Theatre as Iteration

Last Modified: Sep 1, 2024

When I start to make major changes to the script of Some Other Mirror, I make a new version of the word document, and append a new version number. This is pretty standard for a playwright. However, I believe that the show ‘Some Other Mirror’ is not the script, and it’s not even the performance of the script. Some Other Mirror is the iterative process. It is a living organism that changes as I do, but which is not expressed as a person, or an individual version.

I guess you could argue that this is what all theatre is, but I argue this is the case for my own work, because it is a piece about my own understanding of myself, which I deliberately re-release at intervals. It‘s a piece of theatre that expresses the intersection of my creative practice with technology and coding. In fact, the other day, I realised this aspect of Some Other Mirror is remarkably simple to the concept of learning in public, which is spoken about by coders. Except, in my case, my public learning is not about making plugins, it's about iteratively revising my ideas about masculinity and transitioning.

I kind of wish the script could have a git commit log, but I also think that level of granularity to editing a script would have driven me crazy. I keep thinking about this one blog I read from The Gaming Philosopher, which was a review of a game called ‘Scents and Semiosis’. It’s a text parser game about crafting perfumes. The Gaming Philosopher's main critique was that the programmer’s categorisation of language and context, to create meaning, was much more interesting than the game itself.

I’m sure the git commit log would be very interesting, but probably at the expense of the script itself. I tend to edit my script the most while I am committing the words to memory.