Premiering at Now Or Never, Crisis Actor is one part surrealist theatrical comedy and one part live-action video game. Its creators wanted it to be a potentially overwhelming sensory experience – and a lot of fun.
“It’s kind of silly to admit,” says writer and director Vidya Rajan, “but I was just really fascinated by the double meaning of the term ‘crisis actor.’”
Rajan is explaining the origins of her new multimedia theatre performance, Crisis Actor, created with digital artist Sam Mcgilp and dramaturgist Andrew Sutherland. It’s on at Arts House from Wednesday 27 to Sunday 31 August as part of this year’s Now Or Never festival.
Crisis Actor for Now or Never
- Wednesday 27 – Friday 29 August | 7.30pm – 8.45pm
- Saturday 30 August | 1pm – 2.15pm, 7.30pm – 8.45pm
- Sunday 31 August | 5pm – 6.15pm
- Arts House
- Tickets here
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The performance toes the line between absurdist comedy and dystopian drama as it bores into what Rajan calls the “reality collapse” of our contemporary technology-driven era.
Rajan has been a crisis actor before, she says, going by the term’s original meaning. “It started as a term for actors hired to play victims for medical doctors who are training in emergency services,” she says.
But over the last decade, the term “crisis actor” has been co-opted by the alt-right to dispute the veracity of some very real crises, from the Sandy Hook mass shooting to the war in Ukraine and Covid-19.
“I was just thinking of this time of reality collapse,” says Rajan. She defines “reality collapse” as a state in which we’re unable to trust what our senses show us due to the attention-diverting role digital technology plays in our lives.
“It’s like, things may or may not be real, but you can’t take them in because of the nature of how we exist on our platforms and the technologies that frame our world,” Rajan says. “You have a thousand feelings a second, which is almost like having no feelings at all.”
This insight about contemporary culture was the jumping off point for Crisis Actor. But the work sets its gaze on the future, with Rajan, Mcgilp and Sutherland imagining where this situation might lead us.
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“The story of the century seems to be, we’re just watching suffering and disaster from afar as it gets closer and closer,” Rajan says. “There’s a good tweet that says, like, ‘Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.’”
It’s a grave conceptual base, but there are several layers of game-playing in Crisis Actor. A couple of actors appear on stage, while Mcgilp deploys motion capture technology to simultaneously display 3D avatars of the actors in the performance space.
“It’s definitely a work that unfolds across a number of forms,” Mcgilp says. “It’s become this challenge for the performers to represent themselves simultaneously in person, in body, and then in avatar, and to elicit empathy in both of those states.”
The audience plays a vital role. The work begins with a disaster experienced by all members of the audience. “We create this memory of a quite surreal disaster you’ve been through as a group,” says Rajan.
It then jumps ahead to the not-too-distant future where two actors are competing to memorialise the tragic event. “It’s taking its inspiration from competition reality shows and live gaming,” Rajan says.
The audience is divided into two teams, and each team strives to help its actor win. The audience interacts with the performers via a phone app.
“The audience is able to contribute content into the space, like words and text and emojis, and they’re able to vote on who’s doing better,” Mcgilp says.
“It’s like you’re playing a video game with real people,” says Rajan.
Crisis Actor is partly a commentary on the performance of victimhood, with the actors competing to portray the suffering of the disaster. It also looks at how memory, care, patience and empathy get distorted and exploited by those who stand to profit from the attention economy.
Though, Rajan says it’s not without its light-hearted moments. “Anything I do – and I think Sam’s practice also has this – has always got an element of silliness. I’m always interested in that line between the silly and the profound, and when it slips between both.”
She adds, “It’s really interesting to put people in a playful state and slowly unfold some of the more disturbing themes, because I think that’s an easier way to get to that more emotional space.”
Find out more information about Crisis Actor here.
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