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5 - The Play at the End of the World

Deke Weaver’s Unreliable Bestiary and the Theatre of Extinction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2021

Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

Chapter 5: This chapter situates the American artist Deke Weaver’s long-term project The Unreliable Bestiary within the ecological politics of the Anthropocene. Weaver aims to create a performance for every letter of the English alphabet, with each letter representing an endangered species or threatened habitat. The performances he has made to date – Monkey (2009), Elephant (2010), Wolf (2013), Bear (2016–17), and Tiger (2019) – address the looming threat of the sixth great extinction by pairing the most fantastic flights of the animalized imagination with the most astonishing facts discovered by animal science. Reactivating and reconfiguring the medieval bestiary in this way allows Weaver to braid together an epistemology derived from the ‘squishy science’ of performance with an affect he calls ‘plain old wonder’, producing a new theatrical grammar for being in and with extinction and a new ethical framework for encountering our remaining animal others.

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Chapter
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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References

Suggested Reading

Bass, Rick. Brown Dog of the Yaak: Essays on Art and Activism. The Credo Series. Minneapolis, 1999.Google Scholar
Bilodeau, Chantal. ‘In Search of a New Aesthetic’. HowlRound, 19 April 2015. https://howlround.com/search-new-aesthetic.Google Scholar
Chaudhuri, Una, and Hughes, Holly, eds. Animal Acts: Performing Species Today. Ann Arbor, 2014.Google Scholar
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Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Berlin Family Lectures. Chicago, 2017.Google Scholar
Green, Matthew. ‘Art in WOLF’s Clothing.’ Smile Politely, 11 September 2013. www.smilepolitely.com/arts/art_in_wolfs_clothing/.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Experimental Futures. Durham, 2016.Google Scholar
Kingsnorth, Paul, and Hine, Dougald. Manifesto. Oxford, 2009. https://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/.Google Scholar
Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York, 2014.Google Scholar
Scranton, Roy. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization. San Francisco, 2015.Google Scholar
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, 2017.Google Scholar
Weaver, Deke. ‘The Aura of Bad Maps’. Text and Performance Quarterly 29, no. 4 (October 2009): 418–37.Google Scholar
Weaver, Deke. ‘Excerpts from ELEPHANT’. In Animal Acts: Performing Species Today, ed. Chaudhuri, Una and Hughes, Holly. Ann Arbor, 2014, 163–81.Google Scholar
Weaver, Deke, and Lux, Maria. ‘The Unreliable Bestiary’. Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 22 (Autumn 2012): 3140.Google Scholar

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