Crisis Acting in The Destroyed Room

Abstract

The internet immerses us in waves of traumatic information, leaving us desperately crawling through media wreckage to make sense of the world. We are left alienated from a reality that never settles into a cohesive narrative. Media wreckage in my argumentation denotes the fragmentation of reality occasioned by the digital acting as the dominant epistemological source of the real in the twenty-first century. The atomisation of reality into the porous realm of the digital has spawned conspiratorial internet sub-cultures dedicated to immersing us all in a state of perpetual crisis. Conspiracy theories like crisis acting are thriving in this milieu. This theory was popularised by the host of InfoWars Alex Jones who argued high school shootings are events staged by the government. This article appropriates the term 'crisis acting' from the alt-right political lexicon to analyse how the experience of living in media wreckage is performed on the intermedial stage of The Destroyed Room (Vanishing Point 2016). The performance is a semi-improvised conversation between three actors who debate the morality of watching videos depicting Islamic State executions, the Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris, the refugee crisis and scenes of natural disasters. Terror, social media and climate breakdown constitute the three pieces of media wreckage that are staged The Destroyed Room. It is argued that constructing narratives of reality with media wreckage turns us all into crisis actors who cannot imagine ways of performing in the world as political agents outside of digital spaces.

Notes

1 The New World Order movement originated in the Reagan-era, a period characterized by neoliberal economics and concomitant scare stories of ‘big government’. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union were interpreted by many in the West as events that would establish liberal free market economies as the benchmark for democratic freedom. During the 1990s, supranational organizations like the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU) became symbols of oppression for disparate groups across America who came to believe they were totalitarian forces determined to impose a world government.

2 This was demonstrated to a grotesque degree when white supremacist Brenton Tarrant live streamed the murder of fifty Muslims on Facebook during his attack on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand.

3 The digital has become a referent for a diverse range of practices. Scholars such as Bay-Cheng (2016) and Causey (2016) correctly argue that there no longer exist clear delineations between the virtual and real worlds. Theatre is not immune from this process. But for the purposes of this article I use the term ‘digital’ to refer to those interactions with reality that require a technological interface.

4 The Never Again MSD group was established by student activists after the massacre at Parkland Marjory Stoneman Douglas (MSD) High School in February 2018. Its leaders include one of the survivors of the shooting, David Hogg. His family have endured a sustained campaign of online harassment by affiliates of conspiracists like Robert Ussery (aka Side Thorn), Wolfgang Halbig and Tony Mead (Vice Video 2018).