FROM ECOPHOBIA TO ECOSOPHY IN CHANTAL BILODEAU'S SILA

Abstract

Ecological thinking, which has recently found expression in a wide range of critical and literary works, has been slow to take hold in the ?eld of theatre and performance arts, both in scholarship and practice. Ecological theatre, placing ecological reciprocity at the centre of its dramatic and thematic content, rejects the humanist paradigm of Western theatre, situating humans and non-humans in a mutually reliant framework. Thus, ecological theatre problematizes the notion of ecophobia that postulates the superiority of humans over non-humans, shoring up culture/nature dualism. Drawing upon Felix Guattari's notion of 'ecosophy' in The Three Ecologies (2000), ecosophical theatre emerges as a new kind of ecological theatre, which includes not only human-non-human interactions but also social relations and human subjectivity. Therefore, by bringing into the spotlight the ecosophical theatre qualities, this paper aims at exploring how ecosophical theatre connects subjective, social, and ecological registers through new ethico-political and aesthetic paradigms and allows for fresh modes of existence, social recon?gurations, and original communitarian harmonies. In this context, by analyzing French-Canadian playwright Chantal Bilodeau's Sila (2015) from an ecosophical point of view, this paper indicates that Bilodeau participates in the processes of resingularization and social construction by making use of theatre's capacity to modify our subjectivities through the 'ethico-political and aesthetic paradigms' that Guattari suggests.