Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, And Ecology In The Anthropocene by Angenette Spalink (review)

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• Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, And Ecology In The Anthropocene by Angenette Spalink
• Diana Looser

CHOREOGRAPHING DIRT: MOVEMENT, PERFORMANCE, AND ECOLOGY IN THE ANTHROPOCENE. By Angenette Spalink. Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance, no. 3. London: Routledge, 2024; pp. 104.

In her original and engaging monograph, Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene, Angenette Spalink attunes us to the importance of dirt in artistic performance, highlighting our profound entwinement with such matter and the broader social and ecological significance of these interrelationships. For Spalink, "dirt" refers to earthly material such as soil, peat, and fungi that has been removed from its original grounded context and has been culturally reshaped within the framework of performance, where it functions as a vital and agential co-performer along with human actors and dancers. Spalink undergirds her analysis of choreographic dirt with two key concepts. The first is her compound neologism biogeocultography, which denotes "the structured movement of ecological matter through geographic, biological, and cultural spaces" (2) and the meanings such movements create. The second concept, performative taphonomy (derived from the processes whereby material remains decompose and become part of the environment), expresses the notion that "the presence of exhumed ecological matter on page and stage—e.g., dirt—'does' something" (16). By exploring the many ways in which humans and dirt affect one another, Spalink encourages a more nuanced apprehension of our material entanglement with more-than-human worlds and reveals how dance and performance can provide a productive arena for thinking through the complex problems of the Anthropocene.

Choreographing Dirt brings together a diverse array of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century works from North and Central America and Europe: Suzan-Lori Parks's The America Play (1994), Pina Bausch's The Rite of Spring (1975), Eveoke Dance Theatre's Las Mariposas (2010), and Iván-Daniel Espinosa's Messengers Divinos (2018). The author presents a series of absorbing and richly contextualized close readings buttressed by Indigenous and non-Indigenous critical perspectives. She shows how these performances engage dirt as a vital choreographic element to address environmental racism, extractive capitalism, the interplay of human and more-than-human bodies, and an eco-ethics of care.

Chapter 1 takes up the trope of digging and disinterment as a mode of African American revisionist historiography in The America Play, extending it to a taphonomical reading by focusing on the Foundling Father's material interactions with the soil itself. Staking the claim that "soil literally contains information that changes and influences the ways in which we understand and interpret the past" (24), Spalink uncovers how the Foundling Father's repeated digging movements are political acts that testify to the repetitive physical labor of enslavement and also demonstrate Black resistance and liberation, as he unearths discarded remains previously omitted from the canon of US history. Reciprocally, the soil itself performs as it exhibits evidence of social and environmental injustices. The affective relationship between the character and the soil becomes a means to interrogate dominant historical narratives and bring to light alternative stories and voices.

Chapter 2 offers a close reading of the peat moss that coated the stage in Pina Bausch's adaptation of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, highlighting how the dancers and peat were mutually altered through their physical interactions. In contrast to economic systems and power structures that reduce peat to a resource, Spalink considers Indigenous relational ontologies that understand peat as part of a more-than-human genealogy. She argues that peat functions both as a material performer and as a metaphor within the narrative: like the sacrificial virgin in the story, dead bodies decompose and become part of the soil; at the same time, peat archives and preserves organic (human) remains, so the dancers' bodies may be marked with such remains. Despite this vitality, however, Spalink wonders about the ethics of extracting the peat from its source and treating it as a prop.

In her third chapter, Spalink reads Eveoke Dance Theatre's Las Mariposas, a performance about the Mirabal sisters, who led an underground resistance movement in the 1950s against Dominican dictator [End Page 592] Rafael Trujillo and were subsequently assassinated. Dirt appears...