Abstract:
On 27 February 2013, Mad Ave staged The River Talks, a collation of linked performances in and on the banks of the Omaru River in Glen Innes, Auckland, New Zealand. The event brought together artistic and discursive works that challenged a view of this local river as always and forever degraded. An example of committed ecological performance, The River Talks created time and space for kōrero (dialogue) between people with diverse views and stories of the river. Both the enactment of performance and the performance of meeting drew on Māori protocol on the marae and on Māori concepts of the relationship and obligation to the natural world (kaitiakitanga). The writing of this article was invited by the director Tamati Patuwai as part of extending the kōrero to a global audience. In the article we explore how ecocriticism might be applied to ecological issues in performance. To begin to discuss The River Talks ecocritically, we draw on Rob Nixon’s postcolonial analysis of the textual response to the ‘slow violence’ of environmental harm. Together, we consider the question of how far The River Talks provides a model of performance that could inform otheractivists, educators and artists.
