Three tabs are currently displayed side by side on my Google Chrome browser: the official website of the emotional enhancement tool “Weaver Girl”, an online invitation to the launch party of the “Weaver Girl” series products, and the video documentation of the performance, curated and performed by _ao_ao_jing ensemble (which means “old witches” in Chinese): WeaverGirl: Special Design for Consul General’s Wives (CGW001). No matter which website I choose to look at first, or if I decide to ignore some of the information from the websites shown instead, I have been involuntarily part of a role-playing discourse from the moment I clicked on the link of the webpage. I act as one of the model audiences, , and a floating soul, caught between the development of technology and power structures.
People living on planet Earth used to believe that information technology, especially the internet, could spawn unlimited hyperlinks, spread across countless interfaces, foster cross-border cooperation, and eventually strengthen global interconnectedness. In fact, at the beginning of the millennium, people believed that the realization of globalisation would be completed in the next twenty years. After the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, no one now thinks that information technology can function without the boundaries of race, gender, culture, nationality, etc. I, for example, realised my extreme limitations as an individual; I identify myself as female, as an Asian immigrant with a Chinese background in Germany, and also as an international playwright and theatre practitioner. All these identities secure my existence. My other identities in the virtual world or within the sphere of information technology can be the extension of my identities in physical reality to a certain degree, but are never able reach beyond this limited radius by using digital tools.
Part I
From my perspective, Weaver Girl: Special Design for Consul General’s Wives (CGW001)is a piece of game theatre, performed jointly by the public authorities, the technological elites, and theatre artists. It is a performance that takes place on the terrace of the French Consulate in Shanghai, co-curated and performed by the actual French Consul’s wife, Alice Chen. It is also a product launch event for a start-up technology company called Weaver Girl. Furthermore, it’s an beta test event to test the Weaver Girl products, during which two technological products were released, a software that can read human facial emotions through a camera, and its accessory, a chip. By implanting the chip into the human brain and operating it with a remote control, the equipment can be upgraded and monitor and regulate the emotions of the user. Even though the chip and the remote control are props of the particular performance, the software is in fact currently being developed and did collect private data, such as the heartbeat, pulse, body temperature, etc. of the participants in the tests during the event.
Judging solely from the three tabs on my Google Chrome, Weaver Girl: Special Design for Consul General’s Wives (CGW001)brings out a transformational practice of multiple identities: One member of _ao_ao_jing ensemble, the initiator of the Weaver Girl project, Lin Cuixi, used to studied computer science at UCLA and now works as a freelance theatre-maker in Shanghai, with a special focus on interdisciplinary theatre projects. Alice Chen is the French consul general’s wife and a contemporary artist at the same time. _ao_ao_jing ensemble, needless to say, is an interdisciplinary collective of theatre artists’, which was created and is run by highly educated women. Obviously, the creators of the proformance manipulate their identity of social and academic elites and propose a question: do the elites who takes control of the information resources legitimise themselves by creating new rules of the game, through which they reach the goal of redefining and regulating all sorts of emotions of the public?
The new concept of “the labour of emotions” was thus implicitly conveyed to the participants in the game theatre piece as soon as they began to reflect on the show. _ao_ao_jing ensemble defines “ the labour of emotions” as follows: “In the internet economy, it appears that a new labour relationship has emerged between those who exchange emotional labour for value and those who purchase the emotional labour for a better quality of life. For the emotional workers, the boundary between themselves and the role they have been playing is somehow blurred by continuously offering the emotional labour to other members of society.”
On an otherwise traditional stage, but without the fourth wall, there is a large box divided into other small, irregular boxes, which resemble mobile phones, the recycling bin on the interface of the computer screen, dialogue boxes in chat software and so on. An actress symbolising the “virtual existence” of a common city-dweller moves swiftly between the boxes. The actress switches between different virtual identities and talks directly to the audience in the theatre, or in my case, as I am watching the video documentation of the play, through the screen.
“I admit it, I confess! All of us had a hard time this year. We are yearning for connection and conversation. We are craving seeing faces and hearing voices. Detachment is pretentious, solitude is excessive, and resistance is extremely childish – we must use phones. We only have phones. The size is between five and seven inches. It provides numbers, location, material, spirit, knowledge, and companionship. What else do we need? I scroll through my phone. I wake up at seven in the morning and scroll through my phone. I eat at noon and scroll through my phone. I sleep at twelve o’clock at night and scroll through my phone. Then one day, I checked my screen usage time. Screen usage time, this feature should be considered a bug or something. Anyway, it was a number that exceeded my imagination. I didn’t even know I could keep my eyes open that long every day. I have to admit it, I’m addicted. But I knew it! I must overcome it! I must defeat it! I must... create.
This must not be a story about phones, and phones must not appear from beginning to end. All the phones that appear must be completely destroyed!”
Interesting theme: How can theatre-makers in China analyse and interpret their addiction to the internet? Especially when more than half of China’s purchases and payments are carried out through apps on mobile phones and almost all Generation X social activities take place online.
Not only did I not close the three tabs that have been open ever since I started writing, but I also started to watch a video documentation. It’s a traditional theatre piece called JEPG, written and directed by a member of Sleep-less theatre group, He Qi, with dramaturgy by another member of the group, Hu Xuanyi.
I try to imagine myself sitting in a local black-box theatre in Beijing, watching this play. I stare at the actress on the screen: As a mascot of the information world, she tries her best to show the flexibility of her body. She is diligent. However, her body language is slightly clumsy and her energy seems to be blocked by the screen: The process of one’s personal reflection, such as the self-censorship when someone browses their own internet history, the self-arousal when someone looks back on their conversations on social media and the self-pity for their social isolation in virtual reality in this case reaches me in a conceptual way. In the other words, there isn’t any new discoveries about the struggling between the digital identity and the identities in real life to be revealed.
But then, why am I still watching the video? What do I expect from the theatre production?
This reminds me of my experience as audience during the first lockdown in Germany in April, 2020. At that time, there were a number of free online screenings of classic masterpieces, produced and provided by German theatres. For me, it was a fresh and exciting experience to watch the plays online. However, after twenty minutes sitting in front of the computer, my attention began to be waver and I became distracted. Obviously, being an audience of digital theatre requires outstanding energy management skills and I am lack of those skills. Another important fact is that, the plays didn’t relate to the daily circustance at the beginning of the first lockdown, therefore I was not able to identify myself as the audience of the plays while watching alone at home.
On December 25th, 2022, the Chinese central government announced the end of its Zero Covid Policy. From January 2020 to that date, all the country’s residents had to register through one mobile app. Their daily itinerary, personal health status, and a detailed social network of each individual were recorded and stored in the country’s database. This was obligatory. Moreover, millions of posts on public internet platforms, which criticised the government’s inefficiency and the medical shortages, as well as incidents where the police forcibly quarantined COVID-19 patients and locked them into portable buildings, and all sorts of other traumatic experiences during the total lockdown, were censored and deleted, usually within a week of being published online.
It has already widely reported that all the theatre productions and performances appearing publicly in China must undergo word-by-word censorship before they are permitted to be staged. In 2023, after the end of the Zero Covid Policy, theatre workers were informed that all negative information related to COVID-19 are deemed “thought viruses”. It is therefore impossible to discuss COVID-19 and the related policies in any public space in China.
JEPG received such a comment on Douban ( “豆瓣” “Dou Ban” in Chinese), a free review platform for culture and the arts in China: “The biggest flaw of the play is that it attributes all of society’s problems to social media. This didn't convince me. The problems are clearly multifaceted and much deeper. There are many fatal flaws in existing social media and our social behaviours. Yet by changing them, the problems presented in the play could not be solved at all.”
In China, the relationship between the government, netizens, and theatre practitioners always reminds me of the game of snake in mobile phone: The snake devours everything around it with a large gulp and eventually bites off its own tail.
Part II
Three tabs were shown in my browsing history on February 20, 2023: the definition of ASMR, selected passages of Dostoevsky’s White Nights, and an online theatre performance named the Fade, the Blue, livestreaming on Bilibili, the largest anime platform in China.
In brief, I had a daydream during the one-hour livestream of the Fade, the Blue, even though I was trying to convince myself that a dream could not be defined as long as it’s going on.
Since 2020, a new section has been added into the annual Beijing Fringe Festival, Theatre Online. Most of the theatre pieces shown in this section can solely be accessed through certain internet platforms during scheduled dates and time. During the showing time, all the users of the platform can send real-time comments, which float across the screens of the viewers. A special term, Dan Mu (“弹幕”in Chinese), was created to describe the flying comments, which originally came from anime fandom in Japan.
In his book Postdramatic Theatre, Dr. Hans-Thies Lehmann claims that “Postdramatic theatre is a theatre of the present. Reformulating presence as present, in allusion to Bohrer’s concept of the ‘absolute present tense’ (‘das absolute Präsens’), means, above all, to conceive of it as a process, as a verb. It can be neither object, nor substance, nor the object of cognition in the sense of a synthesis effected by the imagination and the understanding.1 In We Don’t Have Bodies Yet, Paul B. Preciado states that “Science, technology and the market are redrawing the limits of what is now and what will be a living human body tomorrow. These limits are defined not just in relation to animality and forms of life that historically have been considered sub-human (proletarian, non-white, non-masculine, trans, crip, disabled, migrant…), but also in relation to the machine, to artificial intelligence.” 2
If Dr. Lehmann, Ms. Preciado and I were to watch the Fade, the Blue at the same time, we might have completely different opinions on whether it is a piece of theatrical work. The question is: what is the presence of the online performance when it is delivered from the creators to the audience, who completely differ in time and space from both the creators of the performance and the scenes in the performance?
Generally speaking, two spaces are presented in the Fade, the Blue: Firstly, there is a meticulously arranged, proportionally reduced model of a room, in which a meticulously made, proportionally reduced plastic figure plays the main character – an insomniac young man, who works as a civil worker during the day. The young man cannot fall asleep. He wants to resign from his job and stay in his small room. He lies on his bed and scrolls through his mobile phone. It links to a second location – an online location – the ASMR livestream of a young woman who lives upstairs from the young man and recently returned home after her studying overseas. As the ASMR goes on, I can constantly hear the white noises and see a pair of healthy and sophisticated human hands knead, rub, and tear various materials and make sound out of the actions. The piece can also be considered as a variation of a piece of stop-motion animation.
Some well-designed montages connect the subconscious of both characters: childhood portraits, photos of their teenage bedrooms and hand-written notes, which are slid under the door between neighbours. These objects allow both characters to start exploring their shared space in the past. They finally meet offline, walk around the neighbourhood together, and start to document their memories.
Born in the information age and harmoniously coexisting with internet, the Fade, the Blue is subtle, ethereal, and embodies the aesthetic patterns associated with Generation X. The theatre audience seems to be comfortable with such an unconventional theatrical experience, and recreat the presence of the performance by themselves: Comments that occasionally appear on the screen during the live broadcast are “Great voice. Can anyone recommend a radio station for insomniacs?” … “My personal ASMR is as follows...”, which indicate that this online theatre piece encouges the viewers to communicate in their virtual identities and redefine the boundaries of their own virtual spaces.
It’s worth mentioning that due to the intermittent lockdowns and quarantines from 2020 to 2023, online socialising has completely taken over daily life for urban residents in China. People share the microphone in online karaoke rooms, play online games in teams in virtual game rooms, and practice aerobics with coaches through online fitness classes. They watch rural residents in remote areas planting crops, raising chickens, fishing, and helping horses to reshape their horseshoes. They dine alone, while watching the live output of their favourite food bloggers for company, listen to online ASMR stations, and Siri wakes them up and encourages them to work alone in front of the desks.
Adapting from White Nights, Dostoevsky writes, “Now I reach out my hand to you, will you accept me?” , I will describe my experice of watching the Fade, the Blue as “Now I reach out my detached hand to you, will you accept me?”
My next question is, in what way can digital theatre redefine interactivity?
I first heard about the Gānbēi project in 2020 when Stage No More was in residency at the Academy for Theatre and Digitality in Dortmund. I have known Chen Ran, the founder and artistic director of Stage No More, a former senior theatre journalist in China, for quite a few years.
Chen Ran called me in Dortmund and told me that Stage No More had just left Beijing, which was about to go into lockdown, and started their residency in Dortmund. However, then the Dortmund theatre had to close after two weeks. The European artists went back to their hometowns, leaving Stage No More alone in the studio.
The concept of online socialising was born out of such an occasion. Gānbēi was inspired by a famous poem by the well-known poet Li Bai, who lived during the Tang Dynasty, “I raise my cup to invite the moon, who blends her light with my shadow, and we’re three friends.” 3 Famous for his literary creativity after alcohol consumption, Li Bai was tipsy at night, raising his cup to the moon and toasting himself, and then he stared at his shadow, perceiving it as his companion.
During the residency at the Academy for Theatre and Digitality, Stage No More’s research was divided into three sections: the history of human exploration of the Moon, the political metaphor of the social custom of Gānbēi in various cultures, and the study of the social behaviours through screens in the information age. They therefore asked the following questions: How can human beings stay in touch without physical contact? How do their gazes travel through cameras, chips, and networks? What changes do our bodies undergo to adapt to this contactless communication?
Gānbēi took place in a darkened performance space. The deep blue, non-natural light illuminated a performer, dressed in a white jumpsuit with no exposure of his physical features. He/She interacted with a display screen, which simultaneously displayed the image of his/her own body, being captured by a real-time camera positioned on a Wall-E shaped robot. At the same time, special video effects created countless reflections of the body on the screen and the performer raised his cup and toasted to the countless replicas of himself. Sometimes the robot roamed outside the main performance area, probing the audience with its camera. As a result, the audience’s physical features were identified and projected on the screen in real-time. In this case, the presence turned into the present through the interactivity between the camera, the performer and the audience.
Ever since I started watching the video, my body became more sensitive: As my fingers touched the keyboard, I felt the bumps and recesses; I kept pressing the same key harder and harder every time. I then noticed the dust glowing on my screen, my eyes lingered on the camera and I stared at it. I felt the heat of the computer... On April 25th, 2023, sitting at home in front of my computer, the liberation of my body has been firmly confirmed through the connection to and coordination with my computer.
Gānbēi is not only a live digital theatre piece, but also validates as an online immersive theatre in the video documentation, which provides the possibility to link the audiece und the performance by sharing the same status of being alone in front of the screen and interacting with other people contactlessly. As a matter of fact, it enables me to rethink my physical presence. It also suggest the potential of the future digital theatre: One-to-one online performance.
As I close all the tabs and click on the option of shutdown, I notice that, unlike the works that I have experienced live, all the plays and performances I have experienced on the internet were analysed and stored in an alternative chamber in my brain, through the lens of which, my physical existence, my apartment, suddenly changes and it seems smaller and darker than two hours before. To be precise, I now feel that I am much more informed and intelligent, like an external part of a gigantic cyborg.
I am overwhelmed and I feel like I must get away from the screen now.
References:
„Ganbei“ von Stage No More
http://stagenomore.com/works/ganbei
„Weaver Girl Projekt“ von_ao_ao_jing
https://aoaoing.com/WeaverGirl-Project
„JEPG“ von Sleep-less Theatre
https://www.sohu.com/a/337842422_827253
1. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, page 143-144, London: Routledge, 2006.
2. Paul B Preciado, “Notes from a Talk at Glad Day Bookshop”, Toronto, January 22, 2020, mikehoolboom.com
3. Translated from 《月下独酌》,original text in Chinese by Li Bai, translated by Xu Xuanchong,Three Hundred Tang Proms, page 171, China Translation &Publishung House. 2021
Dora (Yuemin) Cheng is a trilingual playwright, working and living recently in Berlin. Born and raised in Nanjing, China, she graduated from B.A playwriting in Shanghai Theater Academy and M.A visual language of Performance in Wimbledon College of Art with a full international scholarship for Asian students. Her first play, Ejected, was presented as the first production in the new writing programme of Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center. She also participated in the playwrights’ programme at the Royal Court Theatre, London. She worked as a dramaturge in the online production Qingdao: a messy archive: Deutsche Kolonialvergangenheit in China for Junges National Theater Mannheim, which was nominated by nachtkritik.de for Theatertreffen 2021. Her first play written in German, Epiphanie 顿悟, has been shortlisted in Theatertreffen Stückemarkt 2022.
