Abstract
This chapter explores the paradoxical qualities of icy environments that make them so challenging and productive to consider in the context of performance studies, particularly at a time of rapidly changing global climate systems. Solid and weighty, icescapes are simultaneously unstable and untrustworthy—liable to collapse, overturn or melt. These are highly active environments: mutable, mobile and constantly in transition between the fluidity of water and the hardness of land, they share with human performances a contingent and unpredictable quality. Alert to the material specificity of different forms of environmental ice as well as the regions with which icescapes are most closely associated, the Arctic and Antarctic, the authors examine the ways in which ice and humans have performed with and alongside each other over the last few centuries. They conclude by positioning the subsequent chapters of the book within this theoretical and historical context.
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Notes
- 1.
The Titanic in Print and on Screen (Anderson 2005) lists only eleven items under “plays,” only six of which appear to have been staged (the first, The Berg, in 1929). There are fifty-eight items under novels and short stories.
- 2.
“Iceberg Spectacle” is a three-day helicopter and boat tour from Iceland offered (at the time of writing) by Greenland Adventures.
- 3.
From W. Clark Russell’s The Frozen Pirate (1887) to Louis Nowra’s Ice (2009), fictional icebergs often yield up human figures who have been preserved for decades due to the power of ice to slow decay.
- 4.
Definitions of all the different forms of ice are too many to canvas here, but it is worth distinguishing between a glacier, a body of ice “massive enough to thin and spread under [its] own weight”; an ice sheet, “A glacier that covers large parts of a continent or a large island”; and an ice shelf, “The floating perimeter of parts of an ice sheet grounded in water” (Hughes 2011). Icesheets occur only in Greenland and Antarctica.
- 5.
- 6.
Recent scholarship has de-emphasised visuality in the analysis of landscape and foregrounded more holistic bodily encounters. For instance, taking a phenomenological perspective, Wylie argues that “landscape is more than visual and more than symbolic,” requiring attention to “myriad everyday and embodied practices of interaction with and through landscape” (2013, p. 59). Mike Pearson, referencing the electroacoustic work of Chris Cree Brown, notes the “primacy” in Antarctica of “sound over sight, the ear ever attuned to the cracking of ice” (2010, p. 27).
- 7.
Given the size of the chunks of ice displayed in the work, they are technically too small to be classed as icebergs and would normally be termed—like the one in the image featured in this chapter—as “growlers.”
- 8.
These difficulties—and perhaps also environmental concerns—can be reflected in the criteria for national residencies. While Antarctica New Zealand facilitated Antarctica: The First Dance, the U.S. Antarctic Artists and Writers Program explicitly excludes performances and art installations in Antarctica, although artists may travel to there in order to gain inspiration or material for works to perform elsewhere (National Science Foundation n.d.).
- 9.
Anthropogenic climate change does not, of course, correspond to uniformly warmer temperatures across the planet; the average increase in temperature can lead to more extreme weather events including intense cold spells (see e.g. Milman 2018).
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Leane, E., Philpott, C., Delbridge, M. (2020). Performing Ice: Histories, Theories, Contexts. In: Philpott, C., Leane, E., Delbridge, M. (eds) Performing Ice. Performing Landscapes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47388-4_1
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