Being Hueman Being // Luke Nowell

Friedrich Schiller wrote that we play only when we are fully human, and are fully human only when we play. In Being Hueman Being, Luke Nowell creates a playful world in which everyone is invited to participate, play and perhaps achieve a state of full humanity.

This world is grounded in his art as a clown - his demeanour, his attitude, even his posture is playful as he has fun with art and the cycle of life. No big deal, he's just being human. Audience participation is crucial. You might be recruited to play a sperm racing to an egg, or to be a flower for a bee to pollinate, or to be a human with a swatter, or to be a bee that forms part of a swarm to sting that human to death. There is so much to do, everyone has a chance to play.

In recent years, there have been many stories about playful workspaces - office ball pits, laughter clubs, colouring books for grown-ups. This trend is not an attempt to revert to childhood, but an attempt to recover an essential part of adulthood. Play allows for creativity: it is necessarily voluntary, enjoyable and flexible. When you join in a game, or run with someone else's idea, you inevitably create something new. This is the playfulness of all performance - there may be rules to learn but performers and their audiences create a new experience every time. Although Nowell begins his show by saying everything is controlled, it is clear that each time he invites someone to participate, he cedes some of his control to us so that we can also play and create a new experience.

- Michael Regnier

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Being Hueman Being - Luke Nowell

Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens - PopMatters

Play is More Than Just Fun - Stuart Brown (TED)

Seriously Playful: Creativity, Being and Play - Institute of Arts and Ideas

The Psychological Case for Adult Play Time - Pacific Standard

Siri // La Messe Base with Aurora Nova

The central concept of Siri, using the iOS assistant AI to fulfil a speaking role in the performance, is intriguingly complicated by the biography of Laurence Dauphinais, the actor conversing with the disembodied voice of her phone. As one of the first Canadians created by artificial insemination, Dauphinais shares some unusual certainties about her conception – exact time and place, process and design – that echo the available information about the creation of Siri by Dag Kittlaus at the SRI Artifical Intelligence Centre. Two derivations of ‘AI’ are at play in Siri, artificial insemination as well as intelligence. Continually questioning her phone to answer the deeper, more emotionally resonant questions that arise from the bare facts of her creation provokes unnerving confluences and responses from the now-familiar voice from the phone. Dauphinais plays with this, the answers that might most approach a Turing-test pass instantly undone by repeated and carefully provoked stock answers.

Fragments of songs and films are used to give Siri the illusion of personality. Familiar touchstones like the homicidal HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, a reference so familiar that it is actually built into the software of Siri itself, are used alongside the autobiography of the performer to question identity, intelligence and the nature of consciousness. As artificial intelligence arrives and becomes part of our lives, these questions become even more essential. Siri provides an anthropomorphisation of external supplementary memory. She is a deferral of the responsibility to remember numbers, the layout of cities or good restaurants near me, and a step towards the normalisation of everyday AI. The performance asks what it means to create it, and to accommodate it into our lives.

Just as Kittlaus saw his creation developed by another, the anonymous donor that provided half of Dauphinais’s genetic makeup is a spectre hanging over even the most technobabble dialogue. Dauphinais recounts how her home DNA test, an increasingly common postal swab, led her to a previously unknown relative and the potential of reconnection. The performance dwells on the risks of pursuing it, asking whether Dauphinais’s biological father might feel differently to now see his anonymous donation realised in a full person as complicated as any other, just as Kittlaus might not recognise the original goals of his creation in the program we carry around today. 

- Lewis Church

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Siri - CanadaHub at Summerhall

Turing Test

Siri Development

History of Artificial Insemination in Canada

The DNA Test as Horoscope - The Atlantic

LAST DREAM (ON EARTH) / Kai Fischer

Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, made his pioneering solo flight on 12 April 1961. Last Dream (On Earth) uses words, imagery and live music to recreate his experiences of countdown, takeoff, weightlessness, and fiery but safe return. 

It’s a spectacular soundscape, and each audience member hears it immersively and intimately through their own individual headphones. But in painful contrast with Gagarin’s triumphant tale, a second story is also told– the desperate journey of refugees trying to reach Spain across the sea from Morocco in a child’s dinghy.

The two stories of peril, bravery, persistence and adversity intermingle and interlink creatively, and we have to ask: could I do this? What would it take to make me risk everything? And how are people changed by such experiences?

Even before their sea journey starts, the refugees in this story have already travelled thousands of miles, been subjected to indignities and uncertainties, and had to bargain, plead and pay.

Little wonder that in Britain, studies show higher rates of depression and anxiety among refugees compared to the national population, with those at highest risk being children, and women who have experienced abuse on their journey.

Figures show that of all people who migrate, asylum-seekers are the most likely to have multiple traumas. Experts have called for more support for those in the asylum system, but the intense politicisation of the issue continues to dog decision-making.

Astronauts, by contrast with refugees, are pampered travellers, rigorously trained for their journeys into such a risky environment. But the psychological impact of living in space is a very topical issue. While Yuri Gagarin spent just 108 minutes on the first spaceflight, a journey to Mars at current speeds would take nine months, one way.

A critical factor in maintaining mental health en route will be discovering how to improve astronauts’ sleep, while light and dark cycles disrupt their natural circadian rhythms.

And could there be genetic impacts on the human body from spaceflight? NASA hopes to answer that question through studying Scott Kelly, a veteran of a year-long space mission, and his identical twin brother, Mark. (RM)

Last Dream (On Earth) ran at Assembly Hall until August 28th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/last-dream-on-earth 

First Orbit, a film featuring audio and imagery of Yuri Gagarin and his mission: http://www.firstorbit.org/watch-the-film

Refugee and asylum seeker health issues: http://www.migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/health-of-migrants-in-the-uk-what-do-we-know/

Psychological wellbeing of refugees and asylum seekers: http://isp.sagepub.com/content/57/2/107.abstract

Refugee council facts on asylum: http://www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/policy_research/the_truth_about_asylum/facts_about_asylum_-_page_5

Medical monitoring on the International Space Station: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/1025.html

Articles about Scott Kelly and his year-long space mission: http://www.nasa.gov/1ym/articles

EVERY DAY I WAKE UP HOPEFUL // Christian Talbot

It’s one the enduring footballing cliches, parked somewhere alongside “a game of two halves” and the absurdist non-sequitur “sick as a parrot”: “it’s the hope that kills you”. Like all good cliches it invites you to consider an alternative, a refashioning, a making new. John Patrick Higgins’ Every Day I Wake Up Hopeful is an attempt at just such a refashioning. 

Its cousin cliche is the idea of “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory”. The falling at the final hurdle when success seems assured. It’s the sense that no matter how propitious the current, no matter how favourable the circumstances, failure is as inevitable as night bleeding into day. Why bother at all? What if the goal that’s agonisingly fallen short of, night after night, is one that can’t be reversed? What if the ultimate, unrealisable victory is in self-annihilation?

For Higgins, and for Malachy (played with hangdog sensitivity by Christian Talbot) hope is the impediment. The current running throughout Malachy’s undistinguished life and his equally undistinguished prospective death (a blunt razor blade belonging to his dead father, a last meal of KFC and a litre of mid-range supermarket white wine) is a Beckettian belief that the only thing better than dying is never having been born at all. Yet it’s not clear that Malachy fully believes his own rhetoric. He stays alive, after all.  

There’s a bit of Larkin, too. For Malachy, as for Larkin, “life is first boredom, then fear”. In this instance, it’s a fear born out of being haunted at the noteless suicide of his much younger partner Skye (“a fucking stupid name, but she was Australian”). It’s a fear that his comfortable, undistinguished life isn’t a subversive comment on the fruitless vanity of others, but just a sad, flabby waste. It’s a suspicion fuelled by self-pity and acute self-knowledge. That’s what makes the play such an effective comment on suicide, its acknowledgement that humans are seldom rational actors, particularly in the matter of life and death decisions. In the end, as Malachy observes, “it’s the fucking hope that gets you”.

- FG

Every Day I Wake Up Hopeful played at Sweet Grassmarket - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/every-day-i-wake-up-hopeful

From Beckett to Stoppard: Existentialism, Death, and Absurdity- http://home.sprintmail.com/~lifeform/beckstop.html

The Silent Epidemic of Male Suicide- http://www.bcmj.org/articles/silent-epidemic-male-suicide

Existential Stress, Anxiety and Meaning Making in Your Life- http://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/anxiety-schmanxiety/2015/04/existential-anxiety-stress-and-meaning-making-in-your-life/

Have Men Been Let Down Over Mental Health?- https://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/2016/may/18/men-suicide-mental-health

The Mind in Solitude: An Interview With Claire Louise-Bennet- http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/tag/samuel-beckett/

THREE JUMPERS // Unearthed Theatre

A council worker watches on as a young man takes a running jump to throw himself off a bridge. He pulls back at the last moment. The young man, elegantly dressed, starts to converse with the dry witted street sweeper and the tone shifts. Things are revealed to be more complicated, as things often are.

Soon we are joined by two others and a queue forms at the bridge. A queue of suicides. They start to squabble and confer and details start to drip down to form a patchwork of connections. Unemployment, childlessness, the absence or death of love. The mutual connection through one female character.

Three Jumpers treats suicide as something more than just a one-off kind of ultimate madness, or a sudden burst towards self-annihilation. It shows the sometimes farcical, even grimly humorous faces of self-loathing and depression. It’s all in the conversation- after all, isn’t the absence of dialogue, the feeling that internal suffering is something to be born stoically and alone, that one of the biggest factors in suicide being the biggest killer of young men. It’s not that the conversations are flawless. They are often stilted and spiteful, yet strangely fluent in the way that desperate peoples conversations often are.

The play unfurls like a morality play without a moralising streak. Through its humor and subtlety it shows suicidal tendencies not as aberrations, but part of the complexity that constitutes being human.

- FG

Three Jumpers played at Greenside @ Infirmary Street - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/three-jumpers

Self-Determination: A Buffer Against Suicide Ideation- http://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/2012-Bureau_SaLTB.pdf

From Beckett to Stoppard: Existentialism, Death, and Absurdity- http://home.sprintmail.com/~lifeform/beckstop.html

An Essay on Influence in Waiting for Godot- http://www.samuel-beckett.net/Penelope/influences_resonances.html

Campaign Against Living Miserably- https://www.thecalmzone.net/

GENERATION ZERO // Lamphouse Theatre

In a world increasingly mediated and sustained through ever more subtle technologies, it seems appropriate that the protagonists of Generation Zero meet through an online dating app. Their blossoming romance develops through a particular set of millennial anxieties and rituals. The strife at an unresponded message with a read receipt, the bonding over twee children's literature, the small unfoldings of mutual appreciations and desires.

But it’s precisely in the anxieties not shared and the concerns not reciprocated that creates the drama. One has deep ideological convictions about environmental activism. The other sees them as both distraction and oddity. The honeymoon harmony starts to wear off under the pressure of sincerity rubbing up against comfortable apathy.

While the play touches on the notional ideas of surveillance, the disruptive powers of technology and the sheer scale of damage humans wreak on their natural environment, it pales against the backdrop of a much more human scaled drama.

 Throughout, it’s the conversation regarding what it truly means to communicate with those you profess to love, with all of the minor, low-grade incomprehensions, the idea of speaking at, not to, the willful stuffing of ears against opposing viewpoints and the way these lead to all sorts of unmeant betrayals. The underlying irony is that what the audience hears is what the protagonists can’t, that all of the noise and concern that they treat each other and their various worthy causes is no substitute for actual communication.

- FG

Generation Zero played at ZOO Southside - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/generation-zero

Competitive effects of technology diffusion-  http://www.jstor.org/stable/1251581

The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism- https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=1tCUQXgAJhoC&oi=fnd&pg=PP2&dq=environmental+activism+spying&ots=ed06eGOT8T&sig=SjLemW70cVLONo3d7bP80iDnR2I#v=onepage&q=environmental%20activism%20spying&f=false

Undercover police spied on activists- https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/09/undercover-uk-police-spy-apologises-after-being-tracked-down-by-woman-he-deceived

Womens Environment Network- http://www.wen.org.uk/

On the Social Media Ideology- http://www.e-flux.com/journal/on-the-social-media-ideology/

THE HOURS BEFORE WE WAKE // Tremolo Theatre

Judging by the extreme rarity of mobile phones, tablets, or even laptops on stage, the theatre world has barely caught up with the technological realities of the present, let alone the future. Tremolo Theatre’s The Hours Before I Wake doesn’t step too dramatically beyond the realities of the world we live in. But its commitment to representing a social media-rich, technologically-dense world makes it feel unusual - a sci-fi satire that’s close to home.

The biggest innovation in this dystopian future is that dreams are both monetised, and controlled. Individual consumers can select what they want to dream about, and take a pill to ensure that they can enact their fantasy painlessly during their sleeping hours. For Ian, the show’s protagonist, this fantasy revolves around becoming a superhero who rescues his office crush Janice from burning buildings. It’s childish stuff. But then, Ian is a huge pampered baby, cocooned from the harsh realities of the world by a soothing robot voice who helps guide him through his hours away from work - and reports any untoward behaviour straight back to his superiors.

Theorists have written about the dangers of a ‘frictionless’ world, where sharing on social media becomes constant and thoughtless -- leading to a situation where governments are able to gather a huge amount of individuals with minimum efforts. And companies are quick to take advantage of these new opportunities, too. Business are already able to track everything from their employees' movements to their facial expressions to their menstrual cycles.

The psychological effects of this dependency are less understood. Recent research has associated social media use (specifically, comparison-type behaviours) with onset of depressive symptoms. The Hours Before We Wake predicts a comfortable acceptance of constant sharing that's facilitated by soothing drugs [rather like Aldous Huxley's conception of the drug Soma in Brave New World]. 

This young company have devised a pretty dispiriting future, one that's a logical extension of a rapidly evolving corporate culture. But as its protagonist Ian is inspired to rebel against his tightly-controlled environment, it demonstrates how easy algorithms can be subverted by, as well as built from, human behaviour at its most individual.

- AS

The Hours Before We Wake was on at the Edinburgh Fringe from 5-28 August http://www.thehoursbeforewewake.com/

How frictionless sharing undermines individual privacy http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/how-frictionless-sharing-could-undermine-your-legal-right-to-privacy/254277/

Surveillance in the workplace http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/corporate-surveillance-activists/406201/

Impact of social media on mental health https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/blog/social-media-and-young-peoples-mental-health

PERHAPS HOPE // Company Here and Now

Circus may not seem like the most obvious medium through which to explore climate change, but watching Perhaps Hope it starts to make a certain kind of sense. What other art form involves so much risk? Where else do you see humans courting danger, even death, with such abandon? The circus artist's willingness to edge as close as possible to the brink and stare oblivion in the face is a pretty good metaphor for the world's inaction on climate change.

Company Here and Now describe Perhaps Hope as an 'eco-apocalyptic circus show', and its three acts feature a repeated set of sequences that gradually unravel. The soundtrack is integral to the piece, weaving written extracts in among the music. Key words like 'anthropocene' and 'hyperobject' play out over the strings, Laurie Anderson and REM.

The LA Review of Books explains what we mean by a 'hyperobject' in relation to climate change.  In 'Global Warming and Other Hyperobjects', Stephen Muecke explains that a hyperobject is something vast, something that challenges our assumptions about human mastery over things. Hyperobjects are 'scary game-changers, and they have a touch of the sublime'.

Circus is a display of human mastery over physical constraints – it is a space where a person can balance on one leg on the head of a man, or on the top of a wine bottle. It is a space where people take on gravity and win, if only momentarily. And so it is a potent space in which to talk about issues that challenge human mastery. Perhaps Hope underlines the performers' frustrations and fears about climate change. Through its physical unraveling, it explores the psychological impact of the knowledge that we may be facing the end of the world as we know it.

- Helen Babbs

Perhaps Hope is on at 17.30 at Underbelly’s Circus Hub on the Meadows until 22 August. Wheelchair Access, Wheelchair Accessible Toilets - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/perhaps-hope

'Global Warming and Other Hyperobjects': https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/hyperobjects/

 'What is climate change doing to our mental health?': http://grist.org/climate-energy/what-is-climate-change-doing-to-our-mental-health/

'Climate Change Will Have Broad Psychological Effects': http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/06/climate-change.aspx

'Human Health: Impacts, Adaptation, and Co-Benefits': http://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/images/uploads/WGIIAR5-Chap11_FGDall.pdf

'Saving the World Together: 5 Shows Tackling Climate Change in Edinburgh': http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/saving-world-together-5-shows-tackling-climate-change-edinburgh/

'Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet for ever': https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/01/generation-anthropocene-altered-planet-for-ever