Location: Barbara McIntyre Theatre
Moderator: Jessica Watkin
Kimberley McLeod, “Relative Care: Destabilizing Human-AI Relations in Secret Theatre’s Alone Together”
Alone Together by Halifax’s Secret Theatre imagines a world in which family rental agencies have become the norm, particularly as a means of combatting loneliness. The experience takes place in an app where the user moves back and forth between watching films following an employee of a rental agency and interactive scenes in which the user becomes this character. Each interactive scene features a one-on-one encounter between the user and someone who has hired them to replace a family member or friend. In an inversion of the increasingly common scenario of humans casting AI as a tool, in this scenario the scene partners hiring the user are played by AI. This choice places the human user in a helper/companion role in which they must comfort, console, entertain and support the AI characters.
While there is an emphasis on disconnection in the content of Alone Together, the uncanny user experience emphasizes connection. The tension between the dystopic future of disconnected families and the connection the user finds with AI characters points to complex questions about the future role of synthetic media in digital performance and daily life, particularly in relation to performances of care. In this paper, I consider how Secret Theatre’s work destabilizes dominant understandings of AI-human coperformance by placing the user experience in conversation with recent work on how AI performs (Annie Dorsen; Lisa Moravec; Ulf Otto; Robert Ellis Walton) and a core touchpoint for Secret Theatre in the creation of this work, Sherry Turkle’s cautionary book also titled Alone Together.
Jayna Mees, “(Dis)Connecting and Colliding: Generating Sites of Disability activism in AI Biometric Performance”
With the popularization of wearable AI biometric devices (wearables), such as Smartwatches and fitness trackers, the social boundaries between “public/private,” “internal/external,” and “self/other” are being questioned, challenged, and explored anew. Among the many affordances of wearables, the characteristic that I will examine in this paper is the political potential of what Gabriella Giannachi calls the “hypersurface.” According to Giannachi, the “hypersurface” is a liminal site of exchange generated through entanglements between the “real” and the digital or virtual, and that enables the spectator to simultaneously be “present in the work [of art] and verfremdt estranged from it” (95). While some attention has been paid to the harmful ways in which wearables are used to augment exclusionary ideologies and practices, few have considered how they might subvert ableist structures of power through immersive performance. Given that this is the case, my paper will examine the hypersurface as an embodied site of world-building in Deaf artist Marco Donnarumma’s 2025 immersive performance: “Ex Silens.” Utilizing a combination of sound, movement, and wearable AI biometric prosthetics, “Ex Silens” engages the interior/exterior of the spectating body to immerse participants in a Deaf-led inter-corporeal and transmedial encounter with the “other.” In my analysis, I will consider the following: How might the show’s entanglements between the digital and the “real” produce more accessible approaches to structuring immersion in performance? How is the hypersurface being leveraged in immersive performance to revise the social conditions of “welcome” and to co-create meaningful sites of belonging? And finally, how might the hypersurface afford new ways of thinking through collective/ individual identity with(in) and beyond the realm of the digital?
Kyra Lin Oser, “From Stage Hypnosis to Stage Hypnotherapy, 1996-2005: Performances of Paul McKenna”
How and why have hypnotherapists since the 1980s incorporated clinical hypnotherapy techniques into entertainment hypnosis to perform therapy as public ritual? Following Milton Erickson’s lifetime, I assert that stage hypnotherapy emerged as a popular genre. The shift in which clinical hypnotherapy techniques merged with stage hypnosis is most identifiable in the performances of Paul McKenna, who started in the 1990s as a popular stage hypnotist with an interest in Erickson’s techniques. This paper traces hypnosis performance techniques in McKenna’s television shows beginning in 1993, identifies turning points from 1996 on when he introduced hypnotherapy techniques into entertainment hypnosis, explores an increased demonstration of hypnotherapy techniques from 2003 to 2005, and proposes economic and social forces that popularized these alternative healing techniques in the UK and US. Stage hypnotherapy attempts to bridge a gap between transactional performances and mental health services by borrowing non-denominational healing rituals from the private spaces of nineteenth and twentieth-century therapeutic developments and moving them into a less cost-prohibitive public forum. Yet stage hypnotherapy resists the practises of Freud, Jung, and Erickson because performative aspects such as production restrictions and the marketability of therapists as talent are unavoidable factors when therapy is filmed, whether for entertainment, educational, or healing purposes. As our Canadian healthcare system is in crisis and considering privatizing, a study of other regions that have experienced reduced healthcare access can benefit Canadian scholars who want to examine how similar economic and social changes may affect future Canadian audiences seeking alternative healthcare options.
Biographies:
Kimberley McLeod is Associate Professor in the School of Theatre, English, and Creative Writing at the University of Guelph and an Associate Editor of Canadian Theatre Review.
Jayna Mees (she/her) is an artist-scholar whose current doctoral research at York University examines access aesthetics, practices, and politics in digital and XR forms of immersive performance. Some recent roles include Assistant Dramaturg for SpiderWebShow’s You Should Have Stayed Home (2022) and Movement Director for Peter Kuling’s Macbeth VR Experience, Ontario Exchange Network (2024).
Kyra Lin Oser instructed Theatre History, Acting, and Children’s Theatre at Moorpark College; Film and TV Acting, Rehearsal and Performance, and Oral Communications at Oxnard College; and Comedy Improv at Hollywood’s Friends and Artists Studio. A certified hypnotherapist and member of AHA/ASCH, she guest lectured for Psychology courses at Pacific States University.