Commissioned in 2020 as part of the Future of Performance series, A Thousand Plateaus is an experimental theatre project named after the 1980 book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia – co-authored by French contemporary philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari – and draws inspiration from two of the book’s key concepts: “rhizome” and “a body without organs”. “Rhizome” refers to a decentralised, non-hierarchical structure of knowledge – such as the Internet – that departs radically from the traditional tree- like way of knowing. “A body without organs” analogises the idea that an individual unbound by conventional norms and constructs can generate pure potentialities by tapping into a vast reservoir of freedoms, primal desires and infinite energy, thereby differentiating themself from others through unrepressed emotional reactions.
Virtual reality is often seen as standing in opposition to physical reality – the real world, so to speak. And contemporary theatre, along with film and other art forms, has long sought to reconcile this dichotomy outside the bounds of linear
storytelling. In this theatre experience, narrative fragments are utilised as “nodes”, designed to spark emotional reactions in the audience, who, through their voluntary participation and interaction, then create roots and connections.
These roots grow and intersect infinitely, forming a rhizomatic multiplicity. The greater the audience input, the larger the network.
In the “personal sensory experience” element of A Thousand Plateaus, audience-participants are told through their VR headsets real-life stories of four gender-nonconforming individuals: Kiki, a cross-gender sex worker; Ching, a cross-dresser and labour movement activist; Raymond, who likes to put his sexuality on display through the art of pole dancing; and S, a college student with plans to undergo gender-reassignment surgery. Amid the zillions of roots and offshoots in the rhizome that is our society, they represent something quite unique: mutated and different, yet an inevitable result of – and perhaps even a milestone in – natural evolution. They exist among us, and by bravely embracing their idiosyncrasies
and loudly rejecting the normative social rules and expectations, they are spawning new connections, networks, strata and plateaus. Virtual and physical realities don’t have to exist in a dichotomy. Some believe that in artistic creation,
the process of mimesis, or imitation, is in fact a form of creating a virtual reality, and therefore it’s important to perceive art in the context of one’s own emotional experience. In a sense, works of theatre, film, dance and contemporary art are all recreations or representations of the real world.
Whether it’s inside a VR headset, across from a silver screen, in front of an artwork or inside a theatre, the virtual worlds that the audience receives through art are fundamentally the same: they are never pure replicas of reality, but
mimicries that have been purposefully interpreted and reassembled by the artists.
In the “collective sensory experience” part of A Thousand Plateaus, we present both fictional and real-life events in the same context. Mixed into the collection of real people, dialogues, monologues, news, recordings and scenarios are fictitious materials that bear no causal relations to the real ones. All of them appear as suddenly as they disappear, and offer no hints as to how the story should end. With no correct answers and no interference or commands from outside, the audience-participants are instead encouraged to be creators and architects of this experience. In doing so, they get to reclaim their sensory autonomy, and make connections and sprout roots freely via their reactions and choices. Each
performance is therefore a new, one-of-a-kind rhizomatic assemblage that comes from and belongs to them.