| dc.description.abstract | Performance Studies has, since its inception as an academic discipline, been characterised by a certain anthropocentrism. With a few exceptions, the work done in the field has mostly addressed humans in their roles as either performers or audience members. Simultaneously, however, the notion of performance seems to be increasingly associated with a variety of nonhuman (and more-than-human) events and behaviours: rituals of animal courtship, fluctuations of stock market indexes, technological efficiency, or viral epidemiology, to name a few. Nevertheless, even in those instances, the human is still privileged as the ultimate sense-ascribing spectator. Thus, if performance theory is to truly abandon its anthropocentric grounds and become ecological, it must not only focus more on nonhuman performance but, most importantly perhaps, it must allow itself to think what performance might look like even in the absence of human witnesses, when it finally becomes object-oriented performance. | en_GB |
