ECOMIMETIC IMMERSIONS:Ecological awareness through immersive theatre

The paper presents three immersive performances from a Danish context, which integrate reductions of the spectator's visual perception: A Story About Blindness by Christian Lollike, Twisted Forest by Wunderland, Garden by Himherandit. <br/>I propose to view the performances as eco-mimetic (Timothy Morton, 2007:31). In eco-mimetic art, the aesthetic inquiry is not primarily related to mimetic meaning production but is connecting to the atmospheric and material environment, and with Morton I will perspective this to ecological awareness.<br/><br/>With ecological awareness in focus, future and temporality become focal points. Through Morton’s concept, we can relate ecomimesis to immidiacy, which resonates with the sociologist, Andreas Reckwitz’s argument, that modern orientation towards the future has been exchanged by a late-modern insistence on the affectivity of the moment in order to strengthen the singular (Reckwitz 2017). But the performances, that I shed light on, are in fact also very much aware of the future, which they, however, relate to in different ways. They expose a critical concern for the time to come, and simultaneously exercise care for the moment, i.e. for the here and now of the sensibility focused performance. Observing their different ways of performing temporalities, allows me to position them along a spectrum which correlates with respectively optimistic and pessimistic outlooks on time and future. It ranges from a dark future dystopia in A Story About Blindness, through a more hopeful vision of future interspecies and material coexistence in Twisted Forest, to a blending of time and space that doesn’t thematize the future as such, but through blind passages from one spot to another, enacts time as concentric temporalities, where times are embedded in each other. <br/>On this basis, I will outline how these examples of ecomimetic performances in unique ways, and with closed eyes as amplifyers, perform ecological awarenesses. <br/>References: <br/>Morton, Timothy (2007) Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Harvard University Press.<br/>Reckwitz, Andreas (2017) Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten, Berlin: Suhrkamp. English Version<br/>