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Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events Baz Kershaw New York: Cambridge UP, 2007. 253 pp $100.00 cloth
In this book Baz Kershaw harnesses forty years of experience creating, analyzing, and theorizing performance events in order to generate a broad, sweeping read of theatrical figures, cinematic moments, environmental activism, biological experiments, and the use of concepts such as "applause" and "spectacle" in the theatre and elsewhere. Offering a definition of ecology as "in the widest sense . . . the study of the interaction and survival of ideas and programs (i.e., differences, complexes of differences, etc.) in circuits," Kershaw considers human and non-human, and organic and inorganic elements of "performance ecology" (and its subsection, "theatre ecology") distinguishable by those events housed in a recognizable theatrical venue or adopting familiar theatrical conventions (25). Contending that an active paradox always exists within environmental and theatrical situations, Kershaw develops a methodological structure based on the concepts of paradoxology and homology, which consists of locating seemingly opposing and analogous processes and viewpoints at work in natural phenomena (lightning, energy exchange, black holes) and theatrical activity (stage performing, spectacle-making, standing ovations). Lightning, which he describes as "one of the Earth's most theatrical and spectacularly common natural performance events," operates paradoxically by producing a fulgurite (or petrified lightning), a hollow glass tube that marks the path of electrical current after striking quartzose sand or soil (9). Kershaw reads the fulgurite as both a negative and a positive trace of the performance event that produced it: it is not the lightning itself, but it has the ability to manifest the lightning's charge. Given the ephemeral quality of the lightning, the fulgurite is a provocative, enduring materialization of the electric discharge. Kershaw applies this line of...