Lettuce Entertain You: Floral Agency in Ralph Knevet's Rhodon and Iris

This essay investigates the performativity of plants in Ralph Knevet’s Rhodon and Iris, a play that was written and performed for a feast held by the Norwich Society of Florists in 1631. The play explores at least two forms of performativity: the first is the act of staging plants for a theatrical performance, where vegetables present their virtues through floral allegories that are enacted by human players. The second form is the way plants affect and are affected by their environments, particularly as theorized by Michael Marder and Mel Y. Chen. In Rhodon and Iris, these two dimensions work together to produce a form of floral agency that decenters the human. The essay explores how floral agency collaborates with literary narratives when beings perform for plants (within a history of floral celebrations), as plants (embodying plants as allegorical figures), and with plants (floral characters using plants as ingredients in cosmetics, poisons, and antidotes). Knevet uses literature to articulate a unique plant philosophy that challenges divisions between art and nature and among literature, philosophy, and science. Rhodon and Iris thus illustrates the many ways that theatrical performances and printed playbooks, and even printed herbals and herbaria, responded to and shaped the performativity of plants.

Ash Stories: A Spell against Forgetting

This paper will explore The Ash Project (2016-2019), which worked to commission a memorial sculpture and a series of walks, talks, workshops and exhibitions to create closer relationships between ash trees and the local puow trade in plants has created increased risks to plant health, and the way in which plants can perform complex relationships to a collective sense of national and colonial identity, through an exploration of ash migrations to the colonies via acclimatisatioblics. This paper will situate the concerns of the ash within broader thinking about capitalism's intensifying impact on nature. It explores hn societies in Australia and New Zealand. Finally, the paper thinks about how we might perform memorial acts to curate love or care while acknowledging our complex shared histories in multi-species entanglements.

Algae Sympoiesis in Performance: Rendering-with Nonhuman Ecologies

This article explores an ecodramaturgical approach to performance-making and research with algae. The first part considers the notion of ‘algae rendering’ as a methodological tool for theorising algae ecological relations which highlights links between representations of algae and their material effects. The second part considers how my embodied encounters with cyanobacteria algae, in the form of lichen, inspire new modes of working with algae in creative practice that explore how algae agencies ‘render’ bodies and environments. I also draw on an artistic case study by The Harrissons (1971) to illustrate principles of what I consider examples of ‘algae rendering’ in artistic practice. The third part considers my approach to making-with algae in a series performance experiments that develop the concept of ‘rendering-with algae’ in practice. This work attempts to depart from anthropocentric binaries that mark different algae species according to their use-value for humans as either ‘healthy’ or ‘harmful’ and investigates embodied ways of working with algae as co-creators, inspired by material ecological relations. The fourth part considers how these performance encounters, experiments and analysis together compose an ecodramaturgical framework that generates new thinking about algae-human relationships in performance and in wider ecologies. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s (2016) concept of ‘sympoiesis’, I develop the term ‘algae sympoiesis’ to describe my embodied ecodramaturgical approach to rendering-with algae in this research. The concept of algae sympoiesis explores how humans and algae shape matter and meaning together in performance and seeks to invite new ways of thinking about how broader algae-human material ecologies are performative of environmental change.

Making New Land: An Intertidal Aesthetics

Making New Land is an essay in theory-fiction set in a near future, where the oceans have disappeared. In these devastated landscapes, a first person narrator investigates unsolved biological enigmas on Earth and on Mars. In the footsteps of a fictional group of Anarcho-botanists called Sea for Space, the story alternates a melancholic longing for the beauty of intertidal and coastal lifeforms with futuristic visions of new species engineered by humans as new companions. The scenario explores archetypal figures of plant-human coexistence: from the botanical gaze to a nostalgic longing for connection, and from the hubris of genetical engineering to the dream of a post-humanism communion with the vegetal. The fictional story is interwoven with scholarly references and a critical discussions of artistic and literary works dealing with the fauna, flora and mythologies of the seaside, which form the outlines of an 'Intertidal Aesthetics'.

Episode Five: Omikemi

In this final episode of the podcast, Rajni Shah and Omikemi engage in a long, slow, wide conversation, in which they reflect on the entanglements between the felt world of lived experiences and the systems within which we live our lives. Infused by the sounds and shapes of the ocean, this episode feels intimate and visceral – and perhaps more than any of the others, like an invitation to eavesdrop on a conversation between friends. In the accompanying offering, Omikemi invites listeners to spend time with a question that was present for them at the time of recording. Full credits and transcript for this episode will be published when the episode is released on 27 April 2021.

Episode Two: Ria Righteous

In this first full conversation, Rajni Shah and Ria Righteous take time to allow words to emerge between them through deep listening. The conversation is intimate and personal, meditating on themes of grief, selfhood, family, renewal, and the long and difficult work of dearmouring the heart and body. This episode is accompanied by a short offering in which Ria guides the listener through a meditation called ‘Breathing the Body’. The offering was recorded by Ria in Kersal Dale, near the river Irwell in Salford. Full credits and transcript for this episode will be published when the episode is released on 27 February 2021.

Episode One: Introduction

In this introductory episode, Rajni Shah, Ria Righteous, and Julietta Singh reflect on their time working together towards what was originally planned as a symposium (also called how to think) and has (for) now been translated into this podcast. The episode begins with an extract from a meditation led by Ria Righteous, followed by Julietta, then Ria, then Rajni reflecting on where they are situated and what’s present for each of them. The episode includes short narrations in which Rajni introduces some of the context for this conversation and the podcast as a whole. Most of the episode is composed of extracts from a reflective conversation in which Rajni, Julietta, and Ria touch on themes of home, grief, friendship, disaporic identities, listening, trust, and preparing for a pandemic world. Click here for full episode and credits.

Episode Four: Khairani Barokka

In this short conversation Rajni Shah and Kharaini Barokka (Okka) discuss the complex relationships between listening, safety, harm, accountability, and trust. These topics are especially poignant because Okka and Rajni did not know each other before recording this podcast, and so we hear them navigating in their own conversation some of the questions they are reflecting on together. In the accompanying offering, Okka shares some of her daily wellbeing practices. Full credits and transcript for this episode will be published when the episode is released on 12 April 2021.

Episode Three: Julietta Singh

This episode draws on two different recordings of conversations between Rajni Shah and Julietta Singh, in which they discover and recognise common ground in their lived and embodied experiences while learning to let go of expectations about how the recording process itself might unfold. The structure of this episode is non-linear, inviting the listener on a disorienting and dreamy listening adventure. In the accompanying offering to this episode, Julietta shares a reading from her new book, The Breaks. Full credits and transcript for this episode will be published when the episode is released on 13 March 2021.

Interruption—Intervention: On the interval between literature and music in Jean Luc Nancy's "Myth Interrupted"

This paper focuses on the role of mimesis and more specifically, the role of musical performance in creating communities by examining the oscillations between muthos and logos that inform contemporary thinking around community and institutions.The starting point is Jean-Luc Nancy’s (1991) intervention—or interruption— into the totalitarian or “immanentist” tendency of myth, a tendency that is especially at play in European modernity’s image of itself as a myth-less community as well as in contemporary or “(new) fascism” (Lawtoo 2019). For Nancy, the notion of myth must not be rejected but “interrupted,” so that “there is a voice of community articulated in the interruption, and even out of the interruption itself” (1991). What replaces myth in his account is “literature” a notion that arguably informs the contemporary movement of performance philosophy (Corby 2015). Why literature and not musical performance? In posing this question, this paper turns back to ancient Greek mousikē as a sonorous performance that interrupts the interruption, giving rise to the interval. Countering the myth of myth, I develop an account of mousikē that mobilizes rhythm, spacing, and iterability to suggest a notion of community that exchanges communion for performative communication, producing an intervened institution interrupted from within: an in— stitution.