Icy Love: Performing Affect and Emotion Feeling About Climate Change

The staging of ice might seem a particularly effective way of drawing spectator attention to the Anthropocene and climate change since ice can have a sensory appeal that encourages attentiveness and related bodily affects. This chapter contends, however, that an artistic intention to communicate about environmental protection may need to engage selective emotional feeling. It proposes that a prosody that shifts from seeing (or hearing) to feeling and then to caring within performance can enhance viewer participation and awareness of place. Performance with ice also implicitly evokes fears about the consequences of global warming that it may need to counteract. The analysis considers examples of twenty-first-century artistic works presenting ice and, in particular, THAW, a performance by the Australian physical theatre group, Legs on the Wall, that evocatively depicted human dependency and struggle by positioning a performer mid-air on melting ice. THAW evoked surprise, curiosity about precarity as well as a sense of exhilaration, in tandem with concern for the performer. There was an imaginative convergence of affect and emotional feeling in communication about the environment.