A Life Once Lived: A Doesnt Live Here Anymore
“What should you know?”
That the capstone project for the MA in Collaborative Theatre Production and Design at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama was never supposed to look like this – squeezed into the proscenia of laptops around the world.
That COVID has forced us to confront our preconceived notions of what theatre is in times of crisis.
That you, clad in pajamas and cotton face mask, are still an audience. You’re alone, a little confused, a little nostalgic for plays as once we knew them, but you’re the audience digital performance has trusted to pay attention.
“Who did this?”
(“This” being the seductively ambiguous A Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, available indefinitely online.)
Designers, production managers, stage managers, scenographers, actors, technicians, academics, and dramaturgs from around the world.
Now-displaced international students.
An emerging cohort of communicators, collaborators, and theatre-makers.
And so sets the pace for A Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, a collective creation available at www.adoesntlivehereanymore.com. Postdramatic in form and whimsical in style, the piece explores remnants of a small apartment’s former occupant, painted to be an in-between type of person – one who navigates gender, sexuality, and interpersonal relationships fluidly. The piece amalgamates “live” video performance from around the world (only once giving in to the fast-emerging “Zoom play” trope) with interact-able animations and scraps of readable mementos; A Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is the collage of an “A” we’ll never get to meet, and the onus is on us to suppose who they might have been.
The play has evident (and not at all unwelcome) ties to Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life; ambiguity in casting and execution leave room for spectatorial imagination. In the age of solo audience, that’s a strong plus; “A” and their world are as detailed as we the audience can conceive them to be from fourteen remnants of the life they once lived.
A Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, in its by-necessity interactivity, affords audiences an agency comparable to that of a computer game; even the in-person immersive shows of the past imposed frameworks, atmosphere, co-presence. Here, A Doesn’t Live Here Anymore acknowledges the scope of this newfound audience power; “grab a beverage, maybe a snack,” the site suggests. “Remove distractions,” it requests (though perhaps understanding the futility therein).
“Make yourself at home.”
And we do.
We let “A” into our homes, our shelters from 2020 calamity. We make space for this proof of drama schools once having been open, of plays once having been made. “A” doesn’t live here anymore, but they’re welcome into our bubbles for a little while; they bring with them a gentle mindfulness, an echo of the normalcy we once knew, a power to manipulate the world around us.
Wherever “A” may be now, they have left behind a compelling, unsolved mystery of a digital presence – one overwhelmingly worth exploring at your earliest convenience.
A Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is available at www.adoesntlivehereanymore.com.