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This article is based on a paper first presented at the Performance Studies international annual conference on Performing Rights at Queen Mary, University of London, 2006. It has been rewritten specially for this themed issue of "RiDE" in light of my research following publication of "Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events" in 2007. Mainly in the format of a thought experiment, it argues that the current ecological crisis of global warming could be a systemic "insanity" of planet Earth produced by a human compulsion to perform. It aims to demonstrate that finding cures for this affliction requires a radical revision of how "Homo sapiens" values human rights via complementary biotic rights inclusive of other organic species. As these rights are an aspect of ongoing global performance ecologies understood as integral to eco-systemic evolution, it becomes necessary for humans to invent refreshed ways of assessing how futures variously emerge through the natures of present and past. The article's thought experimental methods are adopted, in part, so that a few jocular analytical tropes can be treated as entirely serious. Hence it proposes that the concept "retro-modernisation" should be recycled immediately and that one of the shortest of verbal paradoxes is adopted as a motto by all eco-warriors of the dramatic, theatrical and performing arts--but it is certainly not "Be spontaneous!" (Contains 5 notes and 3 figures.)

Invited by NTQ to review two recent books on performance studies--Jon McKenzie's Perform or Else: from Discipline to Performance and Richard Schechners's Performance Studies: an Introduction--Baz Kershaw found himself in a Catch-22 situation: given the vast territories they claimed for the discipline, how could a short survey do them justice? Yet more perplexing, how might a close analysis of their diffusive visions proceed, even in a longer essay? Struck by their common use of air disasters as denouements and their respective publication dates just six months before and after 9/11, he uses these and other homologies as a route into exploring the ethical and political implications for the new century of the arguments employed by the two texts. Drawing on the philosophicalinnovation of 'dialetheism', which deploys paradox to stretch the bounds of classical logic, he also considers the books' differences and suggests a kind of de-territorialized reconciliation through his notion of a 'paradoxology' of performance. He offers the resulting search for depth in surfaces, beginnings in endings, presence in absences, and truth in contradictions as an exemplification of philosopher Po-chang's aphorism about the quest for Buddha's nature: 'It's much like riding an ox in search of the ox.' Baz Kershaw holds the Chair of Drama at Bristol University. His many publications include Engineers of the Imagination (Methuen, 1990), The Politics of Performance (Routledge, 1992), and The Radical in Performance (Routledge, 1999), and he is editor of The Cambridge History of British Theatre: Volume 3, Since 1895 (CUP, 2005). He is also Director of the AHRC-funded major research project PARIP--Practice as Research in Performance.

THE PROBLEM OF APPLAUSE Applause, apparently, is not what it used to be. In a recent brief report on first-night West End audiences, Lyn Gardner, theatre critic for The Guardian, [...]

In what would a postmodern theatrum mundi, or 'theatre of the world', consist? In an ironic inversion of the very concept, with the microcosm issuing a unilateral declaration of independence - or of incorporation? Or in a neo-neoplatonic recognition that it is but a cultural construct of an outer world that is itself culturally constructed? In the following article, Baz Kershaw makes connections between the high-imperial Victorian love of glasshouses, which at once created and constrained their 'theatre of nature', and the massive 'nineties ecological experiment of 'Biosphere II' - 'a gigantic glass ark the size of an aircraft hangar situated in the Southern Arizona desert', which embraces all the main types of terrain in the global eco-system. In the Biosphere's ambiguous position between deeply serious scientific experiment and commodified theme park, Kershaw sees an hermetically-sealed system analogous to much contemporary theatre - whose intrinsic opacity is often further blurred by a theorizing no less reductive than that of the obsessive Victorian taxonomists. He offers not answers, but 'meditations' on the problem of creating an ecologically meaningful theatre. Baz Kershaw, currently Professor of Drama at the University of Bristol, originally trained and worked as a design engineer. He has had extensive experience as a director and writer in radical theatre, including productions at the Drury Lane Arts Lab and as co-director of Medium Fair, the first mobile rural community arts group, and of the reminiscence theatre company Fair Old Times. He is the author of The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (Routledge, 1992) and The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard (Routledge, 1999), and co-author of Engineers of the Imagination: the Welfare State Handbook (Methuen, 1990).

Everybody would agree that agitational political theatre has fallen on hard times, but whether this is due to a changed political climate, a changed theatre, or a more politicized relationship between companies and funding bodies remains a matter for debate. Here, Baz Kershaw adopts a lateral approach to the problem, looking not at dramatized forms of protest but at protest as an action which has itself become increasingly theatricalized - in part owing to its own tactics and choices, in part to the ways in which media coverage creates its own version of politics as performance. After looking at the major focuses of protest in two decades after 1968, Baz Kershaw examines the ways in which political and performance theory has and has not addressed the issue. Presently Head of the Department of Theatre Studies in the University of Lancaster, his previous publications include Engineers of the Imagination: the Welfare State Handbook (with Tony Coult, 1983) and the Politics of Performance: Political Theatre as Cultural Intervention (1992).

In his earlier article, 'Poaching in Thatcherland: a Case of Radical Community Theatre', (NTQ34, May 1993), Baz Kershaw explored the work of the regional touring group EMMA during the 1970s, looking in particular at the quality of 'performative contradiction' which enabled it, for example, to make a subversive political statement within the ostensibly safe ambience of a play steeped in rural nostalgia. Here, he explores other paradoxes of that era of burgeoning alternative and community theatre activity in the years before Thatcher, assessing the role and the 'hidden agenda' of the funding bodies, and analyzing and contrasting the working methods, aims, and resources of two of their very different clients - the 'national' fringe company Joint Stock, and the small-scale 'reminiscence theatre' group, Fair Old Times. Although both groups were engaged in the ostensibly radical and oppositional theatre practice which eventually led to their closures, there was, notes Kershaw, an increasing tendency by the funding bodies to judge the work of the latter by the more amply endowed standards of the former. Baz Kershaw, who lectures in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University, wrote for the original Theatre Quarterly on the work of Fair Old Times's 'parent' company, Medium Fair (TQ30, 1978), and has put the present studies into a broader context in his most recent book, The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (Routledge, 1992). He is co-author, with Tony Coult, of Engineers of the Imagination (Methuen, 1983), a study of Welfare State, and has also contributed to Performance and Theatre Papers.

EMMA was one of the many small-scale touring groups which flourished as part of the community theatre movement of the 1970s. That it died within a year of the Thatcher decade was due, ironically, not to direct political intervention but to a financial crisis within its funding body, East Midlands Arts, brought on by its attempt to centralize community projects and render them safely retrospective. Here, Baz Kershaw compares the practice of EMMA with its stated intentions, and looks in detail at one of its self-created plays, The Poacher, as an example of 'performative contradiction' - in this case, the making of a subversive political statement within the ostensibly safe ambience of the rural nostalgia industry. Baz Kershaw, who lectures in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University, wrote for the original Theatre Quarterly on the rural community arts group Medium Fair. He has also contributed to Performance and Theatre Papers, and was co-author with Tony Coult of a study of Welfare State, Engineers of the Imagination. His most recent work is The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (Routledge, 1992).

The emergence of new performance paradigms in the second half of the twentieth century is only now being recognized as a fresh phase in human history. The creation of the new discipline, or, as some would call it, the anti-discipline of performance studies in universities is just a small chapter in a ubiquitous story. Everywhere performance is becoming a key quality of endeavour, whether in science and technology, commerce and industry, government and civics, or humanities and the arts. We are experiencing the creation of what Baz Kershaw here calls the `performative society' -- a society in which the human is crucially constituted through performance. But in such a society, what happens to the traditional notions and practices of drama and theatre? In this inaugural lecture, Kershaw looks for signs and portents of the future of drama and theatre in the performative society, finds mostly dissolution and deep panic, and tentatively suggests the need for a radical turn that will embrace the promiscuity of performance. Baz Kershaw, currently Professor of Drama at the University of Bristol, trained and worked as a design engineer before reading English and Philosophy at Manchester University. He has had extensive experience as a director and writer in radical theatre, including productions at the Drury Lane Arts Lab and with the Devon-based group Medium Fair, where he founded the first reminiscence theatre company Fair Old Times. His latest book is The Radical in Performance (Routledge, 1999). More recently he wrote about the ecologies of performance in NTQ 62.