Welcome to the Hamletmachine, Says Annie Dorsen
Annie Dorsen‘s heart goes out to our computing machines, or it would if she weren’t against those stale old dichotomies like head versus heart. I mentioned something about a show’s emotional appeal, as compared to its intellectual or conceptual impact, and she pointed out that all thought has an emotional basis, it’s what we care to think about.
In conversation, she describes her new show at On the Boards, called False Peach (aka A Piece of Work), as, variously, about ghosts, about subjectivity, about theatre, about mourning the death of a parent, and about embodiment, ephemerality, and language. “It” runs February 21 through 24, but in an important sense, it doesn’t: The show will be substantively different each night.
Here is what we know. False Peach uses the text of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It stars, in the traditional sense, a single performer: Scott Shepherd (you may remember him from such shows as Gatz, the eight-hour theatrical adaptation of The Great Gatsby). But the creative team that Dorsen has assembled — the “perfect dinner party” she calls the collaboration — were all enlisted to create a “hamletmachine” that would perform-parse False Peach differently each night.
How this is accomplished becomes quickly dizzying; essentially every word of Hamlet was tagged with a host of properties. Thanks to systems programming by Mark Hansen, the text has been integrated with Greg Beller‘s sound composition, Jim Findlay‘s scenography, and Bruno Pocheron and Ruth Waldeyer’s lighting design. Who speaks what lines when, what sounds are heard, what lighting cues are given, are all decisions made on the fly by the hamletmachine each night.
One of Dorsen’s previous shows, Hello Hi There, featured two laptops running chatbots (who between them are discussing a 1971 Foucault and Chomsky debate in language that sounds not unlike two beer-fogged grad students). That was a beachhead in algorithmic theatre and its exploration of communication, agency, and meaning. False Peach takes everything a step farther, pushing the boundaries of theatre and of human consciousness. It’s a truly experimental work, in that Dorsen and her team can pre-state as much as they want, but the show is so complex, they can’t hope to know the outcome.
Nor can they hope to direct the way the audience makes sense of the work. The frontier that Dorsen is operating on, populated by technological bodies, is simultaneously an area where sense-making and affect are distributed to the audience, and yet one where technology can produce meaningful statements (in at least a statistical sense), can act.
Some of the emotional impact of Hello Hi There, Dorsen said, was from the audience realizing that the chatbots didn’t know what they were saying, while at the same time getting something out of their conversation. For one audience member, that might be amusing. For another, it might feel like standing on the brink of a revolution in consciousness.
When you step back to take in False Peach, that brinksmanship seems to have been encoded in theatre all along. Plays are, as Dorsen says, a sort of nested algorithmic functions: assigned roles, entrances (on) and exits (off), environmental signals. It’s all there, but piecemeal, artisanal. How perfect, then, to take Hamlet, its revolutionary inner world, its theories of mind, and return contingency to it. The language of Hamlet is a ghost that haunts all theatre, Dorsen observes — what happens when you put the ghost into the machine?
