Ice-Trapped Performance

Małgorzata Szpakowska

Abstract

This article discusses Tomasz Kubikowski’s book Zjadanie psów [Dog-Eating] (Warszawa 2019), which combines the story of nineteenth-century polar expeditions – by John Ross, William Edward Parry, John Franklin, Elisha Kane and Fridtjof Nansen – with the concept of performance as “restored behaviour,” taken expertly from Richard Schechner. Excellently written, almost like a travel-adventure novel, the book presents Arctic exploration as a sequence of performances that owed their social significance to stories; without a story, getting to the pole was hardly worth the trouble, and all the above-mentioned explorers left such accounts. Kubikowski treats them as anthropological narratives, “stories of someone else’s experience”; he also reads in them what their authors were not aware of: for example, that the natives and their culture were completely invisible to the adventurers. The theoretical background of the book is rather complex, as the author has engaged with performance studies for almost twenty years, yet the book is (deliberately) written in such a way as to be enjoyed also by those who do not care for theory. (Trans. Z. Ziemann)