It's Like Living in the Future

I don't know about other people, but I have a fairly eclectic selection of reading material lying around the house. Probably the oddest is the IEEE Spectrum (the journal for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). Oddly, it's where I found my first sf performance for critical review. Christian Denisart's Robots. You find sf theatre in some weird places.

This morning over coffee I perused the latest issue. Okay, mostly I look at the pictures and occasionally understand an article (well, really a sentence or two from an article), but what snagged my attention was an advertisement on the first page. It was for Dassault Systems, a company that creates software platforms. The photo depicted a woman walking down a flight of white marble stairs--think futuristic Danish modern. What was sf about it was the bionic prosthesis that enabled her to do so. The copy read: "If we can help people who have a damaged skeleton, could they walk again? A robotic skeleton--a dream our software could bring to life. How long before bionic humans are fact, not science fiction?" Harkening back to the last post here, Mac Rogers quoted Karen Joy Fowler. I think that the above ad copy further supports her assertion that sf is the new realism.

I think that we can all pretty much agree with that assessment for the most part. We are currently living in our own future, and our narratives are slowly but surely coming to reflect that fact. Unfortunately, theatre still seems a bit mired in the realism of the past. In conversations with dramaturg Carrie J. Cole, we've lamented the fact that the training system for theatre professionals, still largely reliant on universities, still insists on training almost exclusively in realistic techniques. Designers, given the reliance on more and more sophisticated technology, have it a bit better, but are their skills really being pushed if producers and professionals are still mired in a theatre that no longer really reflects the culture in which we live. Even if and when sf becomes a greater part of performance, have we produced artists capable of rising to the challenge of staging it?

Even critics like myself, trained in traditional theatre practices (and I'm talking critics NOT reviewers) are going to need to start making connections beyond their usual purview if they are going to fairly and correctly represent what they're looking at in addition to helping to move the art forward.

As Jennifer Parker-Starbuck wrote in her book Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance (2011), "Enmeshed with technologic languages in performance, abject bodies can predict future bodies, future questions, future abilities" (60). While she was specifically examining the abject, one could easily replace "abject bodies" with "technologic bodies" or "science fictional bodies." Bodies not unlike the woman depicted in the advertisement. In order to do this, I think that as artists, critics, and educators we may need to reassess ourselves and look for new platforms ourselves. Our software is a little out of date.