The Rise and Fall of Modern Water: From Staging Abstraction to Performing Place

Abstract

This essay critiques a diverse selection of theatre pieces as a means to explore the development and performative persistence of what geographer Jamie Linton calls "the modern water paradigm": the management regime whereby water is treated in isolation, as a volumetric abstraction, rather than as an integral part of inhabited environments. Using a theoretical basis drawn from Linton and Bruno Latour, the essay considers the political-ecological implications of this paradigm, and the need to move toward what Latour calls a "nonmodern constitution" that reintegrates nature and society rather than holding them apart conceptually. Henrik Ibsen's naturalist drama An Enemy of the People (1882) is examined first, as a playtext symptomatic of the rise of the modern water paradigm; here, the purification of water supplies provides the pretext and metaphor underpinning a technocratic narrowing of the body politic. Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann's Broadway musical Urinetown (2001), a dystopian comedy about water scarcity, is then read as signaling the existential crisis into which the modern water paradigm had fallen by the turn of the millennium. Finally, the author examines his own site-specific, practice-as-research pieces Seven Bridges (2015) and Weir Science (2017), both of which were made for the Leeds Waterfront Festival in the United Kingdom. These attempted a performative reading of the specifics of place, and an examination of the city's relationship with its river, as a means for reconsidering water as a meeting point for an expanded political collective comprising both human and nonhuman actors.

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