#2
Kipisjärvi, 29th of March 2016
(NOTES - DRAFT)
_Hypothesizing on the possibility that Western theatre has been operating
from indexical temporal notions such as nowness and co-presenceness them-
selves indexed to a specifically Western conception of linear time and
theological idea of happening (or epiphany).
_Heterochronic theatre seeks to alter this series of indexicalities of
theatrical time by disrupting the human-only copresence and expanding it
vis-à-vis nonhuman materialities which compose what we used to call the
'background' (the Skene from the traditional Greek perspective). The
challenge, and core of my research, of heterochonic theatre is to reset
the idea of stage (which combines both staging and spectating) by
operating the inversion of the proscenium and the skene, between the tra-
ditional 'stage' and its 'background' (in French le fond de scène). The
strategy of the inversion is effected in order to activate a diffraction
of the 'now' of the conventional theatrical representation through a
multitemporal lens which would destabilise the socially constructed time
of theatre and its subsequent anthropocentric organization and production
of copresences.
_In the context of residency in Arctic Lapland, the question would be how
to articulate this research with the experience of this very speci-
fic environment made of still frozen snowscape and extreme rapidity of
weather change. How to engage the research with this paradoxical expe-
rience, plus its potential of exotism and intoxicating spectacularity,
plus the spectral presence of climate change combined with non-spectral
breaking news that "Arctic sea ice appears to have reached its annual
maximum extent on March 24, and is now the lowest maximum in the sa-
tellite record, replacing last year’s record low", which can not be seen
from here but surely turning tangible only hundreds kilometres from here.
_Snow and ice –scapes have been reassembled as décors on Western stages
during the last hundred years of modern theatre.Whether using empty white
spaces or geometrical forms, or white clothing, or plexiglas or fake snow
or even real ice, the representation of the North has been subjegated to
the closure of the stage and its anthropogenic temporal framing. Conside-
ring that real ice set under projectors melts the way too fast, and this
speed is a very poor literal suggestive effect to grasp the question of
climate change, how can heterochronic theatre engage with arctic materia-
lities, and temporalities, without abolishing itself as theatre, i.e. a
certain aesthetic touch (Vs control) to posit human species on and in
front of a (redefined) stage in time(s) of environmental collapse?
_In the morning I passed by this stage (image) while climbing to the
Saana Fell. I thought that it could be a great spot to start The Theatre
Season 2. Maybe a bit too steep and windy and far though to return every
week during the whole year.