Ecofeminist Performance Analysis: The Interplay Between Critical Reflection and Diffraction in Pina Bausch’s Theatre of Exposure

This chapter explores how ecofeminist theory can inform the analysis of postdramatic theatre, focusing on two works by Pina Bausch: Blaubart (1977) and Vollmond (2006). The perspective presented here distinguishes between a critical ecofeminist mode, which exposes the gendered and ecological logics of domination, and a diffractive mode, which foregrounds material entanglement and the ongoing production of difference through which we are always already exposed to a more-than-human world. Drawing on concepts such as estrangement, exposure, and diffraction, the chapter argues that Bausch’s choreographies employ affective and sensory strategies that resist binary thinking and anthropocentrism. As a whole, the chapter shows how performance can participate in ecofeminist politics not by delivering overt messages, but by enacting new forms of relationality, attuning spectators to the porous, more-than-human conditions of embodiment, and opening up imaginaries beyond the logic of environmental mastery.