Ecological Performance and ‘Settler Creep’

The penetration of climate change into our individual and collective consciousness(es) has been a slow process. Using Una Chaudhuri’s (1994) initial demand for a new era of ecological theatre (‘“There must be a lot of fish in that lake”: Toward an ecological theater’, Theater 25(1): 23–31) and Carl Lavery’s (2018) follow-up volume that asked ‘what can theatre do ecologically’ as a springboard (Performance and Ecology: What can theatre do? Abingdon and New York, NY: Routledge), Melanie Kloetzel’s contribution to this issue, ‘Ecological Performance and “Settler Creep”: Making space to resist invasion’ explores the intersection of performance research and the ecological and climate crises. Borrowing from Heather Davis-Fisch’s (2017) coining of ‘settler creep’ (in Laura Levin and Marlis Schweitzer (eds) Performance Studies in Canada, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, pp. 67–89), Kloetzel argues that attempts to create an ‘ecological performance’ have floundered due to the inability to effectually address the modernity/coloniality narrative that undergirds the increasing devastation of the planet. Kloetzel starts by examining the hegemonic grip of this narrative with the support of Indigenous scholar Vanessa Andreotti (2021), after which she charts two speculative pathways through the theoretical stew of contemporary performance research (‘The task of education as we confront the potential for social and ecological collapse’, Ethics and Education 16(2): 143–58 and ‘Depth education and the possibility of GCE otherwise’, Globalisation, Societies and Education 19(4): 496–509). This charting reveals the slippery invasion of ‘settler creep’ into our efforts, hampering our ability both to reckon with and uproot modernity/coloniality’s ecocidal narratives and to find decolonial and ecologically-grounded counterhegemonic narratives. Yet, by examining tactics forwarded by geographers Sarah de Leeuw and Sarah Hunt (2018 ‘Unsettling decolonizing geographies’, Geography Compass 12(7): 1–14), as well as by touching on the embodied practices developed by Kloetzel and Phil Smith (2021 Covert: A handbook: 30 movement meditations for resisting invasion, Bridport: Triarchy Press), the artist digital residency program created by Vancouver-based Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures collective, and TRAction’s turbulent journey to create the Climate Art Web, Kloetzel shows how efforts to make space for confronting modernity/coloniality’s hegemonic effects may offer a generative method to resist the creep.

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