What is Ecoperformance?
The concept ecoperformance was coined by the Brazilian performing artist Maura Baiocchi in 2009, as part of the inauguration of a new cycle of Taanteatro works related to the performative investigation of tensions between body, ancestry, and environment. Ecoperformance understands environment and body as inseparable dimensions of performative creation. In an ecoperformance, the environment constitutes a living and interactive play of presences and forces. The performer is not the central agent, but one of the play’s component‘s. At the same time as an ecoperformance experiments with environmental interactions as a performative event, it configures itself an environmental process. Ecoperformance can take place in any land- scape, natural or urban, and may, among other possibilities, question, honor and reaffirm human being/environment interconnections. It may serve to raise the awareness of the harmful environmental impact of human actions, and, eventually, become a vehicle of political denunciation.
Authentic ecoperformance is inseparable from the eco-ethical and eco-poetic presence of the performer. For this reason, ecoperformative presence should not be confused with the aestheticized posing in front of decorative backdrops employed in some site-specific spectacles that only strive to aggrandize the aura of the artist. It is rather grounded in schizopresence and conveived to be experienced as a dynamic process of interaction and mutual immanence between the body of the performer and the forces and forms that compose the atmosphere of tensions characteristic of the performative environment.
In 2011, Taanteatro Companhia organized the 1st Forum of Ecoperformance. Under the motto The environment is the people. The event took place on World Environment Day, at the Umberto da Silva Dance Center of Olido Gallery in São Paulo. The following year, the second forum, Ecology and Performing Arts, based on a tetra pillar optics of sustainability (ecology, ethics, aesthetics, and economics) was held at the cultural space Mundo Pensante. The third forum, Environment as performance, was coordinated in 2013 at Espacio La Caracola in Córdoba/Argentina.
Taanteatro Companhia promoted and directed ecoperformances in the Moon Valley of the Chapada dos Veadeiros in the Central-West of Brazil; between the giant cacti of Pucará and in Tilcara’s Devil’s Throat in the Andes of Jujuy Province, Argentina; in the aridity of the Greek island of Rhodos; and in the terra cotta colored salt lakes of Matola, Mozambique. The company also interacted with the colo- nial center of Ouro Preto em Minas Gerais; with the canalized banks of the river Arroyo de La Cañada, in Cordoba, Argentina; and with the open sea at Solar do Unhão, in Salvador, Bahia. In São Paulo, it intervened in avenues, bridges, tunnels, plazas, monuments, parks, canals, cemeteries, churches, and subways. Some of these ecoperformances were recorded and disseminated through photography and video.
Taanteatro & Ecoperformance - Events
June 2011
June 2012
3rd Ecoperformance Forum (Córdoba/Argentina)
June 2013
[de]colonization Project - Ecoperformance Forum
September 2019