An Evening of Sci-Fi Theatre in Clapham
A Play, A Workshop, A Meetup: Reflections on Talos III Opening Night (2nd December 2019)
by Talos Artistic Director Christos Callow Jr
The Talos III launch featured a networking event, a workshop in two-parts, a VR experience and a staged reading of a sci-fi monologue, Mayuri. The rest of the festival’s programme (as well as every other Talos festival’s) can be found on our website. I am writing about this particular night, as it combined several different experiences for our audiences, giving the audience members the role of participants, students, observers and creators. I’m also writing because I want to reflect in more depth on the play Mayuri and its association with other Cyborphic projects and our overall exploration of science fiction theatre.
AI & Creativity: Meetup and Workshop
The meetup titled AI & Creativity Meetup was organised by Dr. Stylianos Kampakis, data scientist, CEO of The Tesseract Academy and writer of the “Decision Maker’s Handbook to Data Science” (Apress, 2019.) It included a mix of data scientists and sci-fi theatre enthusiasts who wanted to find out more about AI & Creativity, exchange ideas and discuss potential new collaborations. This was followed by a workshop / lecture by Stylianos where he talked, among other things, about deep learning and his previous work on using AI in the arts. There’s a beautiful review of this event by Yasmin Chamchoun published here: https://thedatascientist.com/review-ai-creativity-meetup-london/ The meetup group has since expanded and people can join future networking events here: https://www.meetup.com/London-AI-and-Creativity-meetup/
I proceeded to give an introductory workshop on science fiction theatre to our audience which involved the people who had come originally for the AI & Creativity meeting but were keen to learn about and experience theatre while most had never written creatively or performed before, and were excited to try out alongside more experienced artists. In regards to the theatre workshop content, I had blogged about sci-fi theatre workshops before here: https://www.cyborphic.com/blog/teaching-science-fiction-theatre Effectively, I delivered a shorter version of the three-hour introduction to sf theatre which I have devised for these occasions – people were still given enough time to create something in small teams, and to share it.
This was followed by an immersive (and impressive) VR experience by Electrick Village titled RawTransport™ which explored issues of escapism and virtual transportation. You can read more about the project, the positive reviews it has received, and the work of the company here: https://www.electrickvillage.org/rawtransporttm
Finally, at 9pm, I presented my own play, Mayuri, as a reading or, if you like, a storytelling experience.
Liza Callinicos in Mayuri (Photo by Matei Răducanu)
Science Fiction Storytelling
We were at the time keen to present this as a staged reading and to develop the work further following audience feedback. Given the play’s nature as a monologue, I suppose more than a staged reading this could be called a storytelling experience, as it is written to be narrated as much as to be performed. As the audience entered the room, the actress Liza Callinicos – as the play’s Priestess who introduces the life of Mayuri – welcomed them asking comic questions about how they’re coping with radiation, thus giving hints as to the play’s theme and atmosphere.
Liza is an experienced film and theatre actress who enthusiastically worked with the character and was very quickly in a position to present the story - including incorporating a proposed blend of Greek dance & robot dance as part of the performance. A writer herself and a sci-fi fan (and also partly Greek & geek), she brought to life all the various stages of Mayuri’s human and posthuman versions. More information on Liza’s acting work can be found here: https://www.spotlight.com/2613-5645-2306
Apart from the obvious limitations of a reading, there is nevertheless an advantage to a science fiction performance that is stripped from any science fictional imagery on stage. Whatever comes to mind when one considers the aesthetics of a sci-fi theatre, it is interesting to test an elimination of any unnecessary elements, resonating with Jerzy Grotowski’s approach who suggests that since theatre cannot compete with TV and film, it might as well be “poor”, and “by gradually eliminating whatever proved superfluous, we found that theatre can exist without make-up, without autonomic costume and scenography, without a separate performance area (stage), without lighting and sound effects, etc.” (Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre). Of course the intention of a staged reading isn’t to replicate Poor Theatre but I like to think that by taking such an approach during rehearsals we managed a storytelling / performance experience that felt complete in and of itself – though this of course had less to do with minor directorial instructions and more to do with Liza’s performance and the emotional depth she added to the character.
Liza Callinicos in Mayuri (Photo by Matei Răducanu)
Inspiration: From Greek tragedy to Japanese anime and back
Without going into great detail about the story itself, the particular science fiction play embodies a number of literary and cultural influences, and reflections on migration and alienation, while also exploring issues of family, identity and existential crisis that come as a result of the above.
The protagonist’s name is a homage to Mayuri Kurotsuchi from the manga Bleach and its anime adaptation, a character who – among other things – can be described as a mad scientist willing to endlessly perform experiments on his own body. There’s an interesting monologue from Kurotsuchi on what is perfection and the meaninglessness of the quest for perfection that can be read here (where it appears as a quote of Bleach’s creator, Tite Kubo): https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/552102-the-perfect-being-huh-there-is-no-such-thing-as while there are several videos of the dubbed anime version on Youtube, e.g: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hu_j9TfGnpw It is this aspect of the character’s personality that the choice of name in the play is a homage to. There are also references to Greek theatre in the play, for example a scene that gives a sci-fi twist to the most tragic (and graphic) Agave – Pentheus scene in The Bacchae by Euripides, where the atrocity that is committed is not say by a mad scientist towards their experiments, but by a mother towards her child.
Liza Callinicos in Mayuri (Photo by Matei Răducanu)
Literary references aside, the play itself is more of a blend of Greek tragedy meets one-woman show meets cyborg identity and posthumanism. The Greek connection (if you like) that defines the play was explored earlier, in the short play “The Last Tragedy” at Talos II which (given that it was about the extinction of humans) was about the last tragedy of the human race. This received a very positive review in A Younger Theatre: https://www.ayoungertheatre.com/review-talos-ii-the-bread-roses-theatre/ These elements were later adapted in another play, a story told in 2nd pov, and later developed as “Posthuman Meditation.” The main difference of course is that the meditation play is without a protagonist (perhaps a theatrical deconstruction even closer to the previously quoted statement by Grotowski) but rather the protagonist is the audience, and it is their story that the play is telling. It takes the concept of storytelling further, blending it with meditation and audio drama, further exploring the positive potential of science fiction’s escapism.
The ideas in the above texts also inform our academic research into science fiction literature, theatre and performance - for example, my colleague Dr. Andriana Domouzi is working on a relevant edited volume on AI and classical Greek literature - and the various nonhuman / posthuman roles one is expected to create or to perform in this genre, and we’re looking forward to exploring these further in the future.
Future
2020 saw the Cyborphic team managing the 2020 version of the Talos festival, which took place despite the challenges of the pandemic in November 2020, largely thanks to the excellent team at The Cockpit who co-produced the festival. The Covid situation has meant we’ve had to postpone taking the Mayuri project further but we are hoping to take this show into full production in the near future.