Performing Ice

In the Anthropocene, icy environments have taken on a new centrality and emotional valency. This book examines the diverse ways in which ice and humans have performed with and alongside each other over the last few centuries, so as to better understand our entangled futures. Icescapes - glaciers, bergs, floes, ice shelves - are places of paradox. Solid and weighty, they are nonetheless always on the move, unstable, untrustworthy, liable to collapse, overturn, or melt. Icescapes have featured - indeed, starred - in conventional theatrical performances since at least the eighteenth century. More recently, the performing arts - site-specific or otherwise - have provoked a different set of considerations of human interactions with these non-human objects, particularly as concerns over anthropogenic warming have mounted. The performances analysed in the book range from the theatrical to the everyday, from the historical to the contemporary, from low-latitude events in interior spaces to embodied encounters with the frozen environment.

Carolyn Philpott is Senior Lecturer in Musicology and Associate Head - Research at the University of Tasmania’s School of Creative Arts and Media, Australia, as well as Adjunct Senior Researcher at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, Australia. She has published widely on music and place in journals and books in the fields of musicology and Antarctic studies.

Elizabeth Leane is Professor of English (School of Humanities) and Associate Dean - Research (College of Arts, Law, and Education) at the University of Tasmania, Australia. Her books include Antarctica in Fiction (2012), South Pole: Nature andCulture (2016), and the co-edited collection Anthropocene Antarctica (2019).

Matt Delbridge is Professor of Performance Studies and Head of School, Communication and Creative Arts, at Deakin University, Australia, and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Creative Media, City University Hong Kong, Hong Kong. He is the author of Motion Capture in Performance (2015).