BY MATT JONES
Algonquin playwright Yvette Nolan’s 2013 play The Unplugging takes place in the aftermath of a catastrophe that has wiped out most of human civilization, leaving those who survive in a post-electric world that is unfamiliar to them. To navigate this world, two Indigenous women, Bern and Elena, tap into the teachings of their ancestors. Some of those teachings remain inaccessible: Bern was raised in the city and never learned traditional ways of knowing, but Elena draws from her memories of her grandmother, who “never trusted technology,” and she gradually recalls skills that help the pair survive off the grid.
As it happened, The Unplugging was the last play I was teaching when the COVID-19 pandemic hit Toronto with a vengeance last March. In fact, in those days, every text seemed to speak about the pandemic. The week before, we had read Sarah Kane’s Crave and her words about deep isolation and depression gave us a vocabulary to begin talking about the effect of the pandemic on our mental health. But The Unplugging was interesting for the opposite reason. Reading it in March, our minds had already gone to the worst-case scenario and many wanted to think through catastrophe from the perspective of a pilot flying straight into it. The postapocalyptic world of The Unplugging gave us a convenient foil. Whereas Nolan’s characters were former Twitter users and Foodora bike couriers adrift in a world without the internet, we were all grasping to our modems to keep us socially connected as our catastrophe unfolded. The internet was our link to our education, our friends, our addictions, our culture. What kind of calamity it would be if we were to lose our DSL connections! This is why I believe Giorgio Agamben is mistaken when he complains that the pandemic has made us care only for “naked life” (or “bare life” as his phrase is usually translated). It is true that we have temporarily lost much of what raised our lives above bare life – our sociality, our freedom of movement, our cultural institutions. But caring only for bare life is perhaps the only attitude in a moment of crisis. In a catastrophe, it doesn’t matter who a person is, only whether their life can be saved. But even as the pandemic hit its peak, people have struggled to find new ways to live beyond bare life. Some of those have come through art: not only singing on balconies and staging on plays on Zoom, but this crisis has provoked a rigorous questioning of what it means to create art at all and what it means to consume it together. We launch this project in the spirit of those artists and activists who have helped keep us above bare life in the midst of disaster. In Nolan’s play, the unplugging does not reduce the characters to bare life. Rather, it offers them an opportunity to engage more deeply with their ancestors’ ways of knowing the world. Survival is, in this perspective, deeply dependent on culture. We are excited to see what our project reveals about how artists in the performing arts are coping with the current crisis. Comments are closed.
|
AboutCheck here to read our profiles with artists under quarantine Artists
All
Archives |