Performance Research / Vol. 25 #2

Timothy Morton describes dark ecology as ‘ecological awareness, dark-depressing. Yet ecological awareness is also dark-uncanny. And strangely it is dark-sweet.’ The concept of dark ecology represents a crucial intervention in the current moment of political conservatism and climate change denial and enables a focused exploration of a wide range of issues relating to performance and ecology. Human activity on the planet is responsible for a number of ecological and political dilemmas, including (but not limited to) global climate change, pollution, leaking pipelines, fragmentation of ecosystems, diminishing natural resources and nuclear meltdowns. While some may harbour hope and positivity about the future, it is easy to feel overwhelmingly hopeless about these large-scale, complex problems. Morton refers to the awareness of these substantial ecological dilemmas as ‘ecognosis’, which he describes as ‘a riddle… It is something like coexisting. It is like being accustomed to something strange.’ It is this tension between hope and despair, the coexistence between ‘depressing’ and ‘sweet’ — this space of ‘dark ecologies’ in our current political and ecological climate — that we explore in this special issue. The essays in this issue consider dark ecology in relation to performance and explore the ways that performance can intervene in or engage with a plurality of dark ecologies.

 

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Performance Research is a specialist journal published eight times a year which aims to promote a dynamic interchange between scholarship and practice in the expanding field of performance.

Each Performance Research issue is theme based and has a 'life cycle' of one year - from the initial call for papers to the final print ready for publication.

For each issue we usually receive between 50 and 100 proposals and the Issue Editors have between 2 to 3 weeks from the proposal's deadline to complete their selection.

On receipt, first drafts will be read by the Issue Editors and also by further independent readers; authors will then be contacted and advised whether we would like to proceed towards publication.

It is the responsibility of the author to obtain all necessary permissions for both print and on-line reproduction of images.