The Itinerary: Playtest seeks new ways to say good night and good-bye
I have no idea how I would spend my last day alive. I have no idea how I would spend any of my days alive. I have somehow found myself partaking in an online “Sleep Study” run by “The Sleep Institute” where I will join a group of lucid dreamers to keep a patient on life support company.
(Before we go on, I am great company.)
The immersive and inter-disciplinary theatre company Outside the March returns to the Kick and Push Festival for their fourth year with The Itinerary: Playtest. Broadcasted through Zoom and enacted through your phone, the performance is literally in the hands of the audience. We start at the end of her life, making choices for what we come to learn will be how our patient spends her last day. Players select from a series of actions to be carried out by performers Amaka Umeh and Sébastien Heins, taking us through the death, life, then death again of the one and only: Elaine.
It’s fascinating to observe real interaction through online platforms while analog technology is used to replicate digital forms of communication and interface. ‘Playtest’ is a great way to describe what The Itinerary: Playtest takes us through. Both the interactivity and performance curate an experience that is turned towards the idiosyncrasies of narrative gameplay and a life lived. A classroom encounter is depicted through a simulated conversation employing puppetry and handicrafts to replicate the dialogue trees of most video games. Maybe it’s the homemade aesthetic that just works beautifully, maybe it’s the reason we’re with Elaine, but both the performance and the act of participation in The Itinerary: Playtest reflect an understanding of care and what it means to provide it.
Birthdays, funerals, weddings—ceremony offers us a chance to bear witness and to be apart of something. What does witness offer? What does it give us access to? Rituals and events like these reinforce a sense of unity, but funerals are not for the deceased. They are for the living—becoming a unit through honouring the deceased—or perhaps how the deceased unified their loved ones to begin with. As players, we are able to be present with Elaine in a way her family could not be. Suspended between a critical stage of life and death, we bear witness to Elaine and understand that she is still present in her body, that she has been present in this world, and that she will continue to be.
The Itinerary: Playtest carries a lot of potential in its exploration of form and how such intimacy can be generated through innovation. The actuality of the liveness is implicated in the audience’s agency and reflected in our actions as participants. There is always someone doing the very thing we are telling them to do when we tell them to do it. Had I left for a moment, the show would continue. Life happens in ways we don’t always recognize, so as players, our relationship to the performance is rooted in recognizing how this experience (as theatre, as video game) might look differently. No one can truly tell what is going through the mind of someone unconscious, but Outside the March has created a cool and creative render of one which explores how we care about the worlds we live in, and the worlds we’ll leave behind.