Performing Resilience: Anchorage and Leverage in Live Action Role-Play Drama

Abstract

The concept of resilience is frequently described within neoliberal discourses as the ability of individuals to bounce back from shocks and reflexively adapt to changing circumstances. In ecological sciences, however, resilience is more commonly understood as the capacity of systems to radically transform themselves, when their usual mode of operation is challenged, rather than simply reverting to their original state. This article considers how live action role-play, as a form of participatory performance, might support ecological resilience by enabling players to actively reflect on their cultural practices in constructing the systems of their play and develop new capacities in the process through intersubjective exchanges with diverse others.The notion of performing resilience is concretised through discussion of artistic research residencies at Trumpington Community Orchard in Cambridge in 2017 and the Peartree Bridge estate in Milton Keynes in 2018. These projects explored how encounters with unfamiliar spaces and beings might enable participants to play with their resilient changeability. Specifically, the article addresses the value of spatial reflexivity in building resilience, proposing spatial defamiliarization as an aesthetic strategy for transcending the immediate familiarity of habitual practices, expanding participants’ horizons of perception and imagination. These arguments yield a theoretical model for cultivating resilience through participatory performance termed anchorage-leverage. This model suggests that habit can provide the foundation for potential transformations of cultural practices as existing capacities are reconfigured by new relational connections, conferring new affordances that enable participants to radically reconfigure the ecologies in which they play and live.