Camille Intson (alias, Camie) (b. 1997) is a Hamilton-born and Tkaronto-based multidisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice spans writing, performance, music, new media, and emerging technology. Her critically acclaimed body of work has been honoured with a Playwrights’ Guild of Canada Tom Hendry Award, Colleen Peterson Songwriting Award, NNPF National Playwriting Competition Award, Hamilton Music Award, Best in Fringe/Venue and New Play Contest Award, and a Canadian Folk Music Award nomination. Intson is also currently a PhD Candidate within the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information, where her work explores queer and feminist embodiments of emerging technologies. When not creating things, Camille is a proud cat mom to Leopold, a passionate reality TV consumer, bubble bath dweller, and lover of hot melted cheese. She can be found everywhere online at camilleintson.com and/or @thecamiliad.
This interview took place on 18 October 2023 in Toronto. It has been edited for clarity.
CRITIQUE FROM WITHIN | HOLOGRAPHIC THINKING | THE PLAY AS MATERIALIZED THEORY | WE CAN BUT SHOULD WE? | NON/INNOCENCE
CRITIQUE FROM WITHIN
Camille Intson: I was saying to [my partner] Wilf before I did this: Kevin’s been listening to a lot of my—And I was saying that my anxiety comes from the fact that normally when I do interviews, I know exactly what is expected of me and what I’m going to say, because it’s usually like a promo thing for a show.
Kevin Andrew Heslop: What was your first influence (or some shit)?
Yeah, some bullshit like that. But I’ve never sat down and talked about all of my stuff as a whole and me in relation to it, so that’s the thing that’s kind of scary, because it’s just sort of … There’s no obvious prescribed answer to things, so I’m just going to do my best to be real about it.
Yeah, I mean. Look, like—when you’re preparing to perform on stage, you do your research and then you just exist in the moment and let things go where they want to go.
Yeah.
I could be explicit about the structure that I anticipate the next hour or two taking if you’d prefer, or you could scroll through these notes.
No, I don’t want to see them. I want to be in the moment.
On that point, I’m going to see if there might be another room in which other conversations might not be taking place.
Okay. Cool.
*Kevin looks for another room in which other conversations might not be taking place, but fails*
*Camille breathes deeply*
*Kevin returns*
Are you okay here?
Yeah, I’m good here.
There’s not really space elsewhere. Alright.
Ooooo, boy.
So we’re like 16 minutes into the 40 minutes of assuaging anxiety.
16 into the 40. I feel good though. It’s gonna be good.
Yeah, everything’s good. Everything’s good.
I’m excited. I was reading your other interviews as well.
Okay, yeah.
And they were actually really fascinating.
Karen Houle, I mean.
So I think that also was what scared me a little bit.
Being put in their class or something.
Yes. Exactly that.
‘I’ll be insufficient in comparison.’
Exactly that.
I mean, my feeling is—
Oh, are you doing Wordsfest this year?
Not a chance.
I’m doing f***ing Wordsfest this year. Yeah, Josh [Lambier] asked me to keynote a thing with Jillian Keiley who, funny enough, eight years ago, I skipped a St. Patrick’s Day party to watch her speak at Museum London. And in that talk, she said something like, to be universal, we must be grounded in the local–in the hyper-specifics of time and place. In the context of making theatre, or making art more generally. Storytelling. And that was actually quite formative to my teenage artist brain at the time. At that age, all I wanted was to work and play in big ideas, because I thought that was big and serious! Besides, who wants to write about Ontario? But she’s right. Specificity is everything. I’ve since embraced Southern Ontarian poetics.
Nice, nice.
So it’s a very interesting full-circle moment, that now I get to do this with Jillian.
Mm, mm, mm.
And it’s funny because Josh is like, I want you to speak to the possibilities of being a professional artist in academia. And I’m just like—*begins laughing*. Do you want—Are you asking me for an institutionally sanctioned, a nice little ribbon on top of—Do you want that? Or do you want me to be real about my experience as a professional artist navigating academic circles?
Yeah.
And the possibilities and points of tension? And he’s like, Yeah, just be real about it. Just talk about your time at Western [University].
Yeah.
So now I’m in this place where I have to write a keynote address that is true to my spirit but… you know… tamer.
I mean …
Because Josh was like, Oh, yeah—speak to possibilities at the intersections of community-engaged artistic practice and academia—And I’m like, But sometimes they don’t speak to each other. And they can’t. And I feel like that’s at the core of my belief.
Mm.
So it’s like, If you want me to come and do this community-engaged event in London, I’m going to say that.
Mhm.
So what do you want me to do? And he’s like, Just be honest, but be—you know. And I’m like, You know?
Diplomatic.
What do you mean? So I have to find that. I haven’t started writing. I’m probably going to write it like two days before I go. But it’s like … I don’t know what that line is, you know?
Yeah.
It’s a weird position to be in, I think.
And partly because that line is shifting for you and will continue to shift as you, you know, parasitically accumulate power and privilege within the institution.
Shit, yeah.
I feel like your willingness to critique it will be commensurate to the amount of power and privilege you accumulate within it: so that line isn’t fixed; it’s shifting as you’re shifting and growing.
That’s precisely it and I honestly couldn’t have phrased it better than you just did. It’s not lost on me that the more power and privilege I gain within my respective institutions, the more political my work becomes. The more anti-capitalist.
Right.
That’s not a coincidence. I feel like it’s a survival tactic. But it’s almost like I’m finding ways of critiquing institutions or systems from within another institution or system. You know?
Yeah.
Which is impossibly paradoxical. Like, a lot of my theatre and performance work now is scathingly critical of ivory-tower academic institutions – I’m talking specifically about JANE, WALSH, and Death to the Prometheans – but then that work is being funded and developed by other institutions that some might consider dually “ivory tower”, just in a different way.
Mm.
It’s interesting to see how my work has shifted with new access to different levels of power.
And I mean, I’m thinking about your relationship with your supervisors, one of whom, I saw you mentioned in the thesis proposal, 3D-printed a dildo in response to the 3D printing of a gun. My sense is that those in your corner are not actually ivory-tower figures, but that they are similarly cloaking themselves in some way within the institution in order to do their work.
Yes and no. Well it’s interesting because the Faculty of Information at U of T is home to a bunch of disciplinary misfits.
Mhm, mhm.
It’s a faculty that isn’t as obstinate as, say, a traditional English department or Arts and Humanities faculty. It’s one where you have subsets of people who do data science work, and then there’s this queer-feminist G.L.A.M. [Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums] faction of the department, and then there’s people who are building robots. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s an incredibly diverse intellectual environment. But I didn’t want to do my doctorate in a traditional humanities or performance studies department because I just came out of doing a master’s at [The Royal] Central [School of Speech and Drama in London]; and after being around a bunch of artist-practitioner-researchers, I felt like I was in a suffocating disciplinary echochamber. You know, theatre artists, we’ve all read the same theorists, more or less; we all have the same disciplinary education; and if I wanted to look or think beyond that Theatre/Performance Studies mold, I had to seek it out myself. And in that specific program [the Master of Arts in Performance Practice as Research Program, now disbanded], we were encouraged to do so; it was highly specialized with a very individualistic focus. But it was a lonely learning environment. Versus I really like being at the Faculty of Information because I’ve taken classes and engaged with bodies of literature that I never would have touched otherwise. Certainly not at theatre school. And now those have become foundational to my work.
Mm, mm.
I would never have engaged with bodies of literature around critical making and repair, design studies, critical infrastructures, queer and feminist technology studies, the cultural studies of technology – if I was in a performance studies department, you know? I believe that that education has allowed me to thrive and grow in a way that I don’t think I would have if I’d chosen a different path for my doctorate. If I was in an academic English or Theatre department. I think I was also saying to Josh, It’s not that the humanities are dead; it’s that the humanities have to adapt. There’s no choice, I think, but to. And that can mean so many different things, whether within curriculum or disciplinary divisions or anti-colonial, anti-racist, queer-positive praxis. But I don’t know. I think one of the reasons that I’ve really enjoyed my time there is that there’s such a proliferation of disciplinary misfits. I think that’s a great way of putting it.
Right.
*chuckling* But yeah, my supervisor 3D printed a pink vibrating dildo. It’s one of my favourite things—favourite stories I’ve ever heard—in response to the 3D printing of a handgun in that same department. My supervisor, Patrick [Keilty], is awesome, and that whole thing was actually about the legal regulation of commercial products in 3D printing. It was in response to these regulations in select U.S. states on the 3D production of sex toys, or “obscene devices” I believe was the actual wording. So printing that dildo was a kind of performative action intended to engage advocates in that conversation. It’s also a big fuck you to the masculine, pro-state, pro-military, pro-corporations interests of Maker Culture. Maker Culture is like a subculture of DIY culture that’s technology-based; think hacker culture, tinkering with various gadgets, dad garages, tech bros. But I’m fascinated by trans-feminist and queer critiques of maker-culture, which leverage things like repair and community care over progress and technological innovation. Sometimes destruction is involved. Sometimes creating things that are ultimately useless to capitalism and heteronormative reproduction, like Patrick’s 3D printed dildo, is involved. Which is methodologically similar to creating art, is it not?
Mm.
My interest in tech and new media is what drew me to the Faculty of Information, actually. Because I was playing with a lot of emerging technological tools in my Master’s. I was working with VR and live cinema. I became really interested in the work of live queer and/or female performance artists who activate live media elements onstage while performing. I wondered what this live mediation of the feminine and/or queer-coded body could achieve, dramaturgically. I was reading a bunch of cyborg and posthuman theory, object-oriented ontology, intermedial and transmedial theory, that kind of thing, while playing with digital technologies in a hands-on manner. And in my Master’s, I really found, at least for awhile, an interesting marriage of my theoretical, philosophical, and material curiosities.
Mm, mm, mm, mm.
Then during COVID, I ended up creating a digital installation. I don’t know if you ever—It was called betweenspace. I don’t know if you ever looked it up. I built a virtual reconstruction of my flat during the first lockdown in the UK. It was playful with the idea that we weren’t legally allowed into each other’s homes; it was a virtual space that was welcoming people into my environment, my domestic environment; it was a co-collaboration between myself and the objects in my ecosystem that made up my entire reality during those months when I was literally just existing there–in that space– all day every day. There are places where you can leave messages that would go right to my phone, so I almost felt like people were “with” me when that work was premiering. Like, oh! Someone just sent me this thing from my kitchen, virtually, and I’m in my kitchen, physically. Cool. COVID fucked us all up psychologically.
Mm, mm.
It was my way of reckoning with what was happening to me, what was happening to the world, but in a way that allowed me to explore some of my theoretical-philosophical curiosities, specifically around the possibilities of digital intimacy. So that was another whole phase I went through. Then when I started my PhD at the University of Toronto, I was back in a traditionally academic space and not in my performing arts conservatoire; I was reading about big tech and not art, which funny enough made me think more about art. That stuff has informed my current work so much; it’s really nice to get out of the circle-jerk of theatre/performance studies or even of contemporary art—even though now I’m in my own separate circle-jerk of the queer makers, queer anti-capitalists. I’m going back and forth between circle-jerks. But that’s better than having only one very possessive circle jerk.
For now. For now. What I’m hearing is—and this bears on a lot of your work—this idea of … Jeez, there are so many questions in my head *chuckles* I’m trying to keep them straight.
Yeah. I also—It’s also my fault because—
No, you’re good; you’re good. This is great. But I’m thinking about echo-chambers and intentional heterogeneity and the way you’re seeking out heterogeneity in your own thought and how this is contrary to the way that algorithms function, basically.
Yes.
Your sort of meta-practice is intentionally resistant to algorithms and your model is yourself. You’re swimming up the polyfurcative stream of the algorithm with the self—something like this.
HOLOGRAPHIC THINKING
Yeah. And in my class, we—I taught a class at the University of Toronto Scarborough’s Department of Arts, Culture, and Media last year, last summer, 2022, and then it was brought back for the fall of 2022; and this class was all about the collision of new media technology with artistic practice. We were looking at a bunch of performance experiments that attempt to integrate an algorithm or a robot into a live performance, or place an algorithm on a human being, or mediate a choreographed routine. We have different themed weeks, so there’s virtual-reality week, or video-game week, or whatever. But all of the readings are—A lot of them are sort of queer anti-capitalist readings, also a lot of readings by Black and Indigenous scholars who are working against the algorithm as a locus of imperial control or capitalist or consumerist control.
Mm.
And that work is really interesting because people will come into the class thinking about progress and innovation and technology in the arts as a vessel forward and then come out of the class being like, well actually, we can’t place an algorithm on a human being. Algorithmic theatre and-or robot theatre fails, here’s why. But that failure is interesting, it does something else. And algorithms are dangerous in the real world. And my students, they crave the idea or experience of liveness. They perceive liveness, immediacy, body language, as things that are lost in experimental performance work that engages new technologies. Not all of it, but some of it.
Mm.
I’ve read some incredible, incredible books in the last few years that specifically come out of a lot of Black feminist thought that are about algorithmic racism and algorithmic imperialism and how much Twitter loves the Alt Right and serves—
YouTube, too.
Hm?
YouTube, too.
Pretty much any social-media platform, yeah. And that’s also the thing that actually, funny enough, took me away from post-human theory—because, you know, in undergrad I started reading N. Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway and all of these—honestly—white female philosophers and technoscience theorists—
Mhm, mhm, mhm.
—Who theorize the post-human as a figure of difference from the human, as a reaction to the idea of humanism. Or the cyborg as a utopian figure, as a marriage of flesh and machine, as a conceptual-material entity crossing boundaries between the human and the non-human. Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto is specifically what I’m referencing, although I could be doing a much better and more nuanced job. Honestly, I could go on and on about posthuman theory forever – there are actually so many different genealogies for the “posthuman” subject – but I’m not about to cite Nietzsche or Freud, I’ll save you the pain. But post-human means, quite literally, an entity that exists beyond the human. We see it a lot in science fiction. Her. Ex Machina. Black Mirror. Ghost in the Shell. Etcetera, etcetera. It’s a transcendence of the stable, all-knowing, contained, biological-material human form. But it’s interesting that it’s these white female scholars and critics who have this interest in the post-human and then you have a lot of Black feminist scholars—
Deprived of humanity to begin with.
Well–In Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology, she says: “Many tech enthusiasts wax poetic about a posthuman world and, indeed, the expansion of big data analytics, predictive algorithms, and AI, animate digital dreams of living beyond the human mind and body–even beyond human bias and racism. But posthumanist visions assume that we have all had a chance to be human. How nice it must be […] to be so tired of living mortally that one dreams of immortality.” So, yeah.
Yeah.
My committee at U of T has kicked my ass. In the best possible way. A lot of my qualifying exams reading lists were made up of books and articles from Black and Indigenous and/or queer and trans scholars and activists, from whom I’ve learned so much about algorithmic inequalities and some of the biggest ethical, moral issues facing big tech. And so, so much more than that. About research and education en large. It’s obscene that this work was never a part of my undergraduate education or my Master’s education. My education has been overwhelmingly white and colonial, and the process of unlearning twenty-five years of public education is… exactly that, it’s a process. So I have my ferociously queer, anti-colonial committee of scholars to thank for me taking a step back from posthuman theory. For now. I also understand that the post-human and the cyborg are still figures of liberation, for some. There’s nuance there, and such an extensive body of work that engages the posthuman. I’ve just moved onto other curiosities. But yeah, that’s been my journey through it. This interview’s going to be all over the place. Let me just say—
It’s good. It’s good.
—I’m a very scatter-brained person.
No, this is great. You speak in nebulae. It’s great.
I speak—What does that mean?
Like what’s a nebula?
I know what a nebula is but what do you mean I speak in—
Like, your thought is simultaneous, non-linear, nebulous; it’s a density of constellations. There’s a generally spherical shape to it but I’m fascinated and—
My—
Yeah. It’s great. You’re fine.
My master’s teacher used to say that I have holographic thinking.
That’s nice. That’s nice.
I don’t know what that meant but—
I don’t know either but that’s nice.
I think she meant something like what you mean in terms of—I don’t—Linearity is not my strength *laughs*. Never has been.
Well that’s also—
I don’t do that.
—It’s an involuntary form of a kind of resistance to a dominant way of perceiving reality. It’s almost as if your gifts are conducive to resisting linearity and progress and iteration and one movement leading inevitably to the next, which sounds like colonial imperialism, or something like that. Speak in nebulae.
Speak in nebulae.
Long may the nebulae persist.
I think, for me, I get asked a lot about—People joke to me a lot about, Do you ever sleep? You’re always—And it’s like, Yes, I am busy. First of all, I sleep ten hours a night and I don’t drink coffee.
Look at you.
So that’s my answer. I take very good care of myself. And I’m actually incredibly strict about rest and sleep and time off. Like very, very strict—more than the average Joe. But I’ve always been somebody who thinks across and between disciplines, forms, media. And that’s—It’s not even something that I, like—
Cultivated.
—Think is cool or have cultivated.
It’s natural.
It’s just been naturally what my brain has done; and it’s always done that. And I think that a lot of the time, when people ask me about my process or my working habits, they expect one answer and my answer is usually maybe less interesting but it’s just how I’ve always thought.
Yeah. One answer is boring. One answer is boring and reductive and insufficient.
Yeah, but that’s the truth. And I also get so much from different environments and perspectives. Like, you know, even though I do perceive my academic life and work and my artistic life and work as quite separate, and I keep them very separate, for my sanity and my mental health—Even though I perceive them that way, of course things that I’m thinking about and feeling and pondering from one bleed into the other. Of course. And vice versa. But that cross-pollination, I think, is sacred. But I think it’s sacred because I don’t let my mind get colonized by any one institution. Disciplinary cross-pollination feels free, for me. I keep my academic life separate from my playwright-musician life. When I’m working with the university, I’m working with the university; but I have this other, very rich creative life where I can think outside of the structures that they set in place for me to think. And that’s really important that I have that. And again, although I am working with other artistic institutions now more than ever, I haven’t seen—Like, in the past year and a half, I’ve had more institutions, in this city specifically, support my work than ever before; I’ve gotten more grant money than ever before; it’s been an influx of wealth which I’m incredibly privileged to—I understand how lucky I am to have that, but it’s like, every single time I get an opportunity where I’m working with an institution, where my brain goes is, Okay, but where’s my freedom space?
Yeah.
What is the space that I’m cultivating that is away from that—where I’m actually doing my real thinking and feeling and learning and then bringing it back into those other spaces for profit, or validation, or whatever? I’m afraid of becoming a product of a single institution—
Yeah.
—And I’ve always been that way. My friends say it’s because I’m an Aquarius. I don’t know what that means but apparently it’s an Aquarian trait.
*chuckles* That’s funny.
Ask Sasha what that means *chuckles*.
I’m just thinking that it’s antithetical to speaking in nebulae to distill how you are into one word: Oh, it’s just because you’re an Aquarius *laughing*.
That’s what my astrology friends tell me. I’m like, Okay. I just accept it.
…
…
Hm. I mean, I’m partly surprised to hear that you’re as intentional about keeping your practices separate, although I do appreciate the importance of having that space for your self that’s separate from the institution where you can create. The song Parasite, for instance, doesn’t—
*laughing* Oh, no.
—feel like it’s branded with the University of Toronto logo or something, right?
Jesus Christ. You know my fear is my students finding that on my Spotify and listening to it?
Why? It’s good for them.
…
Because it humanizes—
To hear that their professor gets laid?
No, that a professor can get laid.
*laughs*
No, it’s good. I’m telling you: it’s humanizing.
You know, people like that song. Every day of my life I question *chuckles*—
But I see the plays manifesting your thought. Sometimes it’s to the extent that the plays almost feel like materializations of theory.
THE PLAY AS MATERIALIZED THEORY
Absolutely. And they are. 100%. 100%. I try not to think of them so much that way in the process of writing because it’s, I mean—
It would deaden it.
—Exactly. It would deaden it. And plays are about action and characters only emerge through actions and reactions and conflict, but. Yeah, I really try—But it’s in retrospect. It’s when I see something myself that I’ve written that I go, Oh, maybe this is also a philosophical exercise. Maybe it’s in conversation with that thing I read two years ago.
Well, I wonder if it’s entirely in retrospect because I can’t help but imagine that you begin writing a play like Jane and you have some ideas of where it’s going and what it’s going to consist.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So there’s some forespect or foresight and retrospect and the process of writing is its own thing, informed by both of those perspectives.
Yeah.
I mean, one of the things that I was wondering on the concrete level of mechanics: do you go about writing the plays in the same way? Do you initially structure them in the same way? Do you know what the acts are going to consist of? Do the characters surprise you? Do you take turns that you didn’t expect.
Every play is different, I actually find. Every single process demands something different of me; and I don’t always know what that is when I begin. In the context of Jane, I didn’t begin with all the anti-institution, anti-capitalist stuff. Jane has a lot of those implications, but I thought of the characters first, I thought of their desires and objectives and the actions they’d take in the real–and also digital–worlds to get there.
Mm, mm, mm.
Martin was the first thing that came to mind. I knew who that person was. And then I knew who Alicia was. And then I knew who Cory was.
Amazing.
So I figured out the people—And it’s a show that exists largely in monologues—
Right.
—Where we have characters coming up against their own self-narrations. The thing I like to say is: what do these characters need to tell themselves about themselves to get out of bed in the morning?
Nice, nice.
And that’s actually something that I find really fascinating about people. I use that phase all the time. I’m like, This is what this person has to tell themselves to get out of bed in the morning. JANE is a play that explores how people narrativize or even mythologize their own lives, coming up against these pre-formulated images or caricatures of themselves. And how something like a virtual-reality sex deepfake prototype is the thing that actually destabilizes those self-images. Anyway, that was my curiosity when I started writing. My challenge, too. Just so happens that I set it in a university, with institutional politics sort of threaded throughout the piece—and then the ending is kind of a fuck-you to those systems of authority, in a very unsettling way. But I didn’t think about that when I was writing the show; I really didn’t. Whereas I just finished writing another play, CLICK BUSH TRAIN BUG, which is a show co-commissioned between Tarragon and Toronto Metropolitan University’s Creative School. I didn’t include it in the materials for you to review because it’s just in a different universe from all the other stuff that I sent you. But the reason I bring it up is that the process of writing that was incredibly rhizomatic, nonlinear, honestly kind of chaotic. I didn’t begin with any concrete structure; I just started writing fragments; and it wasn’t until like a week before the first reading that I realized how it all came together. I only had about three months to write the first draft of this before it went into workshop. And when people would ask me how it’s going I would say, honestly I don’t know what I’m writing towards but I’m going completely from impulse and instinct; but then at the end, everything that I’d written made sense. That’s the first time that’s happened.
Yeah.
So that was a deeply intuitive process; but I’m normally not like that. I’m usually really rigorous with dramatic structure because I think you have to be. Jane is very rigorously structured. It follows a lot of the screenwriting rules that we’re taught that make us roll our eyes about the hero’s journey and all of that. But yeah, some plays are totally different. CLICK BUSH is also an ensemble piece for twelve people, so it’s quite different than Jane, which is largely a hero’s journey, but also like three intersecting hero’s journeys.
So, thinking about the character of—
Martin?
And I think it’s his first line. It began as an assignment.
I think so, yeah. His first monologue begins with that, yeah. But the first line of the show is, First of all, it’s rape.
Right, right.
Which is a bit of a helluva first line *clears throat*.
…
Sorry. Martin.
Have you seen that performed?
Yeah. We had a public workshop presentation at Tarragon in January of this year. It was actually very well received, we sold out our showcases; and you know what’s funny about Jane? First of all, I don’t think I’m very funny. Maybe situationally, but I don’t write jokes. When I wrote Jane, I wasn’t thinking about how it would read aloud–
And you hear it.
Whereas when I heard it aloud for the first time at a public reading [at Theatre Aquarius’s 2022 Brave New Works Festival] , there were so many laughs. Until, of course—
There weren’t.
Until there weren’t. But many of my shows are like that. They’re funny until they’re not; there’s a lot of laughter until it’s deadly serious. And I love that. I love that trajectory. I love getting people on board; and then they have to—They’re laughing until they have to question for themselves why they’re laughing and then it’s a deeply uncomfortable—and you see and hear that in action when you’re in the audience. You hear them questioning, you hear the laughter shift. I think it’s an effective device for an audience, to take them on that sort of a journey.
Mm.
Because humour oftentimes is the most cutting device that we have to reveal—
It evokes involuntary complicity.
Yes!
Or reveals it.
Exactly. Because, even in Jane, it starts as a joke: it’s about having virtual sex with Jane Fonda in a prison suit because that’s Martin’s roommate’s kink. And everyone’s laughing, ha ha, Jane Fonda, that’s so weird and funny. But then it quickly devolves into these questions of consent and agency in virtual spaces when desire meets its object–or a prototype of its object– and the whole play flirts with crossing lines, but there’s a specific moment where a very obvious legal and moral line is crossed and then it’s not funny anymore. It’s no longer playful. And that line crossed makes you re-think everything that came before. Like, wait, why was I laughing at that? That’s a serious breach of consent.
Mm, mm.
Writing is so much about setup and payoff. And with a show like Jane where you’re trying to involve the audience as complicit in the humour until these revelations –But that was the thing that made me realize the magic in the show, the audience laughter. They identify with the characters, with their desires and secrets and circumstances. And then that made me realize, Oh, this is actually doing something. This is doing something. And it’s funny because our public presentation was only about half an hour; and most of the excerpts that we presented were from the first half of the show. And people were laughing and people were eating it up—especially Cory’s character. Also Brett [Houghton], who’s the actor who played Cory in the workshop, he’s such a ham; he really enjoyed hamming it up *laughs* as one can do with that part. And it’s funny because everyone’s like, Oh, what happens next? And what happens next absolutely tanks. But it was fun to see audiences invest so much in that first thirty minutes. And I’m so curious to see how, in a full production, how it would feel to watch them go through that whole thing. Because at our first public reading [at Theatre Aquarius], I really felt the whole trajectory of that journey. From humour and play to deep seriousness and reflection. But, I don’t know. Like I said, it’s all about setup and payoff. And I also think it’s about not doing violence unto your audience, which I don’t think that Jane does.
Mm.
I think that sometimes I see shows, specifically films, that almost berate an audience for feeling a way that they’re set up to feel. And that’s an emotionally manipulative tactic.
Mm, mm, mm.
I think a really good example of this is The Whale, the film with Brendan Frasier, who just won the Oscar.
Yeah, tell me. I saw it.
Darren Aronofsky. Did you see it?
Yeah. It set the audience up to feel …
Well the issue with that film, in my opinion—First of all, I’m really not a Darren Aronofsky fan. I don’t like his movies—I’m sorry—
You don’t have to apologize for anything.
—For various reasons. I actually think that film is fatphobic and vile. It spends its entire run time trying to quote-“humanize” Charlie–that’s Frasier’s character, who is a reclusive English teacher struggling with obesity and a binge eating disorder–which is, I mean, an already fraught premise. But at every moment of the film, his obesity is sensationalized as grotesque and abject, sometimes trivialized, always framed by pity and disgust. The camera work and sound design amplify that perspective. And as a viewer, you feel caught between this empathy project and Aronofsky’s honestly mean and dehumanizing direction. I left the theatre feeling sick and manipulated. It berates its audience for feeling pity and disgust for someone filmed, represented, portrayed with pity and disgust. It’s not empathetic, it’s violent to its subject. It’s dehumanizing, not humanizing. You have to earn an audience’s empathy, or even pity. And that’s the opposite of what I want to achieve with Jane. You earn an audience’s empathy by finding what is true about a text or character, not what you think will best manipulate a paying audience. So when I talk about laughter, it isn’t that the play was written to provoke that. People find it funny because they find it true, they relate to those characters in those situations.
Did you rewrite the text at all after the workshop?
Of Jane? I’ve rewritten it a lot. My rewriting process is very extensive, but I think I’m at a place where I’m happy with it now. It’s ready for production. It knows what it is.
Had you workshopped a play like that before—with an audience while it was in process?
I’ve done a lot of public readings with my works-in-process.
Okay, yeah.
So … so yes and no. Plays are meant to be read aloud; you never know what you have until it’s off the page. But reading something in a room in front of an audience versus seeing it all in production–in a fully embodied, realized fashion–are two different things. And arguably, you can’t really know a show until you see it on its feet.
I’m asking because I’m wondering whether hearing that feedback and realizing retrospectively how many opportunities there were for the audience to laugh and that, as you say, something’s happening there: you’re creating an experience for them which would compel introspection after the performance.
Mhm.
I’m wondering whether you can hear the audience’s laughter when you’re writing more, now. Do you have access to the way that lines are being perceived or are you too much into character in the moment? Are those two different parts of the brain that have that distanced I’m-looking-at-the-thing-now as opposed to looking out from within it?
The truth is that I can’t think about that.
Mm.
The second I start thinking about or anticipating an audience’s laughter, my writing would lose its truth. I would start pandering and catering to the humour. And if I did that, in a play like Jane where all the humour is situational, I would just erode the truth of the moment.
Mm.
It’s just interesting that people perceive lines that I didn’t write thinking were funny to be funny.
Mm, mm, mm.
Now I get to see my collaborators take it and run with it. Which is such a joy, to feel.
You don’t want to direct it.
I’m not interested in directing my own work.
Because?
I feel too close to it. If I’ve done my job, I’ve left it all on the page. I don’t feel like I need to be in the room clarifying anything for anybody. But I also don’t think visually when I write. I don’t think in terms of staging; I just think in terms of text, which I think is different from a lot of playwrights who envision design elements or specific elements of casting. I really am thinking about text first. And I love—And what’s amazing about working with diverse teams of actors, directors, and collaborators is that they will come and exhume things from your text that you a) didn’t intend and b) didn’t know were there—and that will bring a richness to it that just makes it that much better, you know?
Mm, mm, mm.
Because they come to it with their own expertises and lived experiences. I find that if it’s just me making every creative decision, I’m just thinking about my own influences and my intentions, which are always the least interesting intentions. It becomes a vanity project, not actually about the work. I actually think my perspective or insight into my own work is boring.
Okay, I have a really long question now.
Okay. Let’s go.
So I’m thinking of this line “if the self were a bath, it would be overflowing.”
My favourite. I made that up.
It’s great.
I’m proud of it. Baths are my safe space. They’re my soothing space. When I feel overstimulated, I go in the bath with pomegranate bath fizz. And my cat naps beside me in the bath. Very important detail.
Sacred.
It is sacred.
I’m going to look for an opportunity in which to ask you about the word sacred. It has come up a few times and I think there’s more there to discuss. But first: I’m thinking about overflowingness and the permission the arts give to explore non-normative reality, about the permissivity of fantasy; and how, in Woolf’s Orlando, for instance, depictions of lesbianism were allowed as long as they were presented as a fantastical allegory; and I wonder how this relates to your sense—both in theory, in the form of your dissertation, and in practice, in the form of your play Jane, particularly in the character of Cory—of how the internet and virtual reality can actually be hospitable to a self-exploration that might be taboo if explored in what you might call the dominant cis-hetero-patriarchy meatspace.
That’s—That’s a question. Can I see that in writing?
Yeah, yeah.
First of all, have you seen Paul Preciado’s Orlando, My Political Biography?
No.
Okay, Kevin, as well as everyone tuning into this interview, I highly recommend that you go and watch Paul Preciado–who’s a trans writer-philosopher, the author of Countersexual Manifesto, Testo Junkie, Pornotopia, An Apartment on Uranus–these incredible performative literary texts of trans theory, works of auto-theory, often calls to action–Paul Preciado made a film that’s called Orlando, My Political Biography which won the Teddy Award for Best Documentary Film at the Berlin International Film Festival. And this film is outstanding. Paul Preciado enlists many trans and non-binary actors and collaborators to come in and re-enact scenes from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, but with attention to the political realities of being a gender non-conforming person in the 21st century. And the whole thing is framed as a sort of letter to Virginia from the Orlandos of the present.
Mm.
Anyway, it’s phenomenal. It’s, as all Preciado’s work is, deeply political and moving and poetic and very, very beautiful, very metatheatrical, and I think everyone should see it because it’s one of the best films I’ve seen this year, possibly in the past five years. Anyway, that was just a recommendation.
That’s great.
What was the question *laughs*? Can I see it?
You’re welcome *slides laptop*.
Okay. Let’s start here. As a response to how the internet and VR can be hospitable to a self-exploration that might be taboo … “cisheteropatriarchy meatspace.” That’s actually really funny. You know, the thing that I always come back to—because I do write a lot about technology and social relationships and intimacy and sexuality—is that so much of it was informed by my own experiences of being born in 1997 and my coming of age coinciding with the launch of social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram and (I guess MySpace was at its end, but) MSN and all of these new platforms that my generation—We grew up and we learned to express ourselves through them and to even find love through them; and oftentimes when I see or read material written by people of older generations that are reflecting on my generation and our internet usage or our obsession with social media or what have you, I actually find a lot of that work reductive and patronizing because it posits our use of this technology as like an ethical choice.
Mm.
Or it almost looks down on us, on young people, for our reliance on this technology—not understanding that it is quite literally woven into the fabric of our being.
Mm.
We don’t know reality beyond it because we were conditioned by it. And there are so many ways—looking at my adolescence—that I felt welcomed by the internet. Like, my earliest queer experiences were online, as so many people in my generation can also attest to or understand. Queer Tumblr blogs, chat rooms, and yes–pornography was a part of that–all these digital spaces I encountered before I even really had the ability to express that I was a queer person. Things can be expressed just as they are foreclosed in these spaces.
Can you repeat that?
Things can be expressed just as they are foreclosed. Thinking about someone’s being online, the possibilities of queer community or of stepping—Expressions of identity on the internet can be simultaneously expressed and foreclosed. They can be expressed through platforms but also those platforms can be inhospitable to queer community-building, you know?
Mm, mm.
Virtual reality as a technology in Jane, somebody’s expression of desire through that can be fulfilled, but also only to a certain extent; and that technology creates the conditions but also destroys the conditions for intimacy. And this is something that I wrote about extensively in my master’s dissertation, which is actually all about digital intimacy as a phenomenon—which I wrote during COVID, which is not an accident, you know? It’s about the way that these possibilities are created and destroyed through online mechanisms; and it’s not something that we can control, because I was raised to do that. That’s how, when I was in middle school, I would be with my friends all day: I would come home and we would chat on MSN. We would find different ways to manipulate those platforms to express different things about ourselves. Even considering emojis and gifs or whatever—And this I know sounds very eye-roll because we hear this all the time, but we have to understand how it has been woven into the fabric of our identity, you know? And it’s just a fact of being; it’s not an ethical choice. That’s how I see it.
Amazing. Keep reading.
*Camille clears throat and reads the following from Kevin’s laptop*
I recall friends having described Twitter, for instance, although maybe that ship has sailed, as a space in which they could be more selective about who they allow into their reality, and to express themselves in a way that allowed them a certain authenticity that what we might call off-screen reality didn’t as comfortably permit.
Absolutely. Because, online, there’s obviously a lack of physical responsibility or accountability. Yes, there’s digital accountability, but if you have an anonymous platform, or a platform that doesn’t directly tie to you professionally or whatever, you can turn that off …
And this question of selected reality brings us to algorithms, to algorithmic theatre, to what I expect, although I’ve only read the excerpt of Walsh provided, is actually a complicated and messy look at complicity and illusions of purity in the context of any contemporary art.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I’m going to say something in response to algorithmic theatre stuff.
Please.
WE CAN BUT SHOULD WE?
So, an artist that I’m really interested in, and that I have been interested in for a while, and who has made her way into all of my post-graduate studies, is—Have you heard of Annie Dorsen?
No.
So, Annie Dorsen is a New York-based theatre director, performance-maker, who has created a number of quote-unquote “algorithmic theatre” works where she engages algorithms and chat-bots sometimes in place of, and sometimes alongside, human actors in these live performance experiments. For example, she has a work called Hello Hi There, in which she programs two chatbots to comment on the Chomsky-Foucault debate on the subject of human nature. It’s fascinating to watch because these two chatbots who are programmed with, I believe, the contents of the debate, YouTube comments left on the debate, also all of Shakespeare’s works, and Greek tragedies, and a lot of other western references and blah blah blah, and they’re programmed to discuss the debate, as well as reflect on their own non-human positionality in relation to it. And then there’s A Piece of Work, which is a sort of algorithmic Hamlet, which partially involves actors being fed lines that have been algorithmically mediated.
What is algorithmic meditation? The phrase “To be or not to be? That is the question” through an algorithm would sound like—What does that actually—What does it do? What does a treatment of algorithms cause? What does it do to the language?
Okay. We’re going there. So–A Piece of Work uses N-gram language models to essentially determine the probability of the next word in a series of text. They’re programmed to recognize grammatical structures and then re-create sentences from the pre-existing text of the play, essentially creating new scenes from the raw data. The play begins with the line “To be or not to be”, after which, the algorithms that determine the text for the rest of the play take over and go berserk. Speech becomes impossible to follow. If you’re an audience member, you’re like, what the fuck? But Dorsen’s philosophy behind algorithmic theatre is, you know, live theatre’s purpose has always been to “reflect, invoke, or extend what we understand a human to be […] to preserve a collective understanding of what a human is and to assure us that we are as we always have been.” Whereas let’s say algorithmic (or, if we’re going back to this term, a kind of post-human) theatre shows “human-ish” processes in a world where everything is overly mediated. It’s almost like algorithmic theatre is a philosophical experiment to show that we’re no longer—or that we’ve never been—the fixed, stable human entity that we have philosophized for years and years and years. And what’s interesting is that I think this work is fraught with failure. But I say that in a generative way. As Beckett says, Fail better. As Sara Jane Bailes says, Failure provokes. But it’s the attempt, and not necessarily the success (although I don’t know how one could measure that) of eradicating the human that fascinates me. It’s the interest in seeing if an algorithm and a human being can be compatible on stage. If an audience of humans can watch two chatbots interacting onstage and feel empathy, or extract something from that. And I think oftentimes what ends up happening—and I’ve read some reviews of these pieces as well as other similar works—is that what an audience is left with is: It’s interesting at first, it’s theorizing, it’s a material instantiation of theory, but what becomes painfully obvious is all of the ways in which the chatbot is not a human being—all of the ways in which it leaves an audience in mourning. They miss human actors onstage acting like humans as we know and understand humans.
Nice, nice, nice, nice, nice.
And that’s something we talk about a lot in my class. When we watch these videos and these archives of these performances, what are we actually feeling and what are we actually watching and what are we actually experiencing? Throw philosophy out the window for a sec. Throw high theory out the window. What are you getting? What are you actually getting from this? What is it evoking in you? And that’s the conversation we don’t have enough.
Mm.
Oftentimes in theatre, as in tech, we think that just because we can make something cool, we should. We bypass philosophical, theoretical, sometimes ethical considerations. And I’m not even talking about Dorsen anymore, I’m speaking in general terms. So–what I’m getting at is that these performance experiments reveal all the ways that we can not place an algorithm on a human being. But it does something else, it brings us into intimate relation with technology. Through this process of “revealing”, we can reach an understanding of the technological, but also of ourselves, and perhaps how these two things are in relation.
Mm, mm.
And I think that’s interesting.
And on the topic of purity and the illusion of purity within capitalism, say, I’m thinking about artist Michelle Wilson, whom I interviewed in 2021. She says: so, in my life I practice veganism and that has really become complicated over the years because of the simplistic worldview of, If I just make these choices then I can be comfortable with myself in a place of moral righteousness; and how actually, often, veganism is this perception of separation, of, If we just leave the non-human alone and don’t act in sticky, uncomfortable ways, then the world will be better off. And that is a specific, very Western, very anthropocentric worldview in some ways.
Totally.
And meeting hunters and meeting ranchers—while it doesn’t make me comfortable eating meat—has definitely complicated things. So, those things were all in my mind when I came into my Ph.D: I was saying to myself, I don’t think that I can use animal bodies in my work; and my supervisor was like, Will that work be interesting if it’s always, first and foremost, seeking to be coming from a place of innocence?
NON/INNOCENCE
I would love to talk about this. Okay, wow. Let’s talk about non-innocence. First of all, as leftists—in my case, as a queer person—I am of course in pursuit of collective liberation. Aren’t we all? But here’s what I’ve learned: so often do revolutionary or radical or disruptive or challenging social justice methodologies, methods, approaches, and practices get instrumentalized towards antithetical ends. Essentially stolen from the communities they’re for and reinstated against those very people through insidious colonial systems of power. And so I think it’s my responsibility as a White settler artist-scholar to know that I have every subconscious capacity to reinstate and reproduce the violences that I work against. So it’s not just about using certain tactics of political or even artistic resistance, but safeguarding them. And positing non-innocence as a starting point for taking action. Tuck and Yang’s “Refusing Research” and Alexis Shotwell’s “Against Purity” have been key texts in my thinking. There’s also a large body of work about “opting out” of normative systems of happiness, success, representation, visibility, and political power. Sara Ahmed’s work tackles this a lot, as does Mari Ruti’s “The Ethics of Opting Out” and Jack Halberstam’s “The Queer Art of Failure.” But that Tuck and Yang article talks about settler moves to innocence, which are essentially attempts to deflect settler identity while enjoying settler privileges through the occupation of stolen land. And this is something I’ve thought a lot about in relation to online activism. Note that we’re having this conversation in the midst of a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza following the October 7th attack by Hamas. Hold on. I’m trying to—I’m really trying to take my time here because language is important.
Take your time.
You know, as well meaning leftists—specifically well meaning white leftists—we want to say or do the right thing, align ourselves with the right political causes and movements, practice allyship, et cetera et cetera what have you. And there’s a lot of fear in that nowadays, a lot of white anxiety specifically. People wanting to do the right thing for fear of being canceled otherwise. And unfortunately I think what a lot of people do, unbeknownst to themselves—and to be specific, a lot of white queer people do this—is foreground their queerness as a way of bypassing their whiteness. And that’s not actually doing the work of unpacking one’s whiteness or interrogating what white violence can look like within progressive circles. That’s a move to innocence. On another note, there’s also a lot of sharing of reductive, harmful infographics; I’m not saying they’re all bad, but some just don’t have the space for the proper nuance or historical context. And sometimes, we well-meaning white progressives can do more harm than good. And then there’s the obvious critique of people sharing infographics or expressing solidarity without following any calls to action, because for some it’s about the appearance of solidarity, as opposed to the action. It’s about being perceived as “good.” So there are many move[s] to innocence in the digital age—
Mm.
—I think is a precarious thing because—I mean, my social media is full of artists; it’s full of academics; it’s full of leftists; and it’s full of people who oftentimes—It’s full of a lot of white people who oftentimes use their queerness as a shield from criticism of their own whiteness. And the books I’ve mentioned above—as well as many others, the list goes on and on—have really informed not only my artistry and my perception of my own position within white-colonial institutions, but also my pedagogy: I now teach students at the University of Toronto Scarborough and St. George campuses; the vast majority of my undergraduate students were non-white—and how can I ensure that I am not …
Perpetuating …
Perpetuating that move to innocence myself? How can I keep myself accountable? I’m very grateful that the community of scholars I work with at U of T are big on anti-colonial approaches to research and education, so I’m always surrounded by folks engaging these questions. Because research, as we know, is a concept that’s synonymous with imperialism and colonialism; it is a concept that has been used for centuries as a tool of colonial violence towards specifically Indigenous populations, right? And Eve Tuck, who is an Unangax̂ scholar who works and writes at the University of Toronto, writes a lot about refusing research, knowing when something should or shouldn’t be considered research. Knowing when to step away from a project that is institutionally sanctioned.
Mm, mm, mm.
I’m now in a place where I’m teaching, as I’ve mentioned, at the university; and I think that my first thought when I got the teaching job was, Holy shit. I’m twenty-five-years-old. I should not be teaching twenty-one-year-olds. And my second thought was, How am I going to structure my own pedagogy and class by and through anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist principles as a white woman working within an institution where I occupy a position of power? That seems like an impossible question.
Mm.
And in some ways, it is an impossible question. Sometimes peers and colleagues will ask to see my syllabi on the assumption that they’ll be cool, queer, diverse. And, listen, having a diverse syllabus is the bare minimum—the bare minimum—and it doesn’t mean shit if you haven’t structured your pedagogy around it. I’m obviously a white queer woman who is in a classroom teaching texts that are informed by critical race theory, Indigenous research methods, and a lot of Black feminist thought; and the alternative to that is what? Me teaching an all-white syllabus? That’s not going to happen. And so it’s like, How do I position myself in the classroom to de-center my own knowledge and experience? How do I turn my students from passive receivers of information to active, autonomous cultural critics? That’s the question that drives my teaching.
Mm.
So my classes aren’t lecture based—although in my last class, I did a lecture on Indigenous anti-colonial artistic research methods in the first week just to set the tone. I teach Dylan Robinson and Martin Keavy’s Introduction to “Arts of Engagement: taking aesthetic action in and beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada”, which is all about reframing “aesthetics”, that carries the weight of Western art history with it, to “aesthetic action”, which is all about sensory and affective engagements with the arts. Which, for Robinson and Keavy, is a way of understanding how artworks related to the TRC proceedings are felt, and to what degree those impacts can result in change.
But anyway, my classes are seminar-based; they’re discussion-based classes; they’re classes where the students are the ones presenting and processing the information out loud; and I act as more of a facilitator than a lecturer, than a locus of control. And I find that I actually get such incredible work from my students when I place more power and agency in their hands. Like, when they do presentations, I always ask for extensions of the theory, connections to artistic objects they personally engage with. And as a result, I’ve learned about so many fascinating and radical and thoughtful pan-Asian video games, for example. Things we don’t learn about in the West, but that really challenge the medium of the video game. So much stuff. Anyway, there are tactics that I use in the classroom to attempt to create—you know, I think safe space is used way too often these days, it almost loses its meaning sometimes, but—create a space that is founded on anti-colonial principles and thinking. And I say “anti-” and not “decolonial” for a good reason.
Mm.
I mean, I feel like there’s hypocrisy in being a white woman assigning Eve Tuck’s Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor and then calling your own work within the university, that is actually not returning resources or land to Indigenous communities, decolonial, you know what I mean?
Right, right, right, right.
And so the term that I use with my own work, because I work within anti-colonial poetics and politics, I use “anti-” instead of “de-” because I don’t have resources to redistribute; I don’t have land to redistribute; but my work is still positioned within the matrix of all of these conversations. It’s a fraught thing to navigate and it can be an uncomfortable thing to navigate for a lot of white scholars, but just to be clear, a lot of this thinking and practice and action doesn’t come from my own brain: it’s informed by so many conversations, so many readings, so much research, so much criticism I’ve received from my committee members who have been involved in this kind of work for decades. So, I’m just one little blip in the conversation. But I think if you have a position of power like that when you’re teaching at a university—and you’re teaching twenty twenty-one-plus-year-olds—it’s really important to understand the values of your own pedagogy and how you’re actually translating what you’re teaching into practice.
Mm.
And it’s an imperfect process; and contending with your own whiteness and engaging with critical whiteness theory, that’s a lifelong project. But… I think my classes are fun.
I bet they are.
We have a lot of fun. I’m teaching a master’s class next semester. I’ve not taught a master’s class yet, so I’m a little nervous about that, but hopefully they don’t listen to Parasite *laughs*. But it’s a great class. It’s a really cool class. It’s called Queer G.L.A.M. It’s an introduction to queer experiences and queer studies—including intersections of race, gender, and sexuality—within the context of Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums. Hence, G.L.A.M, the acronym. It’s a really interesting class. And I actually took it in the first year of my PhD. My supervisor taught it. I loved it. And I loved it especially because it was such a care-centric class. Mine was a class of mostly queer people (and some very well-meaning allies), but mostly queer people. And every class, my supervisor Patrick [Keilty] took thirty minutes to ask every single student how they were doing as a check-in. You do that in theatre all the time. Get in a circle. Check in. But this was a class over Zoom. And it was actually so beautiful to hear from every single person in a time when we were so isolated from each other. And that’s something that I have brought into all of my classes that I teach to this day. I don’t care how long it takes: ten, fifteen minutes, twenty? I will hear from every single person. I will do my very best to create an environment where we commune around care and not just the empty promise of academic validation.
