e.ID: a fugue – such great hope inside

Our physical lives are no longer ours alone, increasingly overwritten by our digital profiles.

A dark stage and lights in our eyes. The performers enter, diminutive in the blunt scale of the South African State Theatre’s stage. They’re flanked by exposed lighting rigs and industrial fans. A large lamp hangs from the ceiling. Clear bags of water before us, like the ones you keep goldfish in. Only, remote-controlled lights swim in these ones. These are the materials we are presented with. What story will they tell?

What follows is a series of vignettes, fragments, material for collage, all variations on a theme: our identities are fractured across technology, memory, and physicality.

The performers take the luminescent bags, tout them, swing them, cradle them. They flicker on an off, little souls wrapped in plastic. The fans are activated and the costumes billow in their artificial breeze. Fluttering fabric (“florals for spring?”). Thankfully, it does not spill over into gimmickry. Quite the opposite. Trust the Capetonians to pluck poetry from the wind.

The combined world is this: A cold, concrete scene. 50 years away. Tomorrow, maybe. A fever dream in an abandoned building. Why here, then, on this grand stage and not in some industrial warehouse? Well, we are not in Europe. Here, our abandoned buildings are just that – abandoned. Though the State Theatre is not far behind.

Digital discordance is our soundscape, into which the occasional vocal flourish is dropped – high, hot-headed and yearning – ameliorating this exquisite symphony of limbs. Lights flash, furtive eyes seeking the hot afterglow of a silhouette. Fans blow and fade. An artificial climate rises and settles in the rafters. The suspended lamp glows and begins to spin, spin, spin, a wild spiralling outwards, casting a surveillant light below.

And then, quiet. Variation and return. Bodies continue to move. Together, alone, stumbling and gliding and falling through this fugue state.

“We are choreographed by the algorithm,” all of it seems to say. “Our digital data will outlast us, come to define us. We have short-circuited our critical thought.”

Certainly. But what of the everyday act of the body in motion? The enduring influence of embodied knowledge? Such great hope surfaced and sustained through gesture, repetition, and the singularly composed poetic image?

The landscape of e.ID is an undeniably sombre one. But in each short-circuited thrash or pre-programmed gesture is a profound rallying against the confines of our being, be they digital constructs, or our own weary, beautiful bodies.

You are alive, they say. Do not hesitate.       

e.ID: a fugue is on at the State Theatre until 23 August. Tickets available via webtickets.

Credits:
Conceptualised and directed by Louise Coetzer
Performed by Gemma Trehearn, Rian Jansen, Tamsyn Pretorius, Gala Winkler and Aphiwe Sodlamba
Score by Njabulo Phungula, Inge Beckmann, Heidrun Schramm and Nicolas Wiese, with Musical direction by Brydon Bolton
Interactive technology design by Methodlab, with technical direction by Oscar O’Ryan Lighting design by Wilhelm Disbergen

Photo by Oscar O’Ryan