The Move On-line:
Stage 1: You’re on mute.
Stage 2: How do you get those cool backgrounds?
Stage 3: Wow, look at those cool theatre history/painting/Happy Birthday banner/old family photo images!
Stage 4: I’m just turning off my mic and camera but am listening. (Straightens office, paints nails, cooks)
Stage 5: Can we play games in here? We need a break!
Stage 6: (I need to get out of here …)_
The relentless screening of our lives during this Spring of 2020 – whether through teaching, hosting meetings and social events, having cocktails, watching something together, or doing creative projects – distances us but is also pulling us closer. It is reminding us of all the human voices in our lives, in the world. It is a platform for these voices, for questions, for images, for actions.
Our screened faces become a little uncanny, human but also non-human as the technologies glitch, mirror, are slightly out of focus, “slightly robotic.” Theatre artist Richard Maxwell’s 2010 Ads gave us a “live” performance of ghostly actors, performing monologues seemingly in front of us, but also not — they were projected via the 19th century Pepper’s Ghost technique (an optical illusion of projected images). Bodies both absent and present. In Cyborg Theatre I wrote (about Ads) that: “physically confronted with a live theatre with no actors, I understand it… at a level that precedes the languages necessary to understand because they are, perhaps, still the future.”[1] The future is here, but it was also the past — our stages of technological understanding precede us and haunt us into our futures.
We have been globally presenting as our technological selves, wanting to walk through the screens to hug and comfort and protest and stand together. We are “Zooming” on our computers, tablets, and phones, acknowledging, as Bess Rowen writes, our shared human/non-human personhoods. Even as we recall the technologies that have transported us in the past — to other landscapes in other worlds with other people — we struggle to find the languages to understand the future. As we emerge through the technological transition, the phone shifts from a device for diversion or connectivity to a human/nonhuman extension of our eyes and ears, a means of amplification.
Will these cyborgean human/nonhuman persons — us all — create a future in which our voices — however crackling, tinny, or glitched, however muted by social or technological interference — are heard?
[1] Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer, Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 2014), 92.
A stagehand enters, dressed in black, focused on the iPhone that she/he/they is/are carrying onto the stage. The stagehand sets the iPhone down on a central spot, gives the audience a look of importance, and exits. If it is not the most advanced iPhone, it is simply important that the stagehand believe it to be the newest and most expensive member of the iPhone empire and treat it as such. Sacred light on the iPhone. Maybe some angelic music?
A human person enters through the lightning port of the iPhone. They are dressed like an average person in the Apple store nearest to the theatre. They seem as surprised by their entrance as the audience.
Human Person: Is this my iPhone, or am I its human?
Human Person attempts to get back into the lightning port, instead pulls out a seemingly infinite number of iPhones, tablets, and laptops from their pockets, forming a stack of digital detritus.
Human Person: Repeating my question. Confused.
A Non-Human Person enters through the lightning port of one of the other devices. They look much like the human person except for one specific detail. Is it the inhuman glow of their skin? Is it the slightly unfocused look in their eye? Is it a slight robotic quality in their movements? Whatever it is, it is the only thing that separates them from Human Person. Human Person and Non-Human Person, who are standing six feet apart, look at each other. Human Person notices that Non-Human Person is not like them but ignores this out of politeness. They both nod in acknowledgement of their shared personhood. Human Person is happy to see another person, regardless of their humanity. Non-Human Person has learned that Human People like to be acknowledged and smiled at and so obliges. The two of them put their phones away and, maintaining their distance, step together into the back wall of the theatre, which has now become a computer screen. They instantaneously pop up onto the screen, just the two of them. Their projected/real faces turn to look at each other on the screen and touch hands through the boundary of their images.
(Remember those car commercials that ended with the whispered voice of the brand’s tagline ostensibly trying to beckon the viewer to purchase through the promise of speed? This next part should remind us of that.)
Voice, human or not: Zoom zoom.
Suddenly the Zoom screen begins to fill with twenty iPhones “looking around” at each other. They appear in gallery view. Some are old, some are new, some have cases to show individuality. The Brady Bunch theme song plays. The iPhones nod repeatedly, first in unison, then at their own tempos for some time. At just the right moment, Human Person and Non-Human Person reappear in the gallery view. They each reach through the screen frames and pick up one of the phones. They turn to each other while the images of the phones flicker.
Momentary darkness. (I mean a second of a blackout.) When the lights come back up, Human Person and Non-Human Person are standing in front of us, still six feet apart. They pull out their devices and dial. Sound of phones ringing. Both persons answer. We hear an undeniably human voice. First a few. Then hundreds. Then thousands. Then all of the human voices in the world, all at once. Spotlight on their faces and their personhoods.
End of Play.