Digital Intimacy on Zoo(m)
Manila Zoo invites the audience to consume insights into the livelihoods of ‘exotic people’ via video. A screen has been placed on the stage for the performers to appear on. They romp around their rooms naked, surrendering to the gaze, accepting to be regarded as animal-like beings unequal to humans. They kick out with their legs, throw their head back. Restlessly rotating around their own axis and prowling around in circles. Captivity produces repetitive, psychotic patterns of behaviour, as we all have observed in zoo animals. Like an illusionist theatre stage, a zoo is not meant to be perceived as human-made architecture but rather as a strange world belonging to the animals. In the live-stream performance, Eisa Jocson applies the dramaturgy of the zoo to Zoom’s online grid structure. Accompanied by performers in the Philippines and Brussels, and a technical team between Singapore, Vienna and Frankfurt, Jocson continues her HAPPYLAND series with this piece. Against the backdrop of an eerily empty stage, the digital images create a disembodied yet disturbingly intense closeness, playing with voyeuristic tendencies. The performers are warming up in front of their cameras as the spectators enter the auditorium; later, they give insights into shared break rituals and how they loosen up their muscles and cool down their bodies after the work is done. Zoo and Zoom merge as places of artificially generated intimacy. The moments of entering and exiting the stage shift into a mode of endlessly becoming ‘live’.
The Zoom zoo combines the consumption of sensuously staged online visual worlds with the mystifying practices of global capitalism, which conceals conditions of production and is unable to acknowledge affective labour. However, the digital is not merely an effect but rather provides the infrastructure of the work itself. The performance translates the unequal experiences of our global reality into clearly defined, limited frames. The Disneyfied predator then appears in the distortion mirror of cutification and anthropomorphism. The phantasmagoria of the zoo turns the humans’ feeling of superiority over animals into business – but that’s not all. Without ever explicitly addressing it, the performance also sheds light on an aspect of 19th-century European and American colonial history, when many zoos not only exhibited animals but also people that were considered ‘exotic’.
Audience members themselves later become part of the Zoom meeting via camera and microphone, and are invited to ask the performers questions. The answers cloud the tropical leisure ambience with references to the geopolitical and social inequalities inscribed into it. They outline a reality marked by corruption, a shortage of or poorly distributed resources, and migration abroad. However, the performers are happy to “answer any questions”, are “always at your service”, perfectly in line with the stereotypical image associated with Filipinas* and Filipinos* in the context of labour migration. Jocson’s cleverly scaled approach plays the (imagined) superiority of the spectator and the colonial legacy of the West’s moral self-adulation over ‘uncivilized others’. The Zoom call as a zoo thus ultimately creates a utopian space where power relations are renegotiated over and over again. Manila Zoo is a stunningly complex performance about the importance of ‘liveness’ and visibility against the background of unequal conditions of production and exploitation in a globalised world.
Freda Fiala studied Theatre, Film and Media Studies as well as Sinology in Vienna, Berlin, Hong Kong and Taipei. Her research focuses on theatre and performance cultures in East Asia, interculturalism, and the performing arts as means and method of negotiating international cultural relations. She curates the performance festival ‘The Non-fungible Body?’ at OK and Musiktheater Linz that takes place for the first time in 2022.