ONLINE LIFE EXPLORED ON STAGE
Hyperlink examines both the good and bad aspects of the digital age of engagement
More access to information, greater and faster communication, a global community operating in real time, all the time. We so often are told about all the benefits of living in a digital age.
But what about fake news, reactionary responses and the frequently reported statistics on how much more alone people are now than they were before the advent of all these modern technologies? Nothing comes without an alternative side to it, and the internet and its advances has its share of negatives.
Discussions over these issues led Elbow Theatre artistic director Itai Erdal and writer/ performer TJ Dawe to create Hyperlink. The multimedia theatre experience is directed by Rachel Peake and has its world premiere at the Firehall Arts Centre in October.
Erdal and Dawe revealed some facets of their new creation.
Q Titling a show Hyperlink seems like risky business given the pace at which technological change occurs. Is it? Erdal: “It took TJ and I a few years to make the show and, yes, we often had to start again to stay on top of the latest trends before we finally found the model that we are doing right now. We are looking at the way digital life has affected the way we interact with ourselves and other people and where that can go both right and wrong. We have a fantastic projection designer in Cande Andrade and the brilliant composer Mark Haney and choreographer Kayla Dunbar have all contributed to our ‘live’ net experience.”
Q So the two of you probably spend a lot of time staring at computer screens already like the rest of us, why bring it to the stage? Dawe: “Why not? People aren’t averse to talking about the wealth of experience and thoughts that we have that revolve around the internet, so why not put it up on stage and see what happens? Particularly at a time when so much of a certain selfishness and lack of ability to consider other perspectives appears to be such a big part of the internet experience. Can a dialogue and positivity come out of this, too?” Q OK, so are we going online with you two in the theatre?
Erdal: “In a way, yes. For instance, I am talking about my quest for love and the audience will help put together an online dating profile for me and we’ll see how that goes. I’m also talking about how hard Mother’s Day is on Facebook for me since my mother passed away, or the year that I had hundreds of birthday wishes on the site but not a single call or text from anyone I love.” Dawe: “Itai and I have very different views on the internet and how to engage with it. He’s about connecting emotionally and I’m more about intellectual engagement and we’ve brought aspects of that debate into the staging, for sure. We go all over the place and have abandoned any notion of characters following any kind of an arc in the process.” Q Clearly, there will be personal and public aspects to the content, then? Dawe: “There might be someone on stage telling a story or one of us acting out a dozen voices taken from an online argument or we will use multimedia to illustrate how someone may be texting, tweeting, reading, updating and writing at the same time. We incorporated a lot of quite
visceral and emotional content into it.”
Q It’s interesting to consider how, frankly, uncomfortable it may be to take these common daily experiences and make it something you experience in a public, non-private environment. Are you curious about that dynamic, too? Erdal: “Absolutely. The gap between who we are in our private lives and who we are when we represent ourselves online is
something very real and something that we’ve never seen tackled onstage before.”
Dawe: “One of the most interesting things about building the show was the amount of times we took what we had and then took a set of theoretical scissors to it to keep the best bits only and then gathered more experiences into it. The level of collaboration involved in doing that could have been really ego-driven — in fact, it is the very kind of thing that leads to online ego battles — but
it didn’t happen with us at all. This gives me the feeling that, ultimately, humanity can find something really utopian online, too.”
The gap between who we are in our private lives and who we are when we represent ourselves online is something very real.