Children, Ecology and Performance
- Submitting institution
-
Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 2847338
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.1080/13528165.2018.1460449
- Title of journal
- Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts
- Article number
- 3
- First page
- 61
- Volume
- 23
- Issue
- 1
- ISSN
- 1352-8165
- Open access status
- Technical exception
- Month of publication
- June
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- In this article, I explore the generative role that child collaborators can have in the development of an ecological performance practice. I examine how children might uniquely "do the ecological" in the context of devising professional contemporary performance. Specifically, I focus on a piece of practice research, 'Wild Life' - a performance project that sits between choreography, live art and contemporary theatre. 'Wild Life' involved my collaborating with eight professional and non-professional performers between nine and 60 years of age to co-devise a performance that explored and enacted ‘wildness’. The process of co-creating, directing and critically reflecting on 'Wild Life' led me to propose that intergenerational collaboration is a particularly dynamic performance ecology through which to understand and develop an ecological practice.
The main proposition of this article is that the ecological potential of performance lies in the actualities of devising in collaboration with diverse people, where children are treated as capable and skilled artists who have unique performance aesthetics, styles and abilities. I discuss how child collaborators might significantly enable live theatrical performance to do the ecological in its very modes and moments of enactment. I propose that the spontaneity and pragmatism of the ‘just doing-ness' of child performers, can implicitly draw attention to what Jane Bennett (2010) describes as the ‘vital materiality’ of the human and, in doing so, performance can draw attention to our inevitable human interconnection and interactivity with(in) vibrant nonhuman matter.
My discussion brings diverse fields into dialogue with each other in order to offer a unique discussion on children, performance and ecology. These fields are: performance and ecology; children in contemporary performance; intergenerational practice; and, vital materialism.
This article is a companion to my other output in this submission ‘Intergenerational Performance Ecology: a practice-based approach’.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -