Tag Archives: On the Boards

Arts & Entertainment, Dance

Getting In On the Ground Floor with zoe | juniper

A moment from zoe | juniper’s “No one to witness” (l-r) Erin McCarthy, Kim Lusk, Britt Karhoff — Zoe Scofield with back to camera (Photo: Joseph Lambert / Jazzy Photo)

Last Friday night, after a few Euros (shot of Fernet and a Radeberger) at St. John’s, I was lying flat on my back trying to keep the people I saw from spinning. I was having no luck, though, because I was watching a dance performance (of sorts: It was also an experiment, research, and rehearsal). Zoe | juniper‘s “No one to witness and adjust, Study #4” took place in a small studio at Velocity Dance Center — you signed up for a half-hour block ahead of time, and at the appointed time a guide appeared in the Velocity lobby.

She read off a list: Be quiet walking in. Lie down where you’re told. Don’t try to sit up. You can move your head, but try to keep arms and legs inside the ride at all times. Leave your shoes and other belongings in the hall, you can collect them afterward. (Allll right, you thought, conflicted. Lots of instructions, but the lying down seemed easy enough.) At the doorway, the dancers greeted the audience and showed them over to taped off sections of the floor, where they were to stretch out and rest their heads on small pillows. Then the music (which would have contained excerpts from some of the following: FUCK BUTTONS, Henryk Gorecki, Glenn Gould, Greg Haines, Morgan Henderson, Ryoji Ikeda, Loscil, Tito Ramsey) and dancing began.

Juniper Shuey was crouched at one end of the shoebox-shaped studio with a camera, and you at first thought he might be responsible for the video playing on the ceiling, but yes and no: It didn’t seem live, though he was likely the one to have processed and edited the dance pieces shown, along with cosmic interludes. Hanging from the ceiling were casts of body parts made by Derek Ghormley with Zoe Scofield: an upper torso, an arm, a small bit you didn’t recognize, a chunk of human.

Stepping around and between the bodies on the floor were the dancers, in white tops, black tights, and hands dyed red: Britt Karhoff, Kim Lusk, Erin McCarthy, and Zoe Scofield. The choreography came in bits (Scofield would say something like, Have we done this one yet?), and the dancers might start walking in circles around you, hitting slo-mo every third step. Arms drew back, were cocked, sliced the air.

One segment was particularly ballet-centric, though Scofield’s interests in ballet have often to do with its limits, rather than its perfected nature. Here she brushed out tendus with her feet, began then abandoned developpés at calf-height. Earlier, she’d been strolling with a little bounce to her walk, a small smile on her face.

From my vantage point, I could see only so much: McCarthy’s torso framed by Karhoff’s legs, for instance. But the floor brought dance into my bones, each footstep transmitting an impact I’d have underestimated from a chair’s comfort. Bodies loomed over me, developing strange perspectives. The air in the tiny studio grew thickly warm and Scofield paused to turn a fan on. Occasionally a dancer glanced at me and met my eyes, and if she was close, leaning over, it quickly became a little too soul-baringly uncomfortable — a few feet away, and we could have a moment of respectful recognition. Once, an audience member and I locked eyes, and she reddened and looked the other way.

At some point, I realized I felt like a baby on its back, flopping my head around to see what’s what, amazed at the height of everyone, and really began to enjoy myself immensely. It felt like I’d never seen dance before, never quite realized that articulation looked that way. It was almost impossible to critique dance this way since it didn’t conform to prior experience — I found myself  registering qualities, Karhoff’s friendly curiosity, the cool serenity from McCarthy, the shy lightness of Lusk, all of which would require revision in a succeeding segment.

I had to restrain myself from high-fiving the red hands that strayed into my field of view. Not to high-five, really, but to feel that palm’s movement. To carry it. Suddenly we were done.

These “chamber studies,” which began in October 2012, will culminate in BeginAgain, a larger piece coming March 2014 at On the Boards. (So far there’s been Kate&Zoe at City Arts Festival, No one to witness #2 at Frye Art Museum’s Moment Magnitude, and For Forgetting at The Goat Farm/gloAtl.) But just as plenty of studies now grace the walls of museums and galleries, these performances also have the opportunity to live on their own, in the minds and bodies of people who have participated in them.

Some in the performing arts believe that there is a “finished” product, and keep the curious away until opening night. That’s a model of a performer/audience relationship, but it’s not, certainly, the only one. My presence was literally an obstacle for the dancers, a disruption, but I think they sensed, from the response of others as well, that they were making dance with us, disruptively. It’s difficult often to tell people what you mean by modern dance, but in this sense, it’s easy: What’s modern is the willingness to push something out in public(s) before you think you’re ready, to iterate its development and use that feedback to develop further, to organize creativity rather than try to direct it.

Arts & Entertainment, Dance

Three New Works Invite Repeated Viewing at Velocity’s SCUBA 2013

Green Chair Dance Group‘s Tandem Biking and Other Dangerous Pastimes for Two ends the SCUBA 2013 program at Velocity Dance Center (through April 28; tickets) but as they are visitors to Seattle, let’s talk about them first. That way we can get right into how they quirkily talk the audience through an “inside look” at a three-person dance troupe and their interpersonal dynamics.

That the explanations are often unclear, gnomic, or non sequiturs takes nothing from the earnest helpfulness with which they share the names of various pieces (“We Are Reasonable People,” “We Are Luscious People,” “We Are Desperate People”), announce the rationale for their order (the favorite one comes first), or instruct the audience that the games they’ll be playing, however, are “real” (immediately undercut by Sarah Gladwin Camp letting everyone in on the fact that de Keijzer’s game is wearing natural fabrics: cotton, organic cotton; while she, Gladwin Camp likes to play “Don’t Touch My Face,” a game inspired by the fact that she doesn’t like water or people touching her face, and which is indicated by her making a shuffling gesture of disdain with her hands and fingers).

Early on, Gregory Holt gets so carried away with his narration that he mansplains another dancer out of existence, dropping to the floor to show everyone what her dance is like. Dance is decentralized here — or, looked at another way, made so diffuse it permeates everything. Though the work begins with a polished, in-unison phrase that they bring back (seasonally, in swim wear and snow gear) — kicking prettily from a beach-blanket pose, jacking through a turn on their backs by swiveling their hips, hopping to their feet for some stepping — there are also extended, aggressive capoeira-esque bouts, “monument” building where bodies are placed on or jointed into other bodies, and de Keijzer’s contorted face and tongue “dance.”

Gladwin Camp mentions, of a Holt-de Keijzer duet, that it was, for her, like looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. The tension inherent in Tandem Biking for a three-person group gives it both cohesive and propulsive force. De Keijzer says that she’s pretty sure they could all three handle being cooped up in one small room for years, so long as, on a rotating basis, one could leave to have some time alone. The flip-side of that is when one watches as the other two perform. Gladwin Camp emerges bundled up like the kid from A Christmas Story, and it’s both a metaphor for a sort of bruised tenderness, and not a metaphor at all, but a wintertime reality.

Maureen Whiting‘s About That Tree, with its painted-face dancers in tunics and pelts, seemingly living among or caught by the battered branches of a fallen tree, swiftly generates an atmosphere that, this particular year, might remind you of Rite of Spring‘s mythic primitivism. There’s not a lot of spring to be seen, though — the tree has fallen, and a bag of dusty, dead leaves is emptied onto the stage (costume and visual design are by Danii Blackwell and Jean Hicks). Music by Dave Abramson, Eyvind Kang, and Evan Schiller, in vastly different idioms, fits perfectly with the choreography for a 14-person ensemble.

When I saw an excerpt in rehearsal, Whiting was still determining if the “center would hold,” in terms of there being a focal point for the audience — 14 dancers is a lot to attend to. But she’s pulled it off without resorting to strict unison movement that might dampen the individuality expressed by her dancers. She uses breathing, and the sound of it, to move your attention; competing rhythms arise and generate a sort of group “breath” — or not. At one point, a dancer grabs the tree and holds a chunk aloft, another begins a solo with a sort of switch, another balances small branches on her shoulders, head, in the small of her back. The piece ends with a dancer, having grabbed the tree for herself, dropping it to let its clatter disrupt the breathy group communion.

This world premiere is a work you may want to see — and hear — a few times. There’s a poetic compression to it that leaves you wanting more.

Shannon Stewart’s An Inner Place That Has No Place (Photo: Tim Summers)

I had a similar feeling about the excerpt from Shannon Stewart‘s An Inner Place That Has No Place, which I saw an earlier version of a year ago. Here, what had been the last segment came first — dancers Meredith Horiuchi, Mary Margaret Moore, Aaron Swartzman, Rosa Vissers, and David Wolbrecht start off with a high-energy routine, complete with whoops of theoretic delight, that evokes a workout class’s slightly manic pace (music is by composer Jeff Huston).

Initially, the movements are both mechanically precise and slightly cliché, Broadway-musical-style, but then the dancers start shouting out icebreaker-style questions to each other about their pasts that get a litte intrusive (“Where did you lose your virginity?”) and as answers are given, the strict cohesion falters and they start interacting with each other with more idiosyncratic movement. But later, they’ll group around a single dancer and barrage him or her with questions, bumping up against, until the person seems to pass out, so it seems that perhaps moderation is key.

Behind the troupe, a striking video projection (courtesy filmmaker Adam Sekuler) shows them repeating into infinity — this later changes into an expanse of night sky that feels both beautiful and ominous, with a single dancer left. In a middle segment, the troupe poses for a series of memory-photographs, in ways that are both satirically funny (they look to be drunken party shots) and increasingly eerie, as the dancers’ expressions freeze into rictuses or slowly melt away. Even in excerpted form, the work packs a punch that you’re never quite ready for, as its set-ups veer off down unanticipated alleys.

Arts & Entertainment, Dance, Theatre

At OtB, an “Untitled Feminist Show” Questions Your Authority

Young Jean Lee's Untitled Feminist Show (Photo: Blaine Davis)
(Photo: Blaine Davis)

“[Y]ou know, it’s a pretty straightforward show in terms of what it is,” said playwright Young Jean Lee about Untitled Feminist Show (at On the Boards this weekend; tickets). “People are either going to be like, that was fun, or they’ll say, that wasn’t experimental enough, that wasn’t feminist enough.”

Though it’s mostly wordless, except for a brief song, it reminded me in ways of Gertrude Stein’s seminal “Lifting Belly” poem, which has plenty of words, just not used in the manner with which you’re likely to be familiar. “As I say a noun is a name of a thing, and therefore slowly if you feel what is inside that thing you do not call it by the name by which it is known,” declaimed Stein on the issue. (Though she would also try, by sheer dint of repetition, to reach that moment you stare at a word, asking yourself if that’s how it’s really spelled.)

So, too, Untitled Feminist Show feels much more interested in the semiotics of behavior, of body, of identity — in transitional spaces and movements — with the intent of not letting you settle on firm ground to take up a fixed viewpoint. If it refuses to be (Derrida elbows his way inside the paragraph, shouts “Phallocentrisme!” and exits) serious about weighty things and their definitions, perhaps that’s because it’s joining a conversation where gravity and definitions are already well-represented.

The show begins with breath, the sound of it in unison, as the performers slowly process down the aisles to the stage. They are naked. They are Hilary Clark, Becca Blackwell, Desiree Burch, Katy Pyle, Malinda Ray Allen, and Amelia Zirin-Brown. They all have different backgrounds as performers (digital program pdf), and are differently shaped, but they display that ease with nudity that people pretend is so outrageous among nudists — because we know the world requires clothes.

Young Jean Lee worked with choreographer Faye Driscoll (and director Morgan Gould, and her cast) to develop the show — the resulting movement vocabulary is sometimes purposefully banal, but at other moments it seems to go off like a camera flash, as when the performers partner each other and hold their partner’s hair back for them. A blenderized fairy tale segment set to classically plinking music features Zirin-Brown as a witchy Medusa who picks off a happy trio with pink parasols, one by one, by magically freezing them. They’re fed, with plenty of mimed-gore, to her misshapen, hungry Grendel (Katy Pyle), until the third refuses to let Zirin-Brown winkle away her protective parasol, and stabs her with it. The two eaten are freed from Pyle’s stomach just like Red Riding Hood from the wolf.

I saw that Becca Blackwell, the non-gender-conforming performer, was at first rejected by the two other parasolers, and it became a fable about feminists eating their young, and even the difficulty that trans people have had with hard-line feminists demanding, you know, proof you’ve checked out your copy of The Red Tent. (That’s a reference to biological imperative, rather than a suggestion that radical feminists love The Red Tent.) The show continues in a variety-style vein: Katy Pyle and Malinda Ray Allen dance a balletic duet, with pirouettes and lifts. The ensemble break down some rap-video moves (Chris Giarmo and Jamie McElhinney’s sound design captures every genre) with additions like “Moppin’ the Floor,” “Changin’ the Diaper,” and “Cookin’ the Dinner.”  Zirin-Brown furnishes a pornographic-castration mime, winking jauntily, grinning lewdly, before singing sweetly.

Young Jean Lee (Photo: Blaine Davis)
Young Jean Lee (Photo: Blaine Davis)

Allen reappears for an extended vocal solo, singing “La la la” with great (albeit pitchy) verve to cackling from seats in the back. Hilary Clark rages to some heavy metal, and slow-motion parking-lot fight breaks out between Desiree Burch and Clark, bystanders egging them on. Becca Blackwell performs a gripping solo, moving from a mocking, burlesque “Nah nah nah,” to shadow boxing, kissing a bicep, and vocalizing something gut-deep. The ensemble impersonates a tribe of bonobos, luxuriating in skin-on-skin. No hold is barred. Someone’s foot ends up on someone else’s pubis. Raquel Davis’s lighting design never tries, really, to soft-focus anyone’s nudity — at times, she uses a searing white light to turn up the volume.

Throughout, a series of projections by Leah Gelpe plays over a white, lengthwise obelisk by set designer David Evans Morris. At times you don’t notice them, at times they feel perfect as a kind of radiation of what’s happening.

But what is happening? There’s plenty to chuckle or howl at, there’s tenderness and rage, but the show in refusing language Schrödingers away in its box, resolving and unresolving meaning. Is the rap “video” an on-the-nose feminist response, or commentary on a response? Is it empowering to see Clark and Burch slug it out, or is that machismo regressive? What about the rhetoric of performance nudity, of its authenticity? Should we bother to critique a utopic vision?

That analytic impulse is reflexive. But if you think about the show being bookended by first a fairy tale and last by what people are calling an “orgy,” perhaps there’s a directional arrow, pointing the way from childish belief in structures to genuinely childlike, undifferentiated openness. The stuff in between, in its valencies and ambivalence, is a function of having (Gertrude Stein’s distaste intrudes) a noun called feminism, a noun called feminist, a noun called woman. Untitled Feminist Show reminds you that we are not contained by words, or their arguments, but we often act as if we are.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Lighting a Way Toward a Mother’s Death, and Life, with Itai Erdal

Itai Erdal in How to Disappear Completely (Photo: Emily Cooper)
Itai Erdal in How to Disappear Completely (Photo: Emily Cooper)

Lighting designer Itai Erdal can’t have planned it this way, but the same week that his one-man-show How to Disappear Completely has made its way to On the Boards (through March 24; tickets), a middling controversy erupted over whether Voyager 1 had left the heliosphere for the vaster reaches of interstellar space.

So just as the 35-and-a-half-year-old seeing eye detects barely any particles of solar wind, you hear Erdal explain, “When a PAR can dims, it gets warmer and warmer.” Besides parabolic aluminized reflectors (PAR), he’s discussing, though it doesn’t sound like it, the death of a parent. Or maybe it does sound like it: Emelia Symington Fedy’s sound design incorporates a heart beat as Erdal stands there, dialing down percentages of light more and more slowly…from a rock-concert’s iconic glare to five percent, four percent, three percent, two percent, one percent.

Metaphors pile on top of metaphors: A heliosphere can look like a light bulb, can look like a chart of child’s emergence from parental influence. Erdal’s mother died of cancer. When he learned she was sick, he left Vancouver, B.C., where he lives and flew home to Israel. He started making a documentary of sorts. Conversations with her and his sister (and arguments), a scene of her husband lovingly shaving her head after chemotherapy, are projected on a screen (Corwin Ferguson’s remount of Jamie Nesbitt’s projection design) as Erdal stands in front, translating for the audience. His mother, smoking, explains that sickness is when you feel your body impinging on your consciousness. The memories vanish behind a black curtain.

Erdal also translates lighting conventions for you (while running his own cues). Slowly dimming slows time. A low, side lighting creates a sculptural quality, uses light and shadows to emphasize spatial presence. Why step into a square box of light to deliver an important soliloquy? You don’t find many square boxes of light in nature — people pay attention to this. He’s a natural storyteller, as impassioned about lighting as he is about finding the right person to settle down and raise kids with, two maybe three. Probably three. (Erdal gets a little insistent on children being our future.) Time out while he detours to tell you about the time he was molested by a sea creature.

His collaborators — James Long, director; Anita Rochon, dramaturg; Fedy, sound — stitch all this together as if it’s completely natural, and in a way it is: it’s Itai Erdal’s life. He credits their influence with opening up the story, which is lit (so to speak) by his mother’s death, but not limited to it. That’s no doubt why it’s much funnier than you might expect, and free of sentimentality. There is no unearned pathos, near the end, as Erdal explains how his mother died and his part in it.

“Call your mother,” one audience member wryly summarized, getting up to go, but the post-show lobby was quietly reflective, as if the show were still going on, but slowly dimming.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

An Off the Boards Discussion of Annie Dorsen’s “A Piece of Work”

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Scott Shepherd in Annie Dorsen's A Piece of Work (Photo: Jim Findlay)
Scott Shepherd in Annie Dorsen’s A Piece of Work (Photo: Jim Findlay)

Annie Dorsen’s A Piece of Work (formerly known as False Peach) came and went from On The Boards last weekend but the conversation goes on — at least it has at Slog, and between this critic and his editor. As I submitted my review I summarized my impressions. This led to a discussion of the show, its intentions, achievements and potential. An edited version of that discussion follows.

SDW: I didn’t much enjoy the show — at least not emotionally. Intellectually I loved it and in no small part because I felt like it failed kind of spectacularly as theatre. This is all the more interesting to me because it feels very close to success. A bit more humanization one way or another could have brought it together.

MVB: I talked to Annie Dorsen [the show’s creator] in advance but still wasn’t quite sure what to expect. It’s also a hard show to review in that the audience will see a different thing every night, as the algorithm reorders itself.

It felt a bit unfinished, and in need of tuning, as a piece. I think the algorithm was accidentally dropping names and scene IDs.

But the main thing I got from it is its resistance (as you noted) to telling me a theatre-story in any way. It was a bit like “an alien writes a play after reading Hamlet.” The alien has no idea about plot structure or character or relationship, all it can do is see word patterns: sets of prepositional phrases. Phrases that being with “O.” It seizes on “favorite” phrases to repeat, like an autistic person sometimes enjoys echoing things. It has a set of literal associations with set direction.

Dorsen talked a good fight about Hamlet as this ur-humanist text, and how this might redress that illusion of personal agency, but I think in fact you could walk out of it feeling a bit affirmed, as a humanist, that there is something more to consciousness than RAM and subroutines.

The failure of the piece as theatre I think rests on the context for it — if you include Dorsen & Co. in, then it’s a story about this attempt to present an algorithmic performance, and the inability of their creation to connect with 95 percent (?) of the audience. As a performance that you just walk in to, the failure is more obvious. You have to understand what is being attempted to “get” it on any level with emotional stakes. I like your notion [in the review] of an installation — what makes the creators think a computer has any interest in a set running time?

That reminds me, I meant to reference David Ives’s Words, Words, Words in which three monkeys (named Kafka, Milton, and Swift) are left in a room with typewriters to see if they’ll eventually write Hamlet. (You really think the percentage of disconnected in the audience was as high as 95 percent?) I was also fascinated by a sense that many thought Scott Shepherd [the lone actor to appear on stage, and then only briefly] was about to say something, and might not have entered for applause but for another scene just before the crew joined him.

Ha! I wasn’t thinking of Ives, but I definitely had a monkeys/typewriters association.

I may be exaggerating. The OtB crowd is famously tolerant of experiment, but I didn’t get the sense that most people were anything but puzzled by it. I think they probably wanted Shepherd to say something, at the close, to be human.

Neurologically, it’s an interesting experiment, because it frustrates the if-then “narrator” in everyone’s head that typically makes sense of things. It’s a bit Zen: boredom and frustration are cultivated as a way of turning off the monkey-mind. After peak boredom, the mind is more associative, less linear, more accepting of this “random” walk through a text.

It still may not amount to much; people have different interests, and this monkeying with consciousness may not rate that highly.

I feel like this show is more successful run as an experiment, asking people to record how they interact with it. Give them a survey on the way in. Seattle would get a kick out of that if they felt they weren’t being messed with.

I’m interested in your point about experimental theatre as an experiment in the double blind sense. Do you think the neurological experiment side of A Piece of Work would have been as interesting had Shepherd delivered the piece in its entirety? What if the only change were that Shepherd delivered all of the vocalizations instead of the computer-generated voices? Also, do you know if Shepherd was repeating lines delivered in his ear from the computer? What’s his role in this? I feel like his performance mostly served to highlight the non-theatricality of the rest of the performance.

I love your notion that the audience wanted him to say something, to act. I want to believe that this was intentional on the part of Dorsen, et al.

I think people would respond much more readily to the idea of a survey than a “talkback.” It’s weird, but people love being in experiments, so long as they know they are contributors to them.

Yeah, I think as far as frustrating that sense-making compulsion goes, plenty of plays already accomplish a similar thing with actual actors. Had Shepherd continued with gibberish, it would have gotten to people as well, just maybe taken a little longer. It’s when the play is all-computer that you realize you have to abandon all hope. :)

That said, I think Annie was trying for other effects by computerizing the space — I know she had this notion of the Hamlet text itself as a ghost of theatre, and if you step back, you can see that: sounds, lights going on and off. Is it a dramatic idea? Maybe not so much.

Re: Shepherd, she said something to me that was a (it turns out rare) emotional response, which is that sometimes (like with the chatbot play) she gets the sense that the bots are so close to thinking…that they’re trying really to say something, but fail, and it’s sad. Knowing of course that she’s investing them with agency, etc. But I felt like Shepherd’s role underscored that duality — a human actor who can’t quite make sense.

—

What about you, our readers; what did you think of A Piece of Work? Did you make it to the end? Did you walk out? Did you hope that Shepherd was about to speak when he returned to the stage? Did you relish every “O” like Ives’s monkey, Kafka, who types page after page of the letter K? Did the algorithms create a more perfect Hamlet on Friday or Saturday night? Would you like to participate in a post-show survey? Now’s your chance.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Welcome to the Hamletmachine, Says Annie Dorsen

Annie Dorsen
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?

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