{"id":725,"date":"2022-12-11T15:19:38","date_gmt":"2022-12-11T15:19:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/26\/?p=725"},"modified":"2022-12-18T09:15:36","modified_gmt":"2022-12-18T09:15:36","slug":"doppelgangsters-everybody-loses-a-dramaturgy-for-extinction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/26\/doppelgangsters-everybody-loses-a-dramaturgy-for-extinction\/","title":{"rendered":"Doppelgangster\u2019s Everybody Loses<\/em>: A Dramaturgy for Extinction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Tobias Manderson-Galvin<\/strong>*<\/a> and Tom Payne<\/strong>**<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

In 1957, the eminent herpetologist Dr Karl Patterson Schmidt was bitten by a juvenile boomslang snake (Dyspholidus typus) at the Chicago Natural History Field Museum. Over the next twenty-four hours, he recorded his increasingly horrifying symptoms in what was to become his \u2018death diary\u2019 (Buck). In UK\/Australian performance company Doppelgangster\u2019s seventy-five-minute stage performance Everybody Loses: The Death Diary of Karl Patterson Schmidt<\/font> (2017), Schmidt\u2019s account (Pope 1958) provides a narrative framework through which to interrogate the meta themes of climate change and the sixth great extinction. By staging Schmidt\u2019s catastrophic death and inviting spectators to \u2018linger\u2019 with the performer in the space between, myriad ecological antagonisms are enacted. In this essay, co-creators Tobias Manderson-Galvin (MKA Theatre of New Writing, Melbourne) and Tom Payne (Sheffield Hallam University) draw upon Timothy Morton\u2019s concept of \u201cdark ecology\u201d (2018) and the \u201cdark ecology of elegy\u201d (2012), as well as thinking from within the field of Performance Studies, to explore, situate and extend the \u201cecological thought\u201d made apparent in Everybody Loses<\/font>. In doing so, they offer an innovative dramaturgy for extinction.

Keywords<\/strong>: elegy, ecological dramaturgy, dark ecology, anthropocene extinction, Karl Patterson Schmidt, Timothy Morton<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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To be a thing at all \u2013 a rock, a lizard, a human \u2013 is to be in a twist. How thought longs to twist and turn like the serpent poetry.<\/p>\nMorton, Dark Ecology<\/span> 1<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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The real truth about snake stories is that they are all too likely to be untrue.<\/p>\nPatterson Schmidt 1[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Introduction<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Everybody Loses <\/em>(2017), by UK\/Australian performance company Doppelgangster, is a seventy-five-minute stage performance in the form of a direct-address monologue. Written, directed, and designed by Australian playwright Tobias Manderson-Galvin and UK performer and academic Tom Payne, and performed by the latter, Everybody Loses<\/em> draws upon postdramatic, verbatim, recorded delivery, new writing, multimedia, and site-specific performance techniques, to offer a surreal evocation of the final twenty-four hours in the life of the renowned American herpetologist Dr Karl Patterson Schmidt (1890-1957). This essay draws upon Timothy Morton\u2019s concept of \u201cdark ecology\u201d (2018) and the \u201cdark ecology of elegy\u201d (2012), as well as thinking from within the field of Performance Studies, to explore, situate and extend the \u2018ecological thought\u2019 (2007) made apparent in this work. It offers a new dramaturgy for extinction and contributes to emergent models of research and practice within the domain of eco-theatre and performance that operates as a \u201cmeans or a lens through which we can know the unknowable and grapple with the hope, despair and guilt of this ecological epoch\u201d (Spalink and Winn-Lenetsky 5).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Doppelgangster formed in late 2015 following a two-week National Theatre Wales-led artist’s residency at Broneirion country house and Girl Guides headquarters in Llandinam, mid-Wales (Wales Lab, Summercamp, 22 June \u2013 3 July). The company\u2019s \u201cflagship\u201d production Doppelgangster\u2019s TITANIC <\/em>premiered on 5 and 6 November in a laneway at the side of Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff as part of the contemporary arts festival Experimentica 15. This anarchic and satirical re-working of James Cameron\u2019s similarly titled 1997 disaster blockbuster Titanic<\/em> took place at night, in, on, and around a \u201cweeping\u201d shipping container.[2]<\/sup><\/a> By drawing upon this ubiquitous icy metaphor for the climate crisis (Thanki; Cadman; Judge) and aligning itself with the co-star of Cameron\u2019s movie \u2013 prominent American actor and environmentalist, Leonardo Di Caprio \u2013 Doppelgangster sought to establish an oblique thematic relationship between its emergent theatre practice and contemporary work concerned with staging representations of the climate crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Tom Payne and Tobias Manderson-Galvin in Doppelgangster\u2019s TITANIC<\/em>. Presented at Experimentica 15, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff. Photo: Warren Orchard<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Born in Lake Forest Illinois in 1890, Schmidt was responsible for many significant scholarly contributions to herpetology, animal distribution, climate-change-linked species dispersal, and ecology (40). Schmidt\u2019s interest in snakes purportedly dated from 1915 (Goodnight et al. 39-40) and between 1942-1946 he was the President of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. For thirteen years, he served as the herpetological editor of Copeia <\/em>(1937-49), a journal dedicated to the discipline (41). It was in Copeia<\/em> that his personally recorded scientific account of his symptoms \u2013 dubbed his \u201cdeath diary\u201d (Science Friday<\/em>) \u2013 was posthumously published in December 1958 (Pope).[3]<\/sup><\/a> Schmidt\u2019s demise occurred at the age of sixty-seven, one month after he was awarded the title of Eminent Ecologist by the Ecological Society of America (Goodnight 40). Schmidt died on 26 September 1957 due to internal bleeding, twenty-four hours after he was bitten by a South African boomslang snake (Dyspholidus typus) at the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History, where he held the title of Curator Emeritus of Zoology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Schmidt\u2019s account provides a narrative framework through which Doppelgangster has creatively responded to American author Roy Scranton\u2019s provocative essay Learning to Die in the Anthropocene<\/em> (2015). The unofficial epochal designation \u201cAnthropocene\u201d was coined by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoemer in 2000 to \u201cemphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology\u201d and to account for the \u201cgrowing impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere, and at all, including global, scales\u201d (Crutzen and Stoemer 17).  The Anthropocene extinction – also referred to as the sixth mass extinction (Kolbert; Cowie, Bouchet and Fontaine; Ceballos, Ehrlich and Raven), or Holocene extinction (Turvey; Stuart, Kosintsev, Higham; Burney, Robertson and Piggott Burney) \u2013 is notable because \u201cthe rate of species extinction is now as much as 100 times that of the \u2018normal rate\u2019 throughout geological time [\u2026] a rare event [is] changing the environment so quickly that many organisms cannot evolve in response to it\u201d (Ceballos and Ehrlich 1080).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scranton describes his experience as a United States soldier in the second gulf conflict in Iraq and indicates that he could only continue to function amidst the horror and destruction of war by drawing on Samurai philosophy and the thinking of Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, which enabled him to accept that he was, in effect, already dead (Scranton 22). When he returned from war it occurred to him that the severity of the climate crisis required a similar psychological manoeuvre:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront our situation and realize that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the difficult task of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.<\/p>\nScranton 23<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Schmidt\u2019s scientific account of his own death is seen here as analogous to our ecological crisis. By staging extracts from his \u201cdeath diary\u201d the performance seeks to open a space in which to reflect upon the \u201cnew reality\u201d that Scranton sets out. Everybody Loses<\/em> explores the ways in which performance might enable the creation of a spectatorial encounter within which audiences might inhabit that space of learning, and commune with the dead (92). It invites spectators to \u201cabsent from the present a conceptual reality transcending time and space\u201d (95), thereby evoking the competing rhythms and spatiality of Anthropocene extinction. In so doing, Everybody Loses<\/em> invites critical reflection on the death of the self and the death of civilisation.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Tom Payne in the promotional poster for Everybody Loses, <\/em>Aberystwyth Arts Centre (2017). Photo: Wilson Liew<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

First performed in the Stwdio Theatre at Aberystwyth Arts Centre, mid-Wales (23 November 2017) Everybody Loses<\/em> has since been re-configured in a variety of unconventional and traditional theatrical locations, including a former power substation (La G\u00e9n\u00e9rale, Paris); the railway arches beneath Waterloo station (Waterloo Vaults, London); a boutique theatre in a former Victorian coach house (Tom Thumb Theatre, Margate); a former convent (La Universidad de Alcal\u00e1, Alcal\u00e1 de Henares); an independent cinema (The Projector, Singapore); a former lawn bowls club (Backbone Arts, Brisbane); a rear garden veranda in suburban Prahran (MKA Pop-up Theatre, Melbourne); a fetish club (Kings Cross Theatre, Sydney); a post-industrial garage arts space (Apparat Athen, Athens); and a black box studio at the Performance Lab, Sheffield Hallam University, where it was presented as a keynote performance as part of the Standing Conference of University Drama Departments (SCUDD, June 2019).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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