Abstract
What might theatre do if it loosened its grip on anthropocentric temporality and began composing in dialogue with rivers, bones, and deep time? This presentation emerges from The Group Biography, an in-progress, three-part performance combining voice, sound, and digital animation to explore entanglement across species, timescales, and forms of consciousness. Drawing on speculative storytelling, endurance art, and the legacies of action painting and chance operations, the work assembles a chorus that includes Neanderthal dharma talks, ancient riverbeds, ChatGPT, a guanaco bone, an enslaved cartographer, and 9,000-year-old handprints in a Patagonian cave. Together, they co-author a collective history that resists human-centered narrative arcs and reframes performance as a form of ecological and temporal collaboration. Rather than offering only a descriptive or analytic account, this presentation will include a live reading/performance of selected material from The Group Biography. The aim is not to present a polished or finalized work, but to stage the speculative method itself—to bring audiences into the generative space of deep-time dramaturgy and more-than-human composition. In doing so, I invite a shared inquiry into what theatre can do when it relinquishes attachments to human-centered time frames and human-centered epistemologies.
Presenters
Kathleen GoughAssociate Professor , English, Theatre, University of Vermont, Vermont, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
2026 Special Focus—Modeling Life Systems: Art, Algorithms, Ecologies
KEYWORDS
DEEP TIME DRAMATURGY, ANTHROPOCENTRIC TEMPORALITY, PERFORMANCE SCORES
