The Animal Project is, to our knowledge, the first self-conscious theatrical engagement, in the United States, with the new academic field known as Critical Animal Studies. Burgeoning during the last decade of the past century, Critical Animal Studies brings the theoretical frameworks of “posthumanism,” progressive identity politics, and multicultural inquiry to “the question of the animal.” That phrase is the sub-title of the influential critical anthology Zoontologies, edited by Cary Wolfe, one of many recent collections that bring the figure of the animal into the disciplinary and inter-disciplinary purviews of philosophy, anthropology, literary and film studies, art history, and cultural studies. This developing academic discourse is joined by a growing consciousness about animal welfare and ethics in the culture at large, the latest version of a centuries-old animal rights tradition, this most recent phase inaugurated by Peter Singer’s landmark Animal Liberation (1975).
As work began on the Animal Project, various recent events had drawn attention to the place of the animal in contemporary culture. In 2003, one member of the Vegas animal act team Siegfried and Roy had been mauled, on-stage and before a terrified audience, by one of their performance animals, a White Siberian Tiger named Mantecore. At the same time as the infotainment press was issuing hourly bulletins of Roy’s condition (and his Christ-like forgiveness of Mantecore), across the country, an impoverished man was found to be maintaining a private “zoo,” complete with a 350-pound Bengal tiger and a four-foot long cayman, in a tiny fifth-floor apartment in Harlem. A few miles south and a few months later, a different kind of animal habitation drew prolonged media attention: residents of an expensive Fifth Avenue apartment building “evicted” the two hawks, Pale Male and his consort Lola, who had taken up residence on a high cornice and were allegedly fouling the area around them. Following a nation-wide outcry and an impassioned vigil outside the building, the nest was restored and the hawks returned. A few blocks from this improbable drama, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Collection presented “Wild Fashion,” an exhibition exploring the use of animal materials—fur, feather, leather—in haute couture through the ages. In an unintended inversion of the Met’s project, W magazine published a feature on “elephant couture,” in which famous designers like Calvin Klein and Dolce e Gabana took up the magazine’s challenge of designing outfits for elephants.
These and an astonishingly vast array of other artistic and pop-cultural instances of “zooësis”—the making of cultural meaning through the figure of the animal or the discourse of animality and species—helped to situate the project within a kind of “animal cultural unconscious,” a web of ideas and images circulating around us, offering clarifications, mystifications, and inspirations. Later, when the text of the play emerged, a central theme (and even plot element) turned out to be this very circulation of ideas. How is knowledge—old knowledge but more importantly new knowledge—transmitted between individuals and groups, within and between species? Is there a dimension of consciousness that is “out-there” rather than—as humanist models of knowledge invariably assume—“inside,” personal and subjective? Could information occupy an autonomous dimension, independent of individual intention, capable of moving and flowing in unforeseen directions?
This notion was an elaboration of one of the central preoccupations both of this project as of animal studies itself: inter-species communication. The “dream of a common language,” as Donna Harraway calls it, has haunted the human-animal relation from time immemorial, regularly manifesting in culture and science, from Aesop’s Fables to Koko the signing gorilla. The Animal Project was, to a large extent, an attempt to insert the protocols of theatre and the phenomenology of performance into that age-old (attempted) conversation.
In the course of this exploration, we encountered certain key themes and traveled some familiar pathways of human-animal interaction: magic (the “power-animals” of both traditional and New Age shamanism), dreams, drug-induced hallucinations, scientific experimentation and observation, and performance (represented here by that icon of drama and theatre, Hamlet). All these elements eventually found themselves--to our surprise and delight--into the text of the play.
Our work was guided by three texts in particular: French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s chapter, “Become-Intense, Becoming-Animal,” in A Thousand Plateaus, the recently published A Companion Species Manifesto: A Theory of Significant Otherness, by Donna Harraway, and Nobel Prize-winning novelist J.M. Coetzee’s novel, The Lives of the Animals. Initial readings and discussions were followed by a two-week summer workshop with eight actors, during which the Deleuzian idea of “becoming-animal”— one of animal philosophy’s most aesthetically productive of concepts—was explored through imagery and improvisations.
Early discussions began by recognizing first what becoming-animal is not: it is not being-animal, of course, but it is also not, as Deuleuze and Guattari say explicitly, “imitating” animal. We discovered that becoming-animal also needed to be carefully distinguished from a sentimental and personalized quest for one’s “inner animal:” the animal of becoming-animal arrives from outside. It is a seizure, a “contagion.”
Three other key ideas helped us as we moved our work further into the concept: first, becoming-animal is, first and foremost, a becoming. It is continuous, on-going, never-ending: a process that never coalesces into a product. Second, the process is an unraveling, a breaking down, a “molecularization,” tending towards a vanishing, a movement beyond perception, a “becoming-imperceptible.” Third, becoming is a “deterritorialization,” a radical dislocation and de-stabilizing of familiar spatial contours and boundaries. In the hyper-semiotic physical and conceptual spaces of theater, where geography is often destiny and architecture is ideology, deterritorialization is also a potential undoing of the stage and its signifying claims. To explore becoming-animal in the theatre, to “animalize performance” (as we called it) might also mean to seek a new version of this ancient apparatus, and new uses for it. It would be a theatre of becoming, a “Becoming-Theatre.”
But any attempt to “script” and “rehearse” a Deleuzian Becoming immediately presents problems and paradoxes so fundamental as to call into question the very legitimacy of the project. How does one choreograph what is defined as an essentially autonomous process, without beginning or end? How does one stage what must be spontaneous? And, perhaps most troubling of all: is it possible for a performed Becoming to become real? Could our journey into Becoming finally extend to include the audience? Would our Becoming-Theatre be shared with them, or merely shown to them?
This first, almost-immediate encounter with impossibility—the first of many, all immensely productive—found its way into the first draft of the script, the one we had in hand when rehearsals began. The problem of staging a Becoming-Animal manifested itself as an absence, an incompletion: the script called for a play-with-in-the-play, a production of Hamlet by some of the characters. A rehearsal of this production appeared in Act I, but where, towards the end of Act 2, the actual production is supposed to happen, the first draft of the script presented a blank expanse, with the single word, “Hanimalet.”
Thus to the first stage of our work, consisting of physical and intellectual animal explorations, was added a second: we had to “find” Hanimalet, we had to figure out how the principle of becoming would transform Hamlet. The play-script had incorporated our theoretical investigation; to do our play in the spirit of becoming-animal, we would have to help the playwright discover how to deterritorialize and molecularize this paragon of plays.
If the Deleuzian Becoming-Animal gave the Animal Project its most challenging horizon of ideas, Donna Harraway’s little book, A Companion Species Manifesto, provided us with a delightfully rich approach to one of the most familiar figures of animal-culture: the pet. Harraway, in a characteristically inspired thought experiment, reverses the usual understanding of the term companion animal. Speaking instead of companion species, she challenges us to consider ourselves as equally implicated in the phrase: “There cannot be just one companion species; there have to be at least two to make one.” The challenge for us: how to elaborate the definition of human beings as a companion species? How to perform this identity? What would it look like for us to live as if we were a companion species—maybe even the companion species? This question, arising tantalizingly at times, eventually receded from the play, overpowered perhaps by the “impossibilist” excitement of the Becoming-Animal work.
In the first sessions of the workshop, Ertl assigned the actors a series of “etudes”, designed for them to generate physical language for performing animal. The original etude had been used as an audition piece: actors were asked to create a brief performance using, as a point of departure, one of the images from Art Shay’s wonderful photography book Animals. The transformation etudes showed us how fertile the animal image can be for the theatrical imagination. Vastly different narratives and emotional journeys emerged from the same image. For example, the image of a tiny monkey plastered against a human hand produced a heartbreaking scene of fear and loss for one actor (Libby), while for another (Eric) it led to an explosive encounter with the essential alienation of technology: the little animal in the human had became a cell phone, a tool of urban hyper-activity. Suddenly, as the actor animalized, it sprang terrifyingly to life in his hand, causing him to fling it away in terror. The animal, like the gizmo, is taken for granted, until it forces a recognition of its essential otherness.
Once the workshop began, the transformation assignments got more and more layered, until they included not just one but several transformations to and from “human” to “animal”, with various stops in between. The most complex of these explorations came in response to the following “transformation etude,” composed by Fritz Ertl, with the intention of discovering “styles” of animalization as well as modes of moving through and across them, creating a vocabulary and a syntax of transformation, a language of Becoming:
--I am myself, a human animal.
--I transform slowly into an animal.
--I bump back to my human self.
--I transform to a cartoon of the same animal. I speak.
--The real animal rises from within to replace the cartoon.
--A new (second) animal overtakes the original animal from outside.
--The original (first) animal emerges to co-exist with the new animal.
--The cartoon animal emerges to co-exist with the new and original animal.
--Your human self emerges to co-exist with the cartoon, original, and new animal.
--Your conglomerate self “becomes molecule.”
1. Conceive of this etude as a dream that you have. You need not stage the falling asleep or in any way reference the dream, but allow the logic of a dream to inform the experience.
2. Each animal, including your human self, should have a strong primal need (sexual drive, territory, need for comfort, fear, etc). Make that need visceral and manifest.
3. Similarly, each animal senses (sees, hears, smells, etc) differently. Explore the sensory experience of each.
As the actors enacted the transformations, the human animal and the non-human animal increasingly lent one another behaviors, gestures, physicality. One actor (Dylan) discovered his belt as a tail, catalyzing his transformation into a dog. Another (Alex) smelled hot dogs and became a pig. From these explorations there emerged a rich vocabulary of gestures and “flows,” movements back and forth across human and animal bodies, experiences, worlds.
We began to think of these transformations as belonging to one of two categories: those emerging from “within,”—from intention, memory, gesture, movement—and those taking over from without. The latter became very important in our thinking on the concept of the herd, another central tenet of Deleuzian animal theory. Animals not only belong to herds, but contain herds in themselves. Members of flocks, packs, broods, swarms—their identity is always primarily plural. The image of the herd “overtaking” the individual arose repeatedly in design as well as dramaturgical discussions.
The actors’ exercises as well as the design teams meetings produced a realization that in order to enact the animal and produce a climactic “becoming,” not only our characters and actors, but our play-space itself needed to transform. Despite initial excitement regarding the potential for feats of theatrical design, a transformation using multi-media or another hi-tech apparatus didn’t seem quite right: at the moment of transformation, the enactment of “becoming,” the focus, we all felt, should be on the living bodies on stage.
As the actors honed their transformative skills and worked with choreographer Jenny Koons to develop the physical language not only of the animals but also of their characters, the workshop shifted from individual etudes to long-form group improvisation assignments. In the first, the cast was given an hour to create a version of Hanimalet, which was to include at least two “full-circle transformations,” plus images from Frederick Wiseman’s documentary Zoo, which Shonni and Una had screened for the group. The piece that the group came up with incorporated not only the required elements but also many of the tools and topics we had been discussing, including power relationships (between pet and owner, zoo animal and zoo keeper, student and teacher, child and adult). The emergent metaphor of the play, namely, that the adolescent characters are kept and co-opted by the adult social world like animals in a zoo, or pets in a household, here came to the fore: the kids transformed rapidly from their adolescent characters, politely showing the adults to their seats in the theatre, to truly “herded” beasts, ripping their teacher to shreds.
Thus etude instructions began to include shifts in perspective, theatricalizations of the animal point of view, with a view of mapping “animal geographies” for our stage space. The most successful of these were revelatory: not only was the difference of the animal perspective theatricalized, it was theatricalized in a way that embraced rather than ignored the essential unknowability of the animal world. In one particularly memorable experiment, Eric shifted from being a man looking at a dog (and singing “How much is that doggy in the window?” to the dog being looked at, merely by lifting a chair, exchanging the point of view of the man looking down to the animal looking up. Nothing further needed to be shown: the shift was as profound as it was seamless, as clear as it was theatrical. With the perspective etudes, we had stumbled upon a theatrical “deterritorialization” on a micro-level, destabilizing the stage in the most low-tech way possible.
Our ideal, no doubt utopian, was to do the theatrical version of the literary practice that Deleuze and Guattari prescribe when they say: “Either stop writing, or write like a rat!”
In The Animal Project, our quest was for a stage adapted not to seeing the animal, but to seeing as an animal.
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