Tag Archives: nature

Cultural Dysbiosis: A Personal Essay by Ruth Kettle-Frisby

Photo: Ruth, far left, looking out at the view from Wennington Church

We invited Havering local, environmental activist and writer Ruth Kettle-Frisby to write a guest blog article on DYSBIOSIS after attending some of our DYSBIOSIS Creative Nature Workshops in Havering this month. 

What is nature to me?

When I first saw the term Dysbiosis – the title of the creative workshops here in Havering by Daedalus Theatre Company – my mind began to juxtapose discordant thoughts that seemed nevertheless to harmonise. Funnily enough, it is this very paradox that encapsulates nature.

Nature functions to such a finely tuned degree that the earth spins on its axis around the precise gravitational force to sustain life; and this mechanical harmony extends to our localised experiences here on earth, which can be beautiful to behold.

There are few things I enjoy more than an enchanted stroll around Warley Place when it’s sprinkled with clumps of dewy snowdrops glistening in the morning sun, sporadically dissected by ancient trees, some even thriving in supine slumber after great storms…or treating fluffy ducklings, flapping feral pigeons, and tame grey squirrels to veritable feasts at Langtons Gardens on a crisp Spring afternoon: scenes of comical unrest annually reverberate from the resident cob, angrily chasing persistent Canada geese from the lake; loss and sadness rippling in the still air as it becomes apparent on returning children’s fingers, that numbers no longer add up, and he’s attacked some of his own cygnets.

Nature continues to inspire artists, photographers and musicians; it provides us with sustenance, shelter, oxygen and medicine; it grinds our remains deep into its geology, and it contains coded messages of hope, regeneration and resilience, much like the Gingko trees that survived after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nature also has the ability to overwhelm with its might, brutality and caprice; blithely indifferent to some of our deepest instincts and desires.

In spite of our symbiosis with the rest of nature – to which we are intimately genetically connected – the dysbiosis we continue to wreak on our planetary ecosystems, with our continued burning of fossil fuels and so on, is destroying the delicate conditions that sustain a rich variety of life on Earth. 

Othering Nature and exploiting others

We often speak of ‘looking at’ nature, objectifying and othering it through a human lens; it’s as though life forms and processes in our ecology existed independently of each other. Although we live off and return to the earth – and breathe the air around us – we have distanced ourselves from assumptive ideas of ‘primitivism’ by disguising our natural interconnectivity in neatly folded plastic wrappers. 

The othering and politicising of nature in our language and our concepts can be found in the work of theologists and other thinkers, including social contract philosophers, who instilled fear of the ‘state of nature’ as something brutish that stands in conflict with civilised state control; contrasting nature with Western human rationality, as if human nature could achieve the paradoxical desire to transcend the rest of nature in order to conquer it. 

Our post-industrialist dependence on colonialist fossil fuel extraction and persistent burning has led big oil companies to maintain a culture of routinely poisoning the air we breathe, and to heat our shared habitat, which causes climate breakdown that is currently most severe in the Global South. This is making migration an increasing necessity for the survival of a variety of organisms, while pathological dysbiosis penetrates at biological levels with essential enzymes becoming denatured by climate change.

The Covid 19 pandemic tore across the globe; conflicts broke out in Kashmir, East Africa, and the Middle East, as well as the contrastingly highly publicised war in Ukraine; and billions of people have been impacted by floods, droughts and wildfires, always targeting the most marginalised people on the front lines first.

We are already struggling to cope with climate breakdown here in the UK. Parts of our local village of Wennngton were completely destroyed; homes and belongings were lost, and beloved pets and wildlife sadly killed. The UK wildfires of the summer of 2022 carried with them truths reverberating from Western colonialism with dysbiotic warnings, however invariably after such tragedies, those in power find ways to move the conversation along. This perpetuates cultural trends: after jolting reminders of our fragile mortalities, instead of becoming galvanised into action, we endeavour to reinter our dampened awareness that nature will transform and humble our own experiences. Keep calm and carry on, like zombies of convenience; living, polluting and voting, while women and girls of colour and disabled people suffer and die at the sharp end of climate breakdown. 

Kant thought that order in nature is the natural effect of our perceptual interaction with it. We are part of nature, and in perceiving it, we succeed in shaping it as it shapes our perceptions of it, creating a natural two-way symbiosis between our perceptual experience and reality. This is an interesting way of un-othering nature, and reconnecting with it conceptually at a metaphysical level, but the cultural story is very different.

The incoherence of selective narratives of dysbiosis

Stripping this down to logic, if nature is all that there is, then can it be ordered or disordered? Surely in the absence of any natural standard of orderliness beyond the socially constructed characteristics, disorder can only represent our perception in terms of reductive binaries that simply reveal truths about us and what we value. We separate flowers from weeds – or pets from pests and livestock – as wheat from chaff … nondisabled human worth from disabled lack of worth. This dehumanisation of people is a dangerous consequence of prejudiced perceptions of dysbiosis; fuelled by sustained, historically embedded power structures, they dominate the narrative to such a degree that they are sewn into the fabric of our basic, often unconscious assumptions.

My eldest daughter is six years old and has CDKL5: a neurodevelopmental genetic condition that is often referred to as ‘CDD’, standing for ‘CDKL5 Deficiency Disorder’. Non-disabled people taking for granted the working protein that was truncated for children like her does not justify the association of ‘deficiency’ and ‘disorder’ with human beings. When something is broken, we tend to fix it or throw it away; when children are labelled as ‘disordered’ by medical communities, nondisabled people with power tend to try either to fix disabled people according to nondisabled standards, or they marginalise them, compromising their worth and their safety in society.

We have spent centuries segregating people. Great thinkers, whose ideas endure today, pronounced some natural functions as ‘natural’, equating arbitrary ‘order’ with goodness; while perceptions of natural dysbiosis were labelled ‘unnatural’ and denigrated to ‘disorder’, abnormality, and sin.  

Here we find ourselves in dehumanising territories of supremacist political, religious and social ideologies throughout history. The Nazis persecuted and systematically murdered hundreds of thousands disabled people along with millions of Jews; white supremacist scientific practices fuelled by racist confirmation bias – with no biological basis – were used to justify, propagate and embed pernicious claims of ‘racial inferiority’, and the ‘biological disharmony’ of children of mixed background. Queer people throughout history are dismissed as dysbiotic ‘abominations’ of nature, and continue to live in fear and to suffer humiliation, harm and discrimination.

Intersecting racist, ableist and queerphobic prejudice is designed into all aspects of society, and a culture of worthlessness persists in public conscious and unconscious bias, evidenced throughout history: from celebrated figures such as Virginia Woolf, who described disabled people as ‘imbeciles’; to the ableist comments made by politicians today that betray the lack of humanity, dignity and value that they often feel entitled to attribute to disabled children.

Untangling cultural dysbiosis

The artists at Daedalus Theatre Company have inspired me to question ingrained tropes of dysbiosis that exist in scientific, religious, political and other cultural contexts, that have led us to ultimately minimise, disguise, or even deny the rights and expressions of marginalised people.  

How do we emerge from pernicious, supremacist cultural narratives of dysbiosis that have created marginalisation, engendered fear and bracketed off all forms of divergence? They have made their way into violence against women, girls and nature, upholding Western ideas and white coat medicine, widening the gulf between humans and other aspects of nature.

Nietzsche’s philosophy of aesthetics likens traditional human understandings of natural harmony with Apollo – god of reason, order and beauty; and chaotic disorder to Dionysus – god of ecstasy and insanity. Inspiringly, he thought that while we need both principles, we should use our wills to surrender our sense of self to nature in an intoxicated embrace of dysbiotic creativity!

I suspect it to be neither possible nor desirable to consistently bear (let alone affirm) nature in all its dispassionate, destructive revelry. However, I think we have a duty of care to ourselves, each other and our environment to openly question cultural mirages of socially constructed harmony based on harmful misappropriations of ‘nature’, and to find the courage to celebrate radically inclusive expressions of interdependent identity. 

Can our propensity to care overcome our impulse to dominate?

Can our propensity to care overcome our impulse to dominate? I don’t know, but I am pinning my hopes on our willingness to unlearn dysbiotic practices of entitlement. I hope we can continue to build momentum for climate justice, and learn to renature ourselves in our surroundings in more sophisticated, forest-inspired, collaborations so that future generations – and as many species as we can hold on to – can dance, play and work together to nature’s rhythms.

In the art world, there are interconnecting shoots popping up that teach us to embrace dysbiosis in all its divergent variety, offering us active opportunities to cultivate creative abandon, and loving acceptance from the grassroots.

DYSBIOSIS: Creative Nature Workshops – call for participants

Calling all Rainham and Wennington residents!

Our latest community programme is now live for DYSBIOSIS: Creative Nature Workshops. 

Join Daedalus Theatre Company for some fun and relaxed drop-in workshops and contribute to a collaborative artwork that will be displayed at Rainham Royals and Queens Theatre Hornchurch. Sign up via Google Forms here. If you need support with the form email tasnim@daedalustheatre.co.uk or if you prefer to do it on the phone, call Tasnim on 07942 476053

Location: Rainham and Wennington, East London

Dates:
Session 1. Saturday 24 February 2024, 11AM-2.30PM
Nature Walk at Rainham Marshes, Purfleet
Meeting point: Rainham Library, 6 Celtic Farm Road, Rainham RM13 9GP
Session 2. Friday 1 March 2024, 6-8.30PM
Creative Workshop, Royals Youth Centre, Viking Way, Rainham, RM13 9YG
Session 3. Friday 8 March 2024, 6-8.30PM
Creative Workshop, Royals Youth Centre, Viking Way, Rainham, RM13 9YG
Session 4. Friday 15 March 2024, 6-8.30PM
Creative Workshop, St Mary & St Peter’s Church, Wennington Road, Wennington, RM13 9DX 
Meeting point in Rainham for those who need transport to Wennington TBC.

Plus follow-up sessions later in the year! 

You do not need to attend every workshop.

Be part of a fun and relaxed project to explore how we relate to nature and the natural world. Havering is one of London’s greenest boroughs! It’s rich in nature and history. For example, did you know that 400,000 years ago, the Anglian ice sheets reached as far as Hornchurch, forcing the Thames into its present course, or that if you’re lucky, at low tide, you can see the remnants of an ancient forest from the Neolithic age?

This is an opportunity to explore your creativity with the support of interdisciplinary arts professionals from the Dysbiosis project. You’ll be guided through the process of making a personal creative response to the theme, then work with the rest of the group to make an installation that combines everyone’s work. The work will then be showcased at Rainham Royals and Queens Theatre Hornchurch. No experience necessary. 

Who is it for? All residents of the Rainham and Wennington area are welcome. Aimed at adults but children are welcome if supervised by an adult.

For more information, email Assistant Producer/Director Tasnim at tasnim@daedalustheatre.co.uk or call 07942 476053

Organised by Daedalus Theatre Company in partnership with Havering Changing and support from Queens Theatre Hornchurch and Arts Council England. 

Check out the Daedalus website and sign up for the Daedalus newsletter for more about the project Dysbiosis, the company and the latest Dysbiosis project updates or follow us on Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter) and Facebook.


Creative workshops at Poplar Union, Tower Hamlets, for a previous project: Mobile Incitement

Daedalus Theatre announce new partnership with Havering Changing

Date: 16 January 2024

Daedalus Theatre Company has been awarded Creative Community Support by Rainham Change Makers, the local Havering Changing steering group in Rainham, to deliver creative nature workshops in Rainham and Wennington this Spring 2024.

The creative nature workshops are for local adults in Rainham and Wennington with an interest in nature and a curiosity for visual arts. Together, we will work on a collective response to probing questions about nature and local green spaces that will be showcased as a mobile installation. The project will also experiment with sustainable materials and look at ecological ways of thinking. Work with the group, along with the Queens Theatre Hornchurch young company programme, will feed into our next iteration of the DYSBIOSIS project. 

The new work-in-progress project DYSBIOSIS began with an R&D at Queens Theatre Hornchurch in April 2023. Supported by Arts Council England, we delivered an R&D at Queens Theatre Hornchurch in Autumn with a group of exciting creative practitioners such as Zia Álmos Joshua and Havering local Kathryn Webb. The project seeks to explore our relationship with nature in the global north through a queer lens. 

Artist Spotlight: Yael Elisheva

We met up with the Dysbiosis team again for a second week of R&D at Queens Theatre Hornchurch two weeks ago. Our third spotlight is on theatremaker, physical performer, drag artist, drama facilitator and many more things Yael Elisheva. They often work in Jewish spaces and use their artistic practice as a means of examining Jewish culture and religion.

Photo: Hannah Davies

What is your relationship with nature?

In my work, I play with found objects and explore how they can be used unconventionally and with multiple purposes. I grew up observing the sabbath, which gave me a strong connection to nature and rest and play. In today’s Western society – our relationship with rest is often viewed as lazy. I’d love to challenge that and offer rest as a means of rejuvenation for our planet.

How do queerness and nature intersect?

When I first heard of different animals and plants that are constantly changing genders like oysters and mushrooms, I felt so validated in my own gender expression. 

How does your heritage influence the way you view/value nature?

As a jew, I have rituals and prayers that revolve around nature and gratitude for nature. I have been specifically interested in how the Jewish sabbath embodies an attitude of rest which allows nature to rest as well. 

Were any aspects of the project new to you (e.g. devising collaboratively, doing an R&D, working with a designer-led company) and if so, what did you expect coming in?

Dysbiosis R&D Part 2 – A Quick Glimpse!

We have lots more to say about this, along with some exciting news about how we’re working with local residents. But, in the meantime, Nabeela Zaman came along to our end-of-R&D sharing and made this lovely reel.

If you want to know more about the first part of the R&D, back in March, you can read about it here.

Artist Spotlight: Kathryn Webb

While we prepare for the next stage of Dysbiosis, our journey through queer ecology and environmental justice at Queens Theatre Hornchurch, we’re introducing some of the amazing artists we’re privileged to work with on the project. First up is Kathryn Webb.


Tell us about yourself and your creative practice.

Hi! My name is Kathryn and I’m a queer, neurodivergent, working-class creative from Cranham. Ever since I can remember, I’ve always been into ‘making things’. In primary school, me and my bestie used to shoot our own version of Doctor Who, complete with ketchup blood, on a camcorder in his back garden. Nowadays my creative output spans theatre, film, poetry and anything in between. I’ve been mentored by Sky Arts, Creative England, Rianne Pictures, and made a short film for the BBC100 Project. My work stems from an interest in marginalised voices, folklore, and queerness. Previous theatre work has been staged at Theatre503, Arcola, Golden Goose, Pleasance, and Omnibus.

What does queer ecology mean to you?

To me, queer ecology is about questioning what we take for granted when we think of nature, science and reproduction. Unpacking the colonialism and white supremacy of the ‘truths’ we’ve been given and expanding our horizons to see beyond binaries. Nature is brimming with examples of queerness – it’s no joke that we’ve always been here and always will. Through this process, I’ve been empowered to challenge the notion that we exist to procreate.

Woodland Walk – photos by Tan Nidhivir

A selection of some of the wonderful photos taken by visiting Thai photographer Tan Nidhivir of our Woodland Walk tryout the other week in Butcher’s Wood, Hassocks. Led by Dan Cox, the walk links natural history, folklore and mental health and is a collaboration with The Brightwood Project. We were very pleased with how it went and got some great feedback from our invited audience.

More about this rather exciting project as it develops…