Choreographies of Landscape. Sally Ann Ness

performance” or “theatrical performance” or “dance performance” are. In this sense, landscape performance identifies landscape itself as something that is a kind of performance, something that is itself capable of performing. This is the definition that jars the most—unless it is taken as a relatively poetic expression (“performance” being read figuratively), or unless it is interpreted as identifying landscape as a discursive formation that determines the experiences of the human subjects who may be located and defined in relation to it—perhaps along the lines articulated by critical theorists such as Judith Butler or Michel Foucault. Neither of these interpretations, however, is my own. I seek to take the phrase as non-metaphorically as possible, and I do not define landscapes in general merely as human-made discursive formations. It is one main effort of this study, in fact, to demonstrate that such critical theoretical definitions are inadequate to the task of understanding exactly the kinds of performances that are here most at issue. Discursive definitions are not wrong, as far as they go, but they do not tell the whole story of landscape performance, either what it is or how it can come to mean all that it generally does, especially to visitors in Yosemite National Park.

When both senses of the phrase are taken together, “landscape performance” begins to function in a way that is something like the duck-rabbit image made famous by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953). That is, it can be understood to exhibit the character of a “multi-stable object” in the terms of phenomenological discourse (Downey 2004). It becomes a symbol that sustains simultaneously at least two equally valid understandings, the recognition of which depends on the particular perceptions and purposes of its various interpreters.⁴

I would characterize landscapes in general—and Yosemite National Park in particular—as colossal multi-stable objects in their own right. From some points of view, in relation to some kinds of experience, and for some purposes, they may be recognized as discursive formations—as essentially representational, societally constructed, “textual” objects or hermeneutic palimpsests.⁵ From other perspectives and for other purposes, they may be understood and experienced as geological formations, as nonhuman material realities. From still others, they may be perceived and lived as divinely inspired creations of pure light and energy, perhaps enlightening, perhaps maddening.⁶ The list could be extended indefinitely. A landscape will invariably come across as many things to many people, sustaining innumerable perspectives, experiences, and lines of thought simultaneously and through time.

      This multi-stable definition of the symbol “landscape performance” is not altogether unlike those more typically employed in ethnographic studies of landscape, although it is substantially different from them as well. Ethnographic conceptualizations of landscape tend to identify it either as the (at least partly) natural environmental context of a human cultural group or as a symbolic construct created through culturally specific practices (Bender and Winer 2001; Feld and Basso 1996; Low and Lawrence-Zuniga 2003). In its recognition of the symbol’s inherent multiplicity of interrelated meanings, the definition of landscape performance here employed is similar to the “processual” definitions of landscape developed by Eric Hirsch (1995) and David Crouch and Charlotta Malm (2003). However, in its recognition of the virtually innumerable variations of meaning the symbol can represent, it also resonates strongly with David Crouch’s later definition of landscape as a creative and emergent spatial “pregnancy of possibility” (2010: 1) as well as with Mark Dorrian and Gillian Rose’s definition of landscape as a “zone of transaction between multiple interests” that “needs to be understood in terms of what it does” (2003: 16). In this latter, doing-oriented respect, the symbol also bears a limited resemblance to Tim Ingold’s definition of landscape as the qualitative, heterogeneous, temporal and embodied, moving form of a “taskscape” (2000: 190–200). It recognizes, as does Ingold’s conceptualization, the basic relation between purposive habits of interaction (“dwelling” in Ingold’s terms) and the variability of a given landscape’s definition. However, the closest definitional parallel is evident, perhaps, with respect to Erin Manning’s “metastable” conceptualization of the plastic, virtual-real, “relationscape,” a topological milieu rhythmically unfolding through its “living coordinates”—durations that embody the convergence of movements of thought still in the process of taking form (2009: 5–11, 159, 181, 183, 197, 228).

Despite the limited correspondences to all of these definitions, the variability and inclusiveness of the multi-stable definition adopted here is greater than any of these alternatives allow. It argues that no single definition individually, and no human definitions collectively, can represent all that “landscape” or “landscape performance,” understood pragmatically, can come to mean, despite the probability that any definition is likely to be valid in some limited respect and optimal for certain purposes.⁷ This said, landscapes and their performances are not all things to all people. They are not everything and therefore nothing in terms of their definitional character and meaningfulness. Yosemite National Park, as this book documents, is a spectacularly elaborate case in point of a landscape that exhibits and performs the character of a highly distinctive multi-stable object. While its variability of perception is rivaled only by the intensity with which beliefs about its true character tend to become fixed, regardless, all of its various visitors, if they were inclined to agree about anything, would probably agree that there is no landscape in the world remotely like it. Its distinctive features—its three-thousand-foot granite cliffs, domes, and spires; its enormous waterfalls, towering pines, and massive black oak trees; its officially “wild and scenic” Merced River—all of these elements of the landscape are instantly recognizable and unmistakable to those who have spent any significant time among them. As Rebecca Solnit, one of the park’s most astute and critical interpreters, has observed, “Yosemite is a singular place onto which are mapped myriad expectations and desires” (2005: ix). And as Leonard McKenzie, one of Yosemite’s chief naturalists during the twentieth century, once remarked, “Among the Earth’s distinctive places, this showcase occupies a distinctive niche in the human spirit” (cited in Neill and Palmer 1994: 15).

      It is only in conceiving of landscape in general, and of landscape performance in particular, in this multi-stable, vexed way that these concepts stand a chance of moving the study of cultural performance (one might now want to put quotations marks around the word “cultural” here) into some relatively unknown fields of meaning-making. Only in this way can the concepts lead thinking toward encounters with certain stages of performance, cultural and otherwise, that have gone relatively unnoticed in performance research, but which may be seen to bear, at times tellingly, on kinds of performance that definitely have not done so. My hope, in this regard, is that the phrase’s awkwardness is temporary. As its definition becomes more familiar, it may acquire a certain admirable quality and value in its own right, as may the somewhat unconventional kinds of performance it seeks to illuminate.

      A Rhetorical Semeiotic Approach

There are a number of theoretical sources employed and engaged in this book. Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the post-phenomenologists who have extended his work; Henri Bergson and the “Bergsonism” that informs Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory, as well as the vitalism of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—all of these figures loom large throughout the pages that follow. So do certain anthropological luminaries such as Gregory Bateson, Victor Turner, Tim Ingold, Arjun Appadurai, and Saba Mahmood. Theorists of choreographic performance André Lepecki and Erin Manning are also crucial to the mix. All assist variously in the complex project of working through diverse facets of landscape performance. However, the theorist who plays the greatest role, although not always the most visible, is the sign theorist and scientist/philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. It is through Peirce’s pragmaticist semeiotic that I have come to see the relevance and the value of the other approaches herein employed.⁸ Likewise, it is in relation to Peirce’s sign theory that I have identified some of their limitations.