Birds, Trees, Stones, and Politics: Agency & Ecology in Some Recent B.C. Performance

Ecology involves interrelationships, and interrelationships, by definition, require multiple agencies. This is a paper about the significance of agency in ecologically informed performance, with reference to some recent productions from British Columbia and with particular attention to the SongBird Oratorio, a work focusing on the interrelationships between birds and humans, and The Unnatural and Accidental Women, a play in which trees and stones take part in the transformation of a criminal injustice. While ecologically informed productions might be considered solely as those that foreground conservation issues, my argument is that the performances under discussion here, and others like them, can also be deemed ecological by virtue of the way they situate human action vis-a-vis physical agencies that are other than human. Such performances, it seems to me, present action (that often-cited Aristotelian term) as interaction, and extend the field of this interaction by tossing out the entrenched anthropocentric assumption that human conflict and its resolution is the be-all-and-end-all of meaning and existence. The term “agency” has a branching number of meanings, all of which stem from the notion of action; it can denote a faculty of action, an action itself, or the personification of an action. Agency as a human attribute is an important concept in post-colonial discourse, 1 but the term may also be applied to non-human forces. The O.E.D., for instance, lists a wide range of examples including fire, the Supreme Being, citizens, insects, government organizations, an invisible force, and ‘a strong east wind’. Something else to notice about agencies is that while they may have intentions and goals, these are by no means prerequisites. Asserting that the sun’s agency causes the crops to grow does not, for instance, necessitate that the sun has chosen to act this way. And, although we may be accustomed to attributing intentions and goals to human agencies, doing so can still engender debates involving questions of free will and determinism. In its most basic sense, then, agency is simply action