Man

One of the great tasks and opportunities for our moment and for the environmental Humanities is “to stay with the human trouble” […]. Let us make another recursion across the terrain of our species, this time trying to tell more truthful accounts than those that stress our wondrous superiority. In an ecologically attentive recursion, we find that man is the only animal to voraciously, relentlessly, and viciously wreck the lifeworld of earth. Man is the only animal systematically to torture members of its own species, as well as members of other species, and to engage in seemingly endless and often wildly indiscriminate killing. Precisely because human cruelty tends to drop out of our conversations, I want to insist that we linger with it. (55)
Deborah Bird Rose, ‘Shimmer: When All You Love is Being Trashed’
In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Tsing et al. (eds)

While theorists might justifiably point out the romantic narcissism in reverse of foregrounding human cruelty and tendencies towards shitting in our nest, we certainly also feel the need to stay with the human trouble.

AnthrApology unabashedly explores ranges of human folly, idiocy, cruelty, with extensive sequences on genocide, environmental degradation, and many other types of violence.

Also, going against the current and easy academic trend, AnthrApology still seeks to explore possibilities for human beauty, for human and more-than-human relationality not marked by dominance, and for the role that human and more-than-human art can play in bringing new worlds into existence.

Without these kinds of combinations of approaches, any honest engagement with theatre and performance would be either premised on denial, or futile, or both.

We understand so much existing theatre and performance to simply be the proverbial moving of the sentimental deck chairs on the sinking the Titanic of our geosphere and its ability to be able to maintain much human and more-than-human life.

Can we move our performance cultures away from the echoes of the high renaissance Vitruvian man, with artists forced to compete—and in so doing becoming boring and inconsequential — within capital’s tight constraints for survival and predominance?

(From 7. Posthuman I: some people, here, soon)

A—My friend always falls in love
like she’s a whiff of cotton candy,
like she wants to melt in her lover’s mouth.
She floats downwards on her intended
with fibrous
and crystalline intensity.
Her brain turns to dextrose and fructose and sucralose and even stevia and the man feels the shimmer of another species in his hand.
Drops of sugar water fall from places above
and everything starts to run together.

B—Aren’t you actually surprised that anything happens at all? That anything gets actually done at all?
We could be trying to build a dam forever
without it being finished,
but somehow eventually at some point
the water holds.
And the mother finishes the flute
and the song begins for her daughter.
Amazing really that anything works in this world: a clock, soup, a basket, a pair of shoes.
Why can’t we pay more attention to all this?
Choose to live between the miraculous intimacies of all these things?