What was the inspiration
for this performance?
When we began working on
Feed, it was in the wake of Brexit
and Trump and we thought we were going to be doing a piece on echo chambers,
fake news, and social division. The more we researched, however, the more
we realised that Feed was actually
about capitalism.
It’s a play about the attention economy and how our focus as
consumers—our engagement, our emotional arousal, and the time we spend with our
eyeballs drinking in content—is the greatest commodity on the current market.
This means that anything that provokes emotion—humour, scandal, outrage,
sensationalism—rises to the top while nuance and deep thinking are pushed out
the picture.
Fake news and social divisions are a part of that, but they are a
tangential by-product of a much darker and more insidious thing and really only
the tip of the iceberg.
Is performance still a
good space for the public discussion of ideas?
I think in this age of
highly personalised and curated content, live performance is one of the best
spaces for public discussion because A) it’s shared and B) it’s live.
These are two things that are becoming increasingly rare in our
hyper-connected-but-disconnected world.
How did you become
interested in making performance?
I don’t actually
remember because I was so young, but my mum tells me she used to take me to see
a touring kid’s Shakespeare company that did cut-down versions of Shakespeare
plays when I was in nursery, and that from about age five I started pestering
her to let me be in the shows.
I had to wait until I was eight to join
the troupe,
Is there any particular
approach to the making of the show?
Every show invents its
own new approach, doesn’t it? With this show, we began with a series of
workshops working with professional playwrights and young people to address
this itching question about social media: how it was changing our relationship
to ourselves and to other people.
It’s such a vast subject so the real
work of this play was about selecting and articulating the subject, something
that took us months. At one point we were working with the Tactical
Technology Collective (creators of the sell-out pop-up The Glass Room) to create a joint foyer exhibition, and two days
through the discussion and partnership we realised, ‘Ah wait, Feed is about the attention economy,
whereas The Glass Room is about the data
economy.’
Don’t worry if that disambiguation goes over your head,
we’re still getting our own heads around it after months of researching.
So the process of making this show has been very different to others in that
the landscape is constantly shifting; the subject we’re trying to articulate is
evolving so quickly and is such a popular discussion point in the current
zeitgeist that a significant part of the process has been just trying to
understand and keep up with the subject.
We have to be on top of what is
general knowledge, and what is specialist knowledge, all while figuring out how
we can apply theatre to bridging the gap between the two in a poetic and
engaging way.
Does the show fit with
your usual productions?
You might know from our
past work, The Fantasist, Nobody’s Home, and
The Marked, that we’re passionate
about translating internal experiences… using visual theatre to flip the human
mind inside-out and show a protagonist’s mental journey through the tangible
world.
In the past we’ve dealt with individualised subjects like bi-polar
disorder and post-traumatic stress, but Feed
feels like the first piece we’ve ever done that looks at a lived mental
experience that almost all of us are grappling with in some way: the onslaught
of stimulation from smartphones and social media, and how we are coping with
and adapting to our new information landscape.
What’s surprising is that Feed actually feels like the most
neurotic show we’ve made to date. There’s a certain logic to something
like traumatic experience, where there may be a swirl of emotions to navigate
but somewhere in there you can find the vulnerability, the humanity, the logic,
the root. The attention economy, on the other hand, is capitalism
unleashed on the human mind; it’s addiction, it’s manipulation, it’s deception,
and it’s completely devoid of any ethics or monitoring.
It’s a world in
which every human experience is a commodity. Making this play has made us
all feel a little bit less sane.
What do you hope that
the audience will experience?
With past shows, we
always had a clear goal of increasing empathy for the protagonist (and by
proxy, anyone with a similar story or background). But Feed has been created in reaction to a
moment in time when we were experience empathy burnout; when victim-driven news
items were flooding our Facebook feeds and we felt ourselves shutting down to
the plight of humans living the various crises of our time. As
storytellers, we needed to take a step back and look at the underlying dynamics
of the stories of our times.
We’ve learned a lot in the process about the
way we tell our stories to ourselves as a species, and it’s really changed the
way we see things, especially the way we take things in. In a way, it’s
been liberating…building Feed has
given us just a tiny bit of reflective distance between ourselves and the media
around us, and with that some relief from the whirlwind of guilt and rage and
titillation and stimulation that it does its best to suck us into.
I
guess, we want people to laugh, we want people to be provoked and slightly
uncomfortable, we want people to see familiar things from a new perspective, we
want people to fully embrace and grieve the problems of our times…but mostly,
in the space of digestion and reflection that follows, we want to share with
our audiences that very small gift of a little bit of freedom from the all of
the senseless chatter and noise, so that they have the space reconnect to
what’s most real and important.
Feed
Pleasance Dome
(King Dome), Potterow, Edinburgh, EH8 9AL
Friday
3rd – Monday 27th August 2018 (not 15th),
14:00
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