To Be A Machine and the Liveness Debate Revisited

 

To Be A Machine (Version 1.0), premiered in October 2020 as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, is a stage play adapted by Dead Centre and Mark O’Connell from the latter’s 2017 non-fiction book on transhumanism. By ‘stage play’, I actually mean a show performed in theatre and streamed live on Vimeo. And by ‘live’, of course I do not mean that the audience are in the same physical space where the performance takes place, but that they are able to watch it in real time as it is happening. But the fact that the term ‘live theatre’ now needs a lot of explanation epitomises the new normal of theatre during the Covid-19 pandemic.

At the beginning of the show, we see the face of Game of Thrones star Jack Gleeson, who plays the writer Mark O’Connell. As he is saying to us 'try to forget the screen you are staring into’, the camera zooms out to reveal the frame of a tablet. So this is not the ‘actual’ Gleeson that we are seeing, but instead, a double-mediatised image of him. And he goes on, ‘try to picture me not in your laptop, but standing on stage,’ the camera continues to zoom out and reveals the ‘real’ Gleeson standing on stage next to the tablet, wearing the same shirt.

This is just one of the many meta-mediatic moments in the performance. What is more uncanny than seeing the ‘real’ Gleeson having a dialogue with his tablet doppelganger is when the camera switches to the auditorium, five rows of tablets (a hundred or so in total) are positioned in the place where normally the audience are seated. Each tablet screen contains the head of an audience member. These heads are actually filmed by the audience themselves, who are asked to upload before the show a short video of their reactions of watching a performance.

The uploading of videos is a clever nod to transhumanists’ claim that we can become immortal by uploading our consciousness on the cloud. One might question whether the audience’s liveness, or presence, or in Walter Benjamin’s term ‘aura’ is preserved in the recorded version, as O’Connell asks in his book whether one’s ‘self’ is still the same on the cloud. Gleeson interacts with the tablet audience as though they were ‘real’ and responding in real time. It’s true we are well aware that this audience are pre-recorded, but have they become a legitimate part of the performance during the interaction?

Such playful blurred boundaries between live and media renders the insistence on ‘liveness’ being the opposite of mediatisation outdated and futile. For sure, ‘liveness’ has always been a complicated notion. In his book Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, Philip Auslander dismisses the mystification and superiority of liveness over televisual performances, as advocated by Peggy Phelan. One of his arguments is that the concept of ‘live’ is applied in mediatised events as well such as live broadcast sports matches and recordings of live concerts.

If Auslander had written his book after the birth of National Theatre Live, he would definitely have used this example.  The whole project is based on such concept of mediatised liveness, as it claims to bring live theatre to audiences in their local cinemas. In the beginning, the project only presented live broadcasts. Later, encore screenings have become more common. During the first months of the coronavirus lockdown, NT Live offered several recorded plays streaming free on Youtube. 

I don’t necessarily 100% agree with Auslander, but I think he is right in refuting the essentialist binary between live and mediatised, especially now that there are numerous online pieces that claim to be live theatre, performed either from theatres (like To Be A Machine and the Old Vic In Camera programme) or from actors’ homes (like Oxford’s Creation Theatre). Nevertheless, many people are still using ‘live theatre’ to refer to the performances where audiences can share the same physical space with performers in conventional theatre venues. Indeed, what else can we say? Are we in urgent need of another term to describe the kind of theatre that we took for granted in the pre-Covid time?

 

 

Jack Gleeson as Mark O’Connell

 

 

 

 

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