The MacroPlastic Workout
“What does it mean to exercise as a cyborg who has consumed three tonnes of microplastic? Do devolved former human Neanderthals still go to the gym? What’s the soundtrack to your cardio workout in the year 3000?”
Throat Pleats presents their 55-minute performance work:
A fitness routine for posthuman ecologies.
About the work
Twenty-first-century humans have a “habit of parsing the world into dull matter (it, things) and vibrant life (us, beings)” (Jane Bennett 2010). Drawing on philosophy from the environmental humanities where binaries between living and non-living materials and human and non-human lives are blurred, the performers embark on a whimsical material exploration of latex, plastic and rubber as lively agents in imagined lives. The man-made materials of the Anthropocene have fled their makers to form new weird ecologies (new plastic infused geological forms like the plastiglomerate, newly discovered algae species adapted to digest PET plastic and drifting marine plastics as new ecological habitats for microbial communities): how can we as humans attempt to live in, find joy in, and find solutions to a world choked by our own products and teetering on the edge of environmental collapse. The MacroPlastic Workout embraces and finds whimsy in strange, imagined futures where materials and beings biologically entangle.
The show incorporates elements of live music, clowning, electronic music, a self-sounding installation and custom-made sound costumes. Throat Pleats uses the humanly unique cultural construct of a ‘workout’ as a structural and narrative premise to interrogate these ideas. The ‘workout’ is a space where we simultaneously maintain health/wellbeing and but also where we court and peacock for our peers through abstract movement and performance. The highly unnatural conceit of a gym provides a human setting for the two performers to engage in an imagined posthuman courtship display where the materials around them are integral to their biology. How can we see ourselves as integrated into a new petrochemical plastic ecology and more specifically, how will we maintain ‘good health’ and ‘wellbeing’ in bodies and worlds riddled with invasive man-made detritus?
As two queer performers (with backgrounds as classical musicians) they use expanded forms of clarinet and percussion technique in an attempt to ‘queer’ classical instrumental practices, where the expressive capacity of instruments is abstracted and extended. They establish an elaborate plastic gymnasium activated using sound, movement and clowning. The duo has been experimenting with balloons as means of playing musical instruments (clarinet and percussion): delicate expanding sacs of human breath being an apt visual metaphor for a collective rising anxiety about the state of our world. The work challenges what a musical instrument is via repurposing detritus of the Anthropocene as well as finding humour, joy and play in that process. The MacroPlastic Workout involves a literal ‘working out’ of contemporary classical music composition at the meeting point of the sacred and the silly.