Is There Work on Mars?
It’s a series of hoops she must jump through, hurdles she must leap over with casual grace and precision and always a winning smile, challenges which begin to feel less about demonstrating her dedication to and ability for the role of Martian social media manager she is applying for and more about creating specific objections targeted at her personally in order to keep her out before she’s even completed the initial stages of the interview.
The Martian Workers Immigration Scheme receiving thousands of applications, the majority of the roles will be in hard sciences, particularly engineering, but there will be a need for those of softer skills to keep the programme positive in the public eye, Is There Work on Mars? written and performed by Yafei Zheng as she tries to explain to the maladaptive software interview bot that just because she comes from China that doesn’t mean she excels in mathematics.
The impervious database instead insisting that statistically speaking she is more likely to demonstrate an aptitude for mathematics rather than suffering from dyscalculia, it is of course she who must be wrong, and from impatient interrogation it moves to belligerent badgering and belittling personal attacks while she sits blank-faced and defeated, conditioned since school to not answer back or correct authority, that the prize for pointing out the evident truth is most often punishment and exclusion.
A show about the inbuilt recalcitrance of systems, particularly automated ones, Is There Work on Mars? is similarly frustrating; while sound designers Pannavich Weswibul and Charlie Nelson are credited there is no named director who might have encouraged more interesting movement than running between plastic chairs or said that a second dance interlude should be cut, or that the localised rage at the bland interface and its generative responses, while understandable, would be better directed to those who conceived and implemented a process where marginalisation and disenfranchisement are standardised operations, but while names are spoken they are never accused.
Is There Work on Mars? continues at theSpace at Surgeon’s Hall until Saturday 17th August then transfers to theSpace on the Mile until Saturday 24th August
