Be afraid, be very afraid: Darkroom Contemporary’s spectacular ‘autoplay’ urges us to get off autopilot

Technology meets autonomy in autoplay. (Photo: Oscar O'Ryan)

19 Sep 2024

autoplay is a new dance-centric operatic experience that’s been created through a choreographed interaction between humans and machines. It’s also a meditation on the degree to which our autonomy is being subsumed by the technologies we’ve so willingly embraced, perhaps with too little questioning of the existential threat that this not-so-Brave New World poses to our humanity.

Fantastical shadows danced on the high walls of the vast, warehouse-like space. They shimmered and fluttered like huge, depthless wraiths, afterimages emanating from the four dancers repeating a sequence of gestures on the square turntable that comprised most of the performance area. The gestures formed part of a physical language that was simultaneously strange and familiar. There was a haunting soundtrack, too, something eerily electronic, digital yet apparently composed from human elements.

At some point in the show, the voice of singer and actress Inge Beckmann, who was clad in the same fake-looking, straight-fringe crop-style wig as the dancers, pierced the room. It was if something reached into my guts, broke my heart a bit. Her mournful, plaintive warbling resonated and resounded through the vastness of space, transforming what had until that point felt like an avant-garde ballet into a kind of edgy, alternative opera. Or perhaps it was a kind of futuristic ritual, an amalgamation of captivating dance moves, semi-synthetic music, hypnotic human vocal gymnastics, and the relentless, though sometimes indiscernible intrusion of technologies, some of them ancient and some brand new.

It was in these moments of triumphant symbioses that the show became a kind of riveting, propulsive gesamtkunstwerk, a work of art incorporating myriad mediums, a coming together of disparate components to create something far richer and more profound than the mere sum of its parts.

Baked into this thrilling whole was the playfulness, the dry wit, the clever physical puns and heavy supply of symbolism, and the endless variety of allusions to an overwhelming body of research. Philosophy, religious references, randomness and chance, nature versus nurture, education versus instinct, humanity versus technology, creativity versus algorithmic constraint… All manner of insights had been brought together to create some semblance of an unfolding narrative while avoiding anything as straightforward or simple as a beginning-middle-end story with easy answers as the reward for your attention.

Vuyelwa Phota in autoplay. (Photo: Oscar O'Ryan)

Instead, autoplay gives rise to endless questions about the ways in which, each day, we relinquish our autonomy to machines. It asks what happens when we allow an algorithm to dictate the next step. Whether that step is the next sequence in a choreographic dance piece or the next step in our evolution, what this dance-opera confronts the audience with is a perplexing theory: what happens if human creativity itself is consumed by the artificial processes being developed in the Silicon Valleys of the world.

Making this horrifying philosophical question bearable, though, is the fact that this disturbing eventuality is being imagined and rendered visible by real people – what we witnessed in that makeshift performance space was a cast of flesh-and-blood dancers and actors and musicians.

As much as the dancers are uniformly costumed and the performers all wear identical wigs to impose a kind of rigid sameness that hints that they might be automata or robots, it is impossible to suppress their inner light, their soulfulness, their urge to express themselves. Because it is the soul – or whatever term you wish to use to describe that pulse which drives us from within – that makes us dance, play, create, love, feel, move forward. It’s that spirit that makes us human.

Even as these dancers move in synch, perform according to a preordained choreography, attempt to convey a sense of robotic mechanisation, their organic nature is there. And, unlike robots, they possess passion.

And so their synchronised movements, their beautiful and sometimes weird gestures, the slaps against their thighs or stomping of their feet on the wooden stage, all of these choreographic components that have been developed as part of a unique dance vocabulary are reminders of our ability to create simply by playing.

Playfulness being a key element in this otherwise daunting performance, it starts with the four dancers pushing their proverbial office chairs-on-wheels around the stage. A proverbial game of “musical chairs” that might put you in mind of some servant-like office minion who one day loses his or her mind and goes sailing down the corporate corridor using that chair as a means of metaphoric escape.

Such images – and there are so many clever and inspired ones in this show – suggest the variety of ways in which the human imagination can be mustered to sustain our autonomy, to keep us looking at the world through the eyes of a child, or to experience life with that same new-to-the-world amazement and awe that must have possessed Adam and Eve before they ate the apple of knowledge.

Bronwyn Craddock and Darion Adams in autoplay. (Photo: Oscar O'Ryan)

In autoplay, that apple is among the many symbols that turn up to play tricks on the audience, to send our imaginations and intellects racing. From the apple in the book of Genesis to Apple computers and iPhones, the layers of meaning seem endless.

A crucial part of autoplay’s hybrid mix of artistic forms is the music, a dazzling interplay of human voice, digitisation, improvisation and live mixing. Created by Beckmann with composers Njabulo Phungula and Brydon Bolton, the soundscape is a captivating force, edging the work into a kind of alternate universe, somewhere between worlds, at the intersection of organic and synthetic, human and digital. It doesn’t merely haunt, it consumes the air molecules, makes your brain feel as though it’s vibrating at an alternate frequency.

Beckmann’s singing is similarly startling, tripping your mind into an altered state.

A real-life enchantress, Beckmann put me in mind of that sensational blue-skinned alien opera star, Diva Plavalaguna (sung by real-life Albanian diva Inva Mula), who performs a semi-synthesised, physiologically impossible aria in the Luc Besson sci-fi film The Fifth Element. With her voice, though, Beckmann brings incredible humanity and gravitas – plus a soul-stinging fury – to the visual action.

Along with the layering of Beckmann’s voice and other composed components of the score, the rich soundscape was further being created and modified live thanks to some wizard-level real-time recording and sampling that was happening, imperceptibly, via the twiddling of knobs and buttons at the sound desk just beyond the edge of the performance space.

It’s this kind of thrilling interaction between human and technological creativity that sparks autoplay’s quandary: what happens if these things – dancing, creative expression, human voices honed to perfection and yet still sufficiently human to be be real, authentic, organic, and tinged by tiny imperfections – become somehow subsumed by machines, infiltrated by digital corrections, polished and perfected by algorithms that know us and know our hopes, desires, and even our dreams, better than we know ourselves? Do we really want to live in a perfectly artificial world?

A duet moment from Darkroom Contemporary Dance Theatre's autoplay. (Photo: Oscar O'Ryan)

Paper aeroplanes – Darkroom Contemporary Dance Theatre's autoplay. (Photo: Oscar O'Ryan)

Eerie shadows and symbolic apples in autoplay. (Photo: Oscar O'Ryan)

While autoplay sets out to ponder this philosophical dilemma, what it does not do is provide solace. Nor does it pretend to have the answers.

Louise Coetzer, who choreographed this work, is far too smart, way too invested in making art (as opposed to simplistic entertainment or empty spectacle), to pretend she has answers. What she and her apparently inexhaustible creative team have done, is create an experiment that instead amplifies the questions she wants to explore – and in so doing they’ve transformed philosophical and intellectual issues into an absorbing and exhilarating performance that grips you from start to finish.

Coetzer, who is part of a multi-disciplinary collective called Darkroom Contemporary Dance Theatre, is no stranger to creating work that is mind-bending in its complexity and in its capacity to prod at pressing issues. She is known for incorporating elements of chance into her shows, meaning that not only are no two performances identical, but there are heightened demands on the performers. This element of randomness adds an edge, too, keeping the cast on their toes to an almost alarming level. They are dancing, moving, singing according to a playbook, but there are moments throughout when the unfolding action might be altered in some or other way.

Coetzer likens it to those old “choose your own adventure” books some of us grew up reading, where decisions made on impulse or taste or preference could send the narrative in a new direction and fundamentally change the outcome.

With autoplay, there is to some extent a slightly disturbing sense that despite the choices offered there is nevertheless something preordained – even automatic – about the outcome. Even in the moment when the audience is offered the chance to affect the outcome of the performance, there’s a residual worry that this choice is in fact a distraction, that in fact the future has already been mapped out, the outcome predetermined, that something akin to fate (or authoritarian control) does in fact steer our evolution.

Perhaps the point Coetzer hopes to make is that even the slightest opportunity to act, to participate and to have a voice, is valuable. Even the tiniest gesture of agency is better than giving away our sovereignty to agents of technological control.

Visceral and physical – Darkroom Contemporary Dance Theatre's autoplay. (Photo: Oscar O'Ryan)

The dancers in autoplay. (Photo: Oscar O'Ryan)

Technology meets autonomy in autoplay. (Photo: Oscar O'Ryan)

autoplay is in some sense the story of Creation, only what it explores is a brand new beginning. It’s not quite the Garden of Eden, although there are certainly Apples that provide access to infinite knowledge, so much as it is a world where we humans, via our proliferating technology, are in a sense reengineering our genesis. Our technologies now enable us to reconstruct ourselves not so much in God’s image, but as a series of godlike 1s and 0s.

This dance-opera is not only about technology and its strangely parasitic relationship with humans, but is to some extent co-authored by AI. The performance itself has been guided by Coetzer’s deep-dive research into generative AI, and her experiments with it as a creative partner. What has emerged is an important work that highlights some of the great possibilities as well as some of the potentially damning consequences of the digital age. The great question is to what extent we have surrendered or are willing to surrender our autonomy to the algorithms that hide in the machines we now share our most private and intimate lives with.

It could so easily have descended into something flat and empty and awful, but in the hands of this extremely capable – and very smart – creative team it is instead vital, alarming and exquisitely challenging.

And it is important. Because this show is also evidence of live performance’s enduring capacity to captivate and enthral us like nothing else.

It’s only fault – for me at least – was the fact that I was sitting down to watch it instead of standing on the edge of the performance space, or dancing along. I longed to be closer, felt the pull of something urgent and devastating. Sometimes merely watching doesn’t feel right. And that, I think, is the point of this show: it urges you to participate. To play a little with your body, mind and soul, and do whatever it takes to avoid autopilot. DM

autoplay will be performed until 28 September at an unnamed site within Longkloof Studios in Gardens, Cape Town. Tickets available from Quicket. A special Heritage Day performance on 24 September at 4pm will be followed by an artist discussion and Q&A session.

Categories:

Tags:

DM is much better if you are signed in...

South Africa