Digital Prophesies Lab

An Ancient Greek myth tells that Zeus decided to determine where the centre of “Grandmother Earth” or Gaia is. To do that, he sent two eagles to fly in opposite directions – one from the Western extreme and the other one from the Eastern extreme of the sky. Their trajectories crossed over town of Delphi, seated on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. Zeus marked the spot by placing a stone known as omphalos or the naval of Gaia. At that place the most famous and influential temple of Antiquity emerged – The Temple of Apollo, where Pythia spelled her prophesies during certain months of the year.

Yet, in the 21^st century we find out that the centre of the Earth has moved, at least temporarily, to Cologne, Germany. At Offenbachplatz to be precise. There the oracles of Delphi meet us at the end of a theatrical journey digi/topia. It involves 30 non-professional actors (with the exception of several elderly actors from the troop of the theatre) between the ages of 13 and 78, whom take their “test subjects”, the members of the audience, into small groups of up to 12 people in every 15-minutes through their performative installation, dedicated to the possible scenarios about the future they can imagine. It lasts about 90 minutes and unfolds between the two buildings of Schauspiel Köln, a significant part of which is undergoing reconstruction at the moment. Like the paths of the two eagles, it also presents two opposite to one another possible trajectories about what might be coming next: the utopian one and the dystopian one. Near the end they come together in a scene, where the audience is standing in a circle, each person showing to the others his or her just created avatar on the tablet, received at the entrance of the room, when two oracles appear to share their prophesies in the form of mystic sentences.

According the digital traces left intentionally on the official Instagram profile of the project, the first rehearsal of the group took place on 25^th of February 2019. They worked together with the director and theatre pedagogue Bassam Ghazi, artistic manager Saliha Shagasi and the dramaturge Julia Fischer. And it feels like it has been a well-guided and structured but yet collaborative creative process. A separate journey on its own for the participants themselves, through which a personal performance, reflecting their own present concerns, fears, thoughts and positive anticipations has emerged.

The result of it, which is being presented between 17^th and 19^th of May to the public, consists of 4 major stages, following one another chronologically, clearly marked and announced within the performance: assumption, utopia, dystopia and digi/topia. The general framework in which digi/topia happens is the one a scientific laboratory, which studies the future, entitled “Laboratory for Future-Oriented Perspective Research (LzP)” – a common image when future is discussed, which implies the belief that what is coming next can be predicted, controlled and even directed, as opposed to be thoroughly chaotic and random. The scientists and the different characters inhibiting this space gently guide the audience through each scene and pass on the group to one another very rhythmically.

The assumption phase begins at the very entrance of the theatre building, right next to the box office, where data, including shoe size, is collected for each “test subject”. Afterwards two researchers in white aprons welcome the participants on the stage of the theatre. There they help them to calibrate and dive into digi/topia’s experiment through VR glasses and a short movie. As a matter of fact, that is the only instance when the audience is situated in a functioning theatre space, though again the theatrical convention is converted, since the viewers are also main actors in this performance. Thus, since everyone in the group is wearing the VR glasses, everyone is focused on the projection screened in them and there is no viewer-viewing situation. It is only the young actors, playing the scientists in the lab, who are actually observing their “test subject” on the stage. And from here on the digi/topia journey continues backstage, thought the other half of theatre building, the spots which are meant to remain invisible for the theatre-goers most of the time: the corridors, makeup, dressing and rehearsal rooms, the basement and the main stage of the building on the other side of the square, which is under construction and closed for the public since 2013.

The second phase of the experiment is the “place too good to be true”, which is the famous utopia – a genre capturing and triggering human imagination with a great strength especially since 1516, when Thomas More best-known work Utopia was printed for a first time. In the performance, the digi/topia’s utopia is introduced to the audience by the character of Dr. Emmett “Doc” Brown, the inventor of the first-time travel machine from the popular American science fiction film from 1985 Back To The Future. This is one of the few direct references in digi/topia, which clearly indicates the intentional choice of the performance to work with images from popular culture.

The visions of a positive future presented discuss topics such as: the choice to continue getting old, instead of taking the opportunity to never age; politics and the very social and equal model of a country that has been achieved in Germany and shall be spread across the world; the possibility to have nice vacations in outer space; ecology in terms of the successful creation of plastic-eating robot and the fact that people have learnt to live with only what is necessary; appearance of the perfect love which is bodiless and totally virtual, with a perfect algorithm, that completely matches the needs of its lover. As a matter of fact, what makes this part utopian is not that the cases presented are not dubious, as some of them are actually quite twofold and seem ironic or as setting questions for further debate, but is that the personages are clearly happy in the situation the audience members encounter them in, their attitude is as if something nice and very positive is happening to them, even in the cases one sees from aside this does not necessary seems to be true.

This tone completely rolls over when the audience is taken into the dystopian phase – the dark counterpart of the utopia, which has prevailed in literature and art of the 20^th century. 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke are among the most obvious titles that come to mind when the term – meaning “a bad-utopia” or “an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic” (according to Oxford dictionary – A/N) – is mentioned. What is also worth noting is that in the recent years, with the quick development of platforms such as Netflix and HBO Go and the TV series produced by them, the dystopian genre is on the rise with productions like Black Mirror, The Handmaid’s Tale (based on Margaret Atwood’s novel from 1985), The Society, West World and many others attracting thousands of viewers. And it feels like those TV shows are part of the closer context in which the digi/topia performance exists and “thinks” about the future. Most of them choose as a narrative strategy the creation of a complete image of the tumbledown world, which is shown bit by bit from within series after series. However, Black Mirror for example opts for presenting different case studies of particular situations, posing ethical questions in each episode, which happen to different people in diverse surroundings. Digi/topia seems to be making a similar dramaturgical choice: it unfolds as a series of separate scenes, where the audience sees each character once and a very particular situation, without a narrative link between them beyond the overall frameworks of the different stages that they are placed into and the general topic of the work.

To enter the dystopian phase of digi/topia, the audience is equipped with prerequisites for construction workers – special shoes with thick soles, helmets and protective vests – emphasizing the peculiarity of what is coming, and taken downstairs, in the gloomy, wet basement, linking the two buildings. Here live the professor and her test subject, that goes insane and asks for more and more broken glass; the librarian, taking good care of the bookworms; the ecologist worried that there is no nature left; the girl, obsessed with likes on social media, who becomes hysterical because she could not finish her latest post due to an empty battery; the paranoiac man, convinced that microchips have been injected into everyone a long time ago; the arrogant female robot, dressed in an evening dress, who let us know that robots are in charge and people are doing what they want for quite some time now; the actress, who reminisces about what it felt like to act live on stage and to be a real human.

When the audience is passing through the dystopian stage of the digi/topia experiment, the scientists, who were the leading figures in most of the scenes during the utopian stage, take a step back and become more like supervisors, escorting the “test subjects” and letting them experience what is there, without interacting with them. Their white aprons are not seen anymore, there are only staff people around, taking care of the security and quietly following the group, while it takes a look at this “exhibition” of cheerless, depressed and dim characters, living in the dark corridor beneath the ground.

They appeared again in the last stage – the digi/topia itself. It begins upstairs, where the light is bright and a few minutes later the oracles of Delphi will dance among the group, spelling their magic words and attempting to somehow connect the two extremes of what is the best possible to happen and the worst possible to come, according to the creators of digi/topia. Their appearance also reminds that the quest for predicting the future is not new at all and what lays ahead is simultaneously unpredictable and up to us.

Published 27 June 2019

A Space For Everybody

Digital Festival Night at the Volkstheater Wien

The Volkstheater in Vienna opens its virtual doors and together with the participating countries Germany, France, Hungary and Greece, the theatre stage becomes a dance floor for a common future.

I am sitting with other theatregoers and participants in the lovely auditorium of the Volkstheater. The stage is empty except for a cinema screen and four young women who are hosting the evening and are entertaining both the Viennese audience as well as the four participating theatre groups. There is a relaxed atmosphere reminiscent of a theatre rehearsal, all doors are open, people sit where they like. Some are moving around; others are looking at the additional exhibitions. The lighting is cleverly chosen. Dark enough in order to create a feeling of intimacy but also bright enough in order to be able to move around accident-free.

Digital Natives is not just the name of this festival, it also identifies the generation of the participants. They all grew up with the internet and navigate it instinctively. Their approach displays confidence verging on naivety, which they seem to have not only with regards to the internet but also to our future. This evening I can share in the enthusiasm and the faith which these many young people have dedicated to this project. The play Concord Floral by Jordan Tannahill is the junction which brings all participating theatres together. The Junges Volkstheater has already staged the Austrian première in 2018. For the project #digitalnatives19, co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union, Vienna has staged a continuation of the play together with Silver Surver while the other countries have staged new productions of Concord Floral in the recent weeks and months.

Back to the auditorium: the entertaining of the Viennese audience has finished and the live broadcast from the other theatre groups starts. It begins with the Schauspiel Köln. The young actors and actresses explain their approach to the play. They rewrote a lot of the original, appropriating the text anew and adding several choreographies. The subsequently projected trailer shows a futuristic stage setting and many dance performances making the physicality of the play seem palpably close.

The passion for theatre unites them all, as a young actor from the Comédie de Reims puts it in the Making-of the French project. We see the young man laughing and crying during the rehearsals, how he runs against a human wall only to show a tender embrace in the next scene. The live broadcast from France shows however that even if technology for border-free togetherness would theoretically be available it can still fail at in its practical implementation. Unfortunately, we cannot hear the French presentation, but the trailer shows a production which sticks closely to the original. No wonder, considering that the French had only two weeks for preparing their staging. The stage design shows a nearly empty stage with a couch – the play thrives on the text which the actors live intensely. On this point it is very similar to the trailer of the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj. It seems that also here the staging is very much oriented towards the original – instead of the couch we see a greenhouse in the background.

While we are listening to the young people from the other countries, visitors continue meandering through the theatre in Vienna. In one of the theatre boxes people wearing 3D glasses are performing certain tasks, tired guests can have a little rest in a corridor while enjoying a video and sound installation. In the corridors and salons of the Volkstheater, the department of experimental media from the Technical College of St. Pölten is showing projects that encourage an exchange with the viewers by means of digital technologies. I was particularly impressed by the project Infinity frames. If you look in the frame you are suddenly looking at yourself. This project allows the spectator to observe themselves in a way which is otherwise only possible for others. Your own spectrum of experience is being broadened: in this new space we experience ourselves not only from within but for the first time also as our own counterpart.

Back to the theatre hall – now it is Vienna’s turn. A group of the Junges Volkstheater recounts their approach to the play and their decision to translate it into German. Vienna was the only theatre to translate Concord Floral into their own language trying to expand the play using dialect and personal experiences. The stage design has also adopted a very idiosyncratic shape.

In the end we see the National Theatre of Northern Greece. They chose a totally different approach and rather than one staging, they opted for two newly developed workshops based on text extracted from the play. The teenagers are asking each other many questions related to the play in a mixture of interview and interrogation. The spontaneous answers draw a fascinating picture of what it means to grow up in our present day. In the second workshop the participants are addressing their parents as well as the audience. Attempts at explanation are being offered, the actors are pleading for more understanding, but above all for more trust.

After this round of presentations, the five theatre groups continue exchanging views in a relaxed Q & A session. Vienna talks about friendships which formed during the rehearsals and are being reflected in the play. Hungary continues to deliver most laughter. Cologne has already started with the first dance performances, but we still cannot hear France. For me Greece is decently getting lost in the shuffle of the ensuing party. At the end everybody is dancing on their stages celebrating both themselves and the successful closing of their project. Knowingly or unknowingly they also celebrate the European idea which brought them all together. Beyond individual country borders, internet and theatre unite these young people and motivates them to cooperate on something much greater. They are all under the magic spell of theatre and its possibilities of telling stories and taking these out to the world. We need them, these manifold perspectives on our counterparts which produce understanding and address our empathy. We live in difficult times, but on evenings like these all doors appear to be open. Theatre proves to be a space where everything seems possible and everything is possible.

Experience Report – Digital Party Night

A report on genuine international exchange at the end of the Digital Natives project

The technicians of the Volkstheater are testing the internet connection for the live connetcion. A vague hissing can be heard from the loudspeakers. “You can just listen to the internet at work”, says an actress of the theatrical production Concord Floral, staged by the Junges Volkstheater – the audience and the teenagers sitting at the front of the stage laugh.

A bit later the teenagers on stage are explaining that the second part of the #digitalnatives19 festival started in March. The theatre groups from the five participating countries met in Vienna and organised a common theatre workshop. The video portraying this meeting does not just reflect the fun the teenagers had while acting, but also how much talent they have.

The first highlight of the evening is about to start: the young theatre groups are being connected and then questioned one by one and recount their own staging of Concord Floral. The guys in Cologne have relocated the play from Canada to their own city. In their version, the action does not take place in a greenhouse but in the House Fühlingen, a notorious abandoned house, allegedly haunted. When asked, they explain that the group loves dancing and that’s why they do that also in their production.
From the production in Reims, I don’t get to see much tonight, unfortunately because there are considerable technical problems with the broadcast from France. I just see the video about their production, which shows along with other things, the teenagers hanging around and rehearsing – and how much fun they have in the process. One of the Hungarian teenagers recounts that the group did not start right away with rehearsals but rather played games and got to know each other. Subsequently it was as much about exploring oneself as the characters. Behind him there is whispering followed by laughter. He quickly turns around, speaks to his colleagues and addresses us again – the audience from the other four countries – saying with dry humour: “I just heard, that I am the cringiest part so far, so I’ll stop talking. Let’s watch the video!“ The audience and the teenagers in Vienna are still laughing when footage of the video comes on. There are moments like these which give the evening a special charm. The teenagers don’t take themselves too seriously, crack jokes and laugh together about the small hitches or that occasionally occur during the evening. That not everything runs perfectly isn’t so bad after all.
Finally, it’s the turn of the group from Austria. The teenagers talk about the way they adapted the text to their own slang and created Instagram accounts for each character. Now and then these were even considered to be genuine profiles, they recount, laughing and somehow proud, too. They also mention that their première of Concord Floral was more than a year ago and how nice it is for them that the other groups have just started with their performances. A lot of appreciation and gratitude resonates at this point. The group from Thessaloniki didn’t work on a proper theatre production but rather organised workshops related to the contents of the play. Initially, this “twist” took me by surprise but then I started thinking about the many difficult subjects being addressed in Concord Floral – for example, growing up as an outsider or bullying.

In the ensuing Q & A session one group asks another one four questions about the developing process of their production. In order to give you an impression I would like to give you an example: When asked if the rehearsal period had any influence on school grades, one teenage girl recounts that she worked on the staging during her final year in high school. She heard from various people that rehearsing five times a week for four hours each time during this period was by no means a good idea. She says that the rehearsal time had no negative influence on her school performance. Turning Ytong aerated concrete blocks into dust during the evening rehearsals was a great balance to the bone-dry everyday school life. In the audience and on stage you see just sympathetic nodding and smiles.

I like the honest and sympathetic exchange between the teenagers: That’s how genuine international exchange looks like, I think to myself. The way the teenagers talk about Concord Floral shows how intensely they dealt with the play and how much they thought about the questions it poses. You can also notice how much it meant for all of them to work on the play and the great joy they had during the performance. It was a really genuine and nice drawing to an end of this international youth project.

Published 24 June 2019

Expedition to the Room Next Door

To me it was the water tower in the castle gardens. A concrete water tower with graffiti on its walls, located along the zigzag paths of a neglected park with lush vegetation. That’s where we went smoking after the acting sessions of our theatre group. Sometimes we drank booze, I have no idea what kind, and of course there were the discussions and the love affairs. I had this supercilious fear that today’s youngsters don’t have these sacral spaces anymore, spaces where the world order is suspended. They were born into something very different that we only try to learn (the internet, let’s name it). This impression may have stemmed from my inferiority complex, perhaps because I will never navigate this digital realm or what as effortlessly as they can. This is their realm, their jungle, where they know the names of plants and trees, where they know which living (?) creature is poisonous and which has curing power.

Jordan Tannahill is a Canadian daredevil from the Y-generation. He writes, directs, films and is deeply involved with North American post-dramatic theatre life. I was fortunate that in this season the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj-Napoca [KÁMSz] adapted Tannahill’s Concord Floral text, a play created in 2014 or 2016, depending on which source you turn to. I was fortunate because of multiple reasons. First, a good author appeared on my radar, i.e. I got to hear about him. Second, finally I could see a performance with fresh, up-to-date drama text, and third, I realized that I have prejudice towards digital inhabitants, for they as well have their sacral spaces, proprietary safe spaces, water towers and Concord Florals.

Well it is more complex than that. The text is about teenagers and in fact it was adapted by the KÁMSz because together with four other theatres from other countries, the Cluj-Napoca theatre was participating in a project organized by the Union of the Theatres of Europe (UTE). All five institutions adapted the same text to stage (the other four were the Volkstheater of Vienna, the Comédie of Reims, the Schauspiel of Cologne and the National Theatre of Thessaloniki), performed by teenagers. There is a fake aspect to this top-down flow of control, when a millennial author writes a play, five others direct it and I write about it, with all of us pretending to know that we don’t know what it means to start one’s adult life, but in fact there is nothing new under the sun, just think of the water tower. But it is futile to whine about it because Tannahill’s text feels authentic even though he himself is not a “digital native”. And based on what I saw at the closing party, the boys and girls definitely liked the text, they could identify with it and adjust it to their own lives and geographical-historical realities.

I watched the Cluj-Napoca performance of the play without any advance knowledge of the project and my first impression was that it was wonderfully refreshing. This freshness did not stem from the false idealization of adolescence, but from authenticity on the one hand and professionalism on the other hand. Do I mean to say that Y-generation actors were the key? No. Instead, it is great that Ferenc Sinkó and his creative associates were able to introduce digital natives into the theatrical profession. It is great that Tannahill was able to write an authentic text, it is great that Noémi László translated it brilliantly and that Krisztina Sípos adapted it to a stage text that sounded credible from the actors. I believe the text itself is refreshing, and so is the fact that a thoroughly postmodern performance finally works with a well-written stage script. (What I mean is that documentarist or jointly produced performances often seem to go into the opposite extreme when it comes to the significance (or insignificance) of the text, allowing the linguistic layer of what is actually said onstage to be the weak point of the performance. But the Concord Floral staged in Cluj-Napoca was not only great because of the original drama, but also because the text was adapted to Cluj-Napoca by local teenagers on a local stage, making it sound natural. The text is great, no doubt about it.)

The Concord Floral is an abandoned, run-down glass house where local youth gathers. In the program booklet, a stylized screen shot illustrates what it is for each character. “For some time, the Concord Floral provided the beauty of roses to the city, but after the florist couple who gardened the flowers deceased, it rendered the beauty of freedom to the new generations.” To some, it is a “concrete bench, a willow”, a walnut tree or the old pool opposite the U Stadium. In reality, it does not matter if the environment is urban or rural. Still, it seems that the members of this generation would seek a hideaway in a village in a group (“we explored it with my pals”) or alone in a city (“this is where I come if I want to be alone, to clean my head or if I just want to be outside”) in an attempt to find their true self. Maybe the difference is not between analogue and digital after all.

During the performance I did not feel for a minute that the actors were non-professionals, let alone children. Quite the opposite: the acting was pure and honest. I keep dwelling on authenticity because I feel this was at stakes here. I think it is always authenticity that is at stake in the case of teenagers. It is their stake, and this was the stake of the performance, too. The performance put no-frill, fresh acting to the fore. Direction, movements and the set were all subordinated to that. Through a tragic story, we could get an insight into a world that used to be ours, too. And we are reminded that treason, excommunication, bullying, sex and drugs were present in that world as well, and that any differences compared to today are only added in our minds in hindsight, because in fact we have the same fear that others would regard us as kids.

The homogeneous crowd of people dancing with their earbuds on first transforms into faces that began to tell a story, then the faces are associated with the characters as the story begins to take shape. The theme of an unjustly killed, returning soul organically fits into the era of immediate contact. The ghost communicating via digital devices stems from the same bad conscience as any other similar character in literature. Here the phone is not a theatre prop that is somehow forced into the play to indicate that it is a contemporary story. Here the phone is the extended member of bodies and the actors use it as any other parts of their body. It is no use to be abhorred by this, let us not be hypocrites. We must be glad that we are shown this in the play by those who are actually capable of showing it. In an especially strong scene, we hear an edited monologue while phone screens are projected to a giant stage screen, and we are asked the question: “Do you know where your child is?” Obviously, the virtual space is meant here.

The story is painful and the pain in this story, too, like elsewhere, is caused by the lack of empathy and openness. How exotic the world of a different generation can be, although they are living in the same space as we do, and how similar their stories are? The performance ends with a dilemma, a common human dilemma between desperation because of cruelty and the relentless search for beauty. It ends with this sentence: “I think people would rather choose to be merciful”.

I for one am happy that the production is not art for art’s sake from a societal viewpoint either, as it does have emancipating power. The play’s approach to LMBTQ identity, alienation and the latent forms of exploitation is liberating, albeit these topics are only addressed briefly. It is liberating for teenagers (and for all other generations for that matter) that they do not need to navigate around taboos. Stock phrase or not, our immediate future is in the hands of “adolescents”.

Digital natives are those for whom the virtual world is a natural environment that they were born into. Ever since anthropology emerged, it has been ruled by the key ethical standard that it should strive to understand the observed community instead of intervening with it either actively or through prejudice.  In this sense, the Concord Floral as staged in Cluj-Napoca offers an anthropological viewpoint to the audience. Still there was a turn in anthropology later when authenticity (also meaning scientific credibility here) became important. At that point, it was difficult to talk about any community without considering it our own, since it is impossible to assess the structure and dynamics of a cultural and sociological system from a purely outside perspective. The performance was anthropological in this sense as well, because the black mask effect could not come to the fore. The actors knew what they were talking about because they are talking about themselves.

Five cities could participate in the UTE’s project: Vienna, Cologne, Reims, Thessaloniki and Cluj-Napoca. The project was closed with a season-ending digital party, with an online broadcast session from each city taking the floor one after the other. Each presented briefly their performances and then the event continued with a common party. My impression was that there were no big cultural or concept-related differences in the approach and tone of the five productions. Some technical solutions were similar, too, even in the short trailers. Each radiated the joy we feel when we can present ourselves in an authentic manner.

Then came the party, at least in theory. The live online broadcast session was sustained but the screens were empty. In Cluj-Napoca, people walked around stiffly, biting on the complimentary food. It was also a little strange that only non-alcoholic drinks and mineral water were offered. The powers that be must sustain the outside image even when they allow discussions of how the same image is broken. You cannot digitalize the party space – that’s what I was thinking. But then I left the world of digital natives. Anthropology, like any other science has the paradox that the object of observation is inevitably changed by observation itself. There are good reasons for the rule that the last intact tribes must not be approached. The current stand anthropology is that untouched aborigine communities must be left as they are. The sole ethical approach is if we stay away from infecting them either biologically or culturally. Digital nomads, however, are not the last but the first tribe of their kind. For them, no element of human civilization that they are interested in is out of reach. Yet as with all closed communities, it is impossible to study them objectively, again because the observed phenomenon is changed by observation itself. I quickly left the online party and the live broadcast sessionsturns, hoping that it is a digital ritual that is only brought to completion when no outside observers are present.

Published on 17 June 2019