| Summary: | What I aim to show in this written dissertation and the complementary creative works is a reciprocal movement between practice-led research—in which Performance contributes to knowledge in the transdisciplinary area of animal studies—and research-led practice—where performers in other animal studies disciplines form part of the relational ensembles from which Performances emerge ex avibus (Latin: from the birds). My title comes from ancient Roman times, when one of the means for divining the gods’ approval in human affairs was through signs conveyed ex avibus. By contrast, my subtitle, distributed performance by way of migratory shorebirds on the East Asian-Australasian Flyway, alludes to our contemporary time of the Anthropocene in which environmental scientists, evolutionary biologists, ornithologists, and citizen scientists are invested in the survival of birds that regularly disappear from view to breed in the remote Arctic tundra. What links all these places, epochs, and epistemologies is this question: how do birds lead humans to perform other versions of humanness? As the chapters unfold sequentially, and then from thesis to gallery space, each place will resemble a stage on which relational ensembles form and express themselves through different modes of performance. It is a conceptual design that I’ve learned from the migratory shorebirds. These aves must migrate strategically, flying for long distances and only occasionally landing at select staging sites. As the birds lead us from site to site, I ask the question: how does what’s happening here, on this interspecies and inter-agential stage, challenge or indeed redefine previous assumptions about performance of the social kind and Performance of the more marked cultural kind? In drawing out some propositional responses, chapter by chapter, I seek to explicate in written form what you will also find implicated in the creative work for this doctorate.
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