feminist ecologies, and for its phenomenological evocation of affect and emotional feeling. As the female performer danced in a tank against the force of rising water, the performance revised the concept of site-specific as it pointed to Pacific island environments along with a tradition of body-based environmental art. While 'site-specific' is often recalled for an aesthetic effect rather than for its politics, Performance Research 17: 4 asks: 'Could site-based performance, which frames and highlights the environments in which it takes place, be used as a means to explore specifically "environmental" questions?' Taumoepeau's Repatriate I, however, raises a different and more urgent question for site-specific performance: what happens when the environmental site is no longer viable for human performance because its habitable spaces have disappeared? In this performance, the bodily patterns of dance movement habituated to island localities over millennia, was shown to be part of an ongoing practice of identity survival. The changing climate and rising sea levels removes the possibility of remaining on the site in which the culture survived and belongs. Repatriate I reveals that the performance culture itself is drowning.