What affective resources can performance offer for addressing a post-apocalyptic predicament, and how can it help explore modes of being and feeling beyond hope? This article engages with these questions by examining Simple Action, a participatory dance performance by Yasmeen Godder Dance Company (2016). Described by Godder as an ‘alternative contemporary ritual’, Simple Action is built around a single set of actions repeated throughout the work: the performers approach members of the audience seated around the dance floor, invite them to give their body weight to them, and support them in their slow and gentle fall to the ground. Inspired by Stabat Mater, the work foregrounds the performance of shared vulnerability and care as a timely alternative to uplifting ideals of agency. In my analysis, I juxtapose Godder’s work with the post-apocalyptic rituals developed by contemporary climate movements, showing how it resonates with a mood of helplessness and obstruction by pre-enacting collapse as a corporeal and interdependent experience. By bringing Simple Action into dialogue with feminist thinkers such as Adriana Cavarero, Bonnie Honig, and Lisa Baraitser, I argue that rather than steering us away from politics, the work’s focus on humility and relationality traces pathways for the reinventing the political on a minor scale and adapting it to catastrophic times.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The research for this article was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Notes
1 The Jewish-Palestinian city of Jaffa is officially part of the Tel Aviv municipality. Prior to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Jaffa was a major urban and cultural hub of Palestinian society. During the 1948 Nakba, most of Jaffa’s Palestinian inhabitants were displaced and Jewish immigrants moved into their homes. Today, Palestinians constitute roughly a third of Jaffa’s population, which also includes Jewish gentrifiers and Jews from underprivileged groups. Like other so-called ‘mixed towns’ in Israel, Jaffa is one of the few spaces where Jews and Palestinians live side by side in what Monterescu (Citation2015) has termed ‘contrived coexistence’.
2 A video excerpt of Simple Action can be seen on YouTube, https://bit.ly/3L5Yn44. Choreography: Yasmeen Godder; co-artistic director: Itzik Giuli; alternating performers: Ari Teperberg, Tal Adler, Matan Daskal, Shulamit Enosh, Dor Frank, Ayala Frenkel, Uri Shafir, Eduard (Edu) Turull Montells, Ofir Yudilevitch, Sigal Bergman, Francesca Foscarini, Yuli Kovbasnian; space and costumes design: Gili Avissar; composer, singer and musician: Tomer Damsky; lightening: Omer Sheizaf; production: Guy Hugler, Ingi Rubin – The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Cultural Center; stage manager: Omer Alsheich.
3 Honig is well aware of the fact that von Trier’s use of the teepee might be seen as a gesture of cultural appropriation, but she also draws attention to the critical message it harbours. The teepee, claims Honig (Citation2017: 78), ‘theologizes’ the catastrophe by intimating that its endings are a belated punishment for colonial plunder and for ‘crimes for which we have never atoned’. Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2017: 120–3) present a similarly nuanced view of Melancholia’s closing scene and its veneration of indigenous artefacts, claiming that the teepee acts as a reminder to the pertinence of indigenous skills and their contribution for cultural and social adaptation to ends-of-the-worldin- the-making. The instrumentalization of indigenous knowledge for climate change resilience is not without its critics (see, for example, Chandler and Reid Citation2019), but a comprehensive discussion of the topic lies beyond the scope of this article.