Post-Human Theater and Digital Dramaturgy
Image: Steirischer Herbst/W. Silveri. A scene from Annie Dorsen’s “Hello Hi There.”
written by Katharine Matthias - September 12, 2020
As theater moves onto the cyber-stage out of necessity due to the current pandemic, the online theater made during the pandemic now engages in a dialogue with decades of scholarship and research about post-humanism, which focuses on the deconstruction of the boundaries between “human” and “machine” and “human” and “animal.” Post-humanism, as the name suggests, de-centers the anthropocentric; however, this also poses a fundamental issue for the current theater-maker, as mainstream theater particularly engages with and focuses on the anthropocentric. The shift to the online stage--whether it be on Zoom or other platforms--necessitates an inquiry into the entanglements between humans and machines.
Artists and scholars have interacted with making post-human theater well before the pandemic. Donna Haraway, for instance, represents one of the many scholars who has shifted and importantly influenced the field of post-humanism. Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1984) remains a foundational text to the field of post-humanism, and her “multispecies feminism” remains a crucial decentering of the humanism that favors and centers the voice of cis white men. As the state of theater as we know it remains permanently changed, the post-human recentering of multiple worlds and exploration into those worlds highlights the continuous and expansive possibilities of art-making during this current moment.
Performance artists, theater-makers, DJs, and other artists like Annie Dorsen, Underground Resistance, Mette Ingvartsen, and American Artist, NIC Kay, Raúl De Nieves, Jackie Wang have also interrogated the porous boundaries between the human and the machine before the pandemic, and their work remains a crucial foundation for the exploration of online performance-making. For instance, Performance Space New York held a Posthuman Series through September to December of 2018 and noted that their goal for the series was to explore “worlds that extend beyond human perspective. Rather than positioning human consciousness as the primary source and content of all art making, the contributions to the Posthuman Series often blur the distinction between ‘the human’ and its other: namely nature, technology, animals, and gods.”
Online theater remains in conversation with both the academic and performance work surrounding posthumanist studies. Posthumanist scholars also highlight the unrecognized biases that also are perpetuated by online algorithms and platforms. For instance, in her book Race After Technology, professor and scholar Ruha Benjamin notes that white supremacy is perpetuated by the algorithms and emerging technologies that surround most people throughout their lives. In particular, Benjamin writes about the “New Jim Code” that encodes inequity into the very design of applications and computer systems. Benjamin’s work remains crucial as theater shifts itself to an online platform, as the very platforms that theater can be held on also encode inequity into their design. In continuation with this work, in her article “Race and/as Technology,” scholar Wendy Hui Kyong Chun defines “race and/as technology” to note how race is socially constructed and how questions of technology agency are inherently tied to the technology we use. Benjamin and Chun represent some of the many voices that highlight the systems of white supremacy that are encoded into the very structures and platforms of technology that theater now has to occur upon to even exist.
As the human and machine become more entangled in the move to “virtual theater,” scholar N. Katherine Hayles also denounces the misleading conception of mind-body dualism; that is, she highlights how not only the mind, but the body remain connected even in cyberspace. She highlights the potential sinister implications of the separation of mind and body in cyberspace and in her book “How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics,” Hayles highlights how the body remains and is also mapped into cyberspace.
This study of the ramifications of the body and mind in cyberspace also remain pertinent in performance spaces as well. For instance, in the article “Call and Response - Towards a Digital Dramaturgy,” scholars Barbara Bridger and J.R. Carpenter introduce the concept of “digital dramaturgy,” as they note how dramaturgy remains capable of contributing and critiquing “digital literary practice” (373). For instance, scholar Barbara Bridger notes that the project TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE] is “a computer-generated dialogue, written in a programming language called JavaScript which...generated a script for a poli-vocal performance” (377). This project led to two discoveries for Bridger, “one − that she was interpreting the word ‘script’ in a way that I had not considered before, and two − that my ‘expanded’ definition of dramaturgy might also encompass digital textual practices.” (ibid). Digital dramaturgy thus expands where performance occurs and how programs like JavaScript encode performance into their very algorithms. Thus, digital dramaturgy challenges the anthropocentric nature of theater and highlights the entanglements of human and machine through digital textual practice.
Annie Dorsen’s “Hello Hi There”
MacArthur Genius Annie Dorsen’s work represents one of the many post-human performance makers who question what it means to make theater with technology even before our current moment. For instance, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times about her “Algorithmic Theater,” she notes how computer science, technology, and theater all “have to do with the uncertainty between truth and illusion — what you can trust, how you know what you know, and do your eyes deceive you.” Dorsen’s work interrogates the entanglements between the human and the virtual, and her questions remain even more pertinent as our jobs, social interactions, and romantic relationships are conducted through virtual media.
In short, computer-generated language offers a potential reframing of what theater is. Perhaps, the programming languages in the lighting boards are as much a theatrical experience as our “traditional” methods of theater-making.
