It's All In Your Head - A Play
Over the Christmas break and throughout semester 2 I worked on a play which I wrote and directed (amongst other organisational things).
In collaboration with the society Theatre Paradok, a few friends and I put on an immersive sound play about AI and mental health called ‘It’s All In Your Head’. We put it on at Whitespace for four performances over three nights.
Here’s a blurb: On a usual dreary morning, Nina suddenly finds herself in a struggle against a mysterious entity. She must find the strength to take control. It’s All In Your Head is a play about the mind, self-discovery, and our relationship with technology. It’s all in your head… or is it?
The play is a kind of mystery and sort of a dark comedy and depicts the struggle between a woman, Nina, and an AI which infiltrates its way into her inner monologue one morning. It was based on / built from an assignment that I did for Text Remix. I wanted the play to be immersive in some way and was inspired by Complicité’s production The Encounter in which they use headphones and a binaural microphone. Paradok are all about experimental theatre and so were keen on this idea. I felt it also suited the narrative as the audience is then immersed in Nina’s inner monologue and starts to hear the AI in their heads as well. We found a sound designer to help us bring this vision to life. We asked the audience to bring along headphones and used the sonobus app in order to stream the sound to them, though it was WiFi reliant so took a lot of trial and error. However, it does seem like it was successful overall!
Putting this play on helped me build many skills such as learning how to produce and organise a production (a very big task) as well as building my writing and editing skills (in this case navigating a script) and learning how to direct. The difference in tone of voice and physicality between the AI and Nina was the most important thing to show and took a lot of tact, especially in the moments when the divide is not so stark (for example when the AI is still hiding). I also arranged props and created a lighting script. We also did a lot of social media and publicity work, here’s the show’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itsallinyourheadplay/
The experience was very time consuming and stressful but extremely rewarding to see my hard work pay off and come to life. It was so amazing to have people attend and enjoy the show!
I think that the experience i gained and lessons learned though this process will inevitably influence my futures project.
I would love to put the play on again someday in an even more polished form. We filmed the show so I hope to edit together a version of it at some point so that more people can experience it in the meantime.
