Welcome back to our Offbeat Spotlight series. Over the next few days we're highlighting all the strange and wonderful things that the Offbeat Festival has to offer. The Offbeat Festival runs from the 9th-15th of September, and is a collaboration between The Old Fire Station, Oxford Playhouse, New Theatre and Gloucester Green Market. In addition to a multitude of shows, there are also workshops, and exhibition, late night events including a poetry slam, comedy scratch night, and listening party, and more.
Here, with catch up with Lorena Briscoe from Medea73, the theatre company behind She Vanishes in the Air. The play is an interative theatre game, examining a woman's mysterious dissapearance. Three artists have banded together to create a 'politically correct' reconstruction of what they suspect happened, and the audience is asked to vote, via app, on the hypothesis they most believe to be true. Highly unique, the piece unlike anything else at the festival this year. Read on to find out more.
Daily Information: Your show creates a highly interactive exploration of cancel culture, sexism and cyberbullying.How did you devise the theatre game format it takes? Was the element of audience engagement there from the start?
Lorena Briscoe: The motivation behind this project is derived from contemporary events. Furthermore, the advent of novel agreements and forms has given rise to a series of profound questions that may alter our perceptions and creative processes. In my opinion, it’s important to acknowledge first and foremost the good that has come from social justice. But what I wanted to explore is the intersection of digital media and race, gender, and sexuality, defining cancel culture as “a cultural boycott¨ and how we artists are affected in the development of our creations.
The play was written over the course of a year of interviews, research, using several books as references, and trough out a movement workshop that I was able to develop with artists in Oxfordshire, from which I selected the actors I later invited to join me on this adventure, Once the movement scores were designed, I was able to rewrite the play in the words of each of the characters, bringing the rhetoric of the play to life and introducing a greater sense of realism through the clearly written and designed situations. The design of the sound space was also very important in creating a sense of dimension.
The text develops three hypotheses, and each of the characters (the actress, the assistant and the director) explores each of them: language, cyber-bullying and the risk of women's mental health being affected by social media; violence against cis and trans women, whether economic, social or in access to decent housing. Radical positions on gender and feminicide.
From the beginning, the work was written to make the audience active, to avoid the anonymity that social networks allow, to break the limit of impunity that allows us to attack, insult, or cancel someone behind a screen. in a certain way, to break the screen wall.
That is why the audience has to enter the app with their real name and have to answer, in real time, the questions that develop and present each hypothesis. Of course, they can refuse. It’s up to then to decide!
DI: What do you hope audiences take away from the piece?
LB: The objective of this piece is not to convey a message; rather, it is to prompt reflection and encourage a re-evaluation of our behaviour on social media, the radicalisation of discourse, and the extent to which we demonstrate humanity in our interactions.
DI: Who is this ‘perfect for fans of’? If you had to compare the vibes of your piece to another piece of media, what would it be?
LB: Apart from interviews, my principal sources of inspiration are books and cinema , the latest one constitute my principal artistic activity. I am unsure whether there is a similar work, but I believe there is, given that no work is truly unique or original. I consider that She Vanishes in the Air represents a respectful exploration of themes that resonate with us on a personal level.
I would say the piece is for those who use social media on a daily basis. The sector of the public which is frequently exposed to social media and through their use of the internet on a daily basis they will have a sense of empathy and identification with the language used in the piece. .
DI: After Offbeat, what's next for you?
LB: Our hope is to have a good start to the season in Oxford and then to be able to take our work to the whole of the UK.
DI: Finally, please describe She Vanishes in the Air in three words.
LB: Cancel culture trial.
She Vanishes in the Air is on at the Old Fire Station, on Fri 13th Sep, 8pm. For more info and to book tickets, click here.
Photo credit: Erika Harlos-Szendrey