An audience member stands hunched over a chair, picks up the small stone on it, looks at me and asks “is it ok for me to sit here?” The small crowd enters the warm, dark room carefully, finding seats and admiring their rocks. An experimental percussion piece is already underway, composed and performed by Pau Michels and Scott Farkas, who begin, seated cross-legged, underneath a canopy of starlike bells. The strings of tiny bells, blue-lit and swaying, chime sweetly as Michels and Farkas reach up to run their hands through the dangling strands. The musicians cross the stage to a tableau of I-beams, bowls, and small gongs balanced on sound-absorbing foam, which are percussed when the musicians scatter tiny pebbles and drop ping-pong balls. Wire brushes scrape metal surfaces. A violin bow draws vibrations from a steel beam. The music unspools unhurriedly, with no discernable dynamic shape or patterned structure. Recorded layered whispering bounces across the stage, thrown side-to-side by speakers on each end of the room, adding a harsh sparkle to the sonic scene.
Photo by Olivia Zakes Green.The sound is meditative and lands us in our bodies, holding our small rocks. I get a little bit bored, but in a way that feels like useful preparation. The program includes only the most basic information about what to expect from the performance: this is a performance, an oral history of the future, says text on the front of the program.
Creator/Director skye hughes uses the interior program space to highlight a series of “readings,” prepared by Hannah Leffingwell. The bibliography includes texts that examine questions including, “how does language restrict or facilitate new thinking about futurity,” and “how does apocalyptic thinking aid or disincentivize human action in matters related to climate justice?” The paragraphs are heavy with thoughtful consideration and long citations.
We have time to read about, and land in, these questions as the percussion music murmurs and rumbles. The heft of the bibliography foretells a show representing only the tip of an iceberg of research. I sort of wonder if I am smart enough to be here, and try to sweatily remember everything I can about Donna Haraway and José Esteban Muñoz, two of the referenced theorists.
The percussion music comes to a close, and black curtains are drawn across the stage, masking the musicians and their setup. Five identical, silvery-blue armchairs are placed in a curved line across the stage, interrupted by small end tables with tall clear glasses of water. Microphones are placed on the seat of each chair.
The five performers enter the stage, wearing pedestrian, loose-cut clothing in the same shade of slatey blue-gray, but each with their own style–blazer, jumpsuit, barrel pants, wide lapels. They greet one another as old friends; hugging, smiling, exchanging a word or a wink.
The performance is staged as a panel discussion reflecting on the end of humanity. It uses speculative future as a tool to explore ways to make meaning from, or to accept the meaninglessness of, humanity’s imminent demise. In the world of posterity: proof of free will, the panelists are experts looking back on an environment-in-collapse that turned, after a Great Psychic Opening, to new ways of being, living, and dying. Humans would dig holes in the ground, press their bodies into the holes, and become one with the mycelial network, changing their relationship of separateness from the world to more expansive unity. In this possible future, humans stop trying to resist the oppression of their self-created toxic environment and instead prepare for their deaths as a community. They stop reproducing, and instead focus on the creation of grief rituals, and move with openness toward their deaths.
The show has no script. It flows from the personal life research and group practice shared by performers Serena Chopra, Alyza DelPan-Monley, HATLO, Lío Sainz-Jones, and Fox Whitney. In response to HATLO’s questions and analysis as panel moderator, the performers take turns to deliver thoughtful, unhurried, and calm recollections of human behavior and ways of caring communally during and after the Great Psychic Opening. There is no despair in this show, only matter-of-fact history-keeping.
After the panelists trade stories and point to examples of nomadic peoples and their rituals, new lifetimes for old art artifacts, dog-sized ants, and the death of language, HATLO turns to the audience for questions. In the version of the show that I witness, volunteer hands shoot into the air, and questions are posed by askers fully immersed in the world they have been handed by this cast. We wonder about how this society handles conflict after the Great Psychic Opening, and the role of cosmology in their lifeways, among other questions. I am struck by the audience’s readiness to play with the panelists, stepping into the speculative world, rather than asking questions that would threaten its integrity.
Photo by Olivia Zakes Green.In posterity: proof of free will, hughes gives the performers a container in which to do the thing that artists do best: to imagine impossible futures, and to take us there with them. By co-imagining, we can almost believe it is possible to queer our ways of being and to modulate our reactivity. The performers are solid in their conviction, they project no political or ego-driven agenda, and speak their wild “truths” with innocent sincerity. We believe them.
I am glad to be watching a theater piece made by a group of performers whose training is in dance as well as acting. There is no movement, but the dancers make choices that seem to stem from their dance training; playing democratically to the collective, unbound by logic, and understanding when to follow ideas and when to shift. They have no goal to make us laugh, to disturb us, or to seem smarter than the person who just spoke. They are just telling it like it is/was in this made up future world that feels both completely impossible and a little too real.
There are holes in the world of this piece and in its logic–this makes sense, given the way it unfolds unscripted through time. I am not sure who the panelists are, or what their relationship to humanity is. Panels seldom meaningfully engage with the depth of each researcher’s expertise, and this show was not immune to that aspect of the panel as an incomplete discursive medium. Sometimes, the narrative would have benefited from more saves and interruptions of one another by the panelists, but I feel quite clear that the point of this piece was not to create a cohesive narrative, and instead to serve as the artifact of a process of wild co-dreaming. It does this very well. hughes chose and coached this group to dream softly of a future where survival is no longer the goal. That is the narrative of this show, rather than a tight and tidy storyline.
After the audience applause, a curtain reveals plates of beautiful tiny cakes that we share, along with conversation, accompanied by live jazz piano from Major Scales. An audience member approaches me and practically shouts, “what was that?! I feel like I’m on Mars!” I smile to myself and silently congratulate the bravely imaginative cast on their power to transform and transport.
Posterity: proof of free will was performed 4.10.26 and 4.11.26 at Town Hall Seattle. You can access the program HERE.
