Doing a one-person play is crazy business. And the writer and director of 2057 Dystopia agrees. When Thayú was bringing this vision to life, they had no idea that it was going to get here, and no idea if Njeri wa Gakuo, i.e. the person who had to actually do all the acting work, would think they were certifiably insane.
2057 Dystopia is written and directed by Thayú, choreographed by Seise Bagbo and features Njeri wa Gakuo as the only cast.
“It’s not an easy thing to do, creating in general but also creating something that is at the front of everyone’s consciousness in the world today, in a different way that will spark something else,” says Thayú. They also have a podcast (called ONGEA AI) where they talk about AI and its effect on creatives, the world, innovation, and of course, Kenya. This was just another way to bring the message, whatever message you choose to deduce, home.
And the messages are as varied as the themes possible. 2057 Dystopia is ‘an immersive performance where memory, rebellion, and artificial intelligence collide.’ The story starts with a grandmother brought into the future by her errant and experimental grandson, and then she proceeds to bring us into the experiment that is the coolest part of this play, the audience decides what the character does next, at three separate points in the play.
Set in a fractured Kenya of 2057, the performance drops you into a world where corporations own water, creativity is taxed, and AI decides which memories are allowed to survive. Data towers glitter over drought-scarred land. Emotion is a commodity. Truth is a glitch. As she hunts for fragments of her erased life, the audience – through an application that is announced and broadcasted during the performance – chooses what she recovers, and what disappears forever.
It sounds pretty cool, because it was pretty cool. The audience sat around the actress, shaped in a way to indicate four walls, and each side had a screen for the audience, so not only was Njeri wa Gakuo acting, but she was also acting as if on four joined stages. There were so many highlights and laughs in the story, from when the main character gets robbed by a robot, to envisioning how the world is going to look like when our presidents start using holograms on the campaign trail instead of the puppets they have been favouring. But what was the most interesting thing was the integration of the audience into the play, kind of like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel.
2057 tells a story of what Kenya might be, and brings about a lot of questions, such as, if one data centre’s water supply can ruin a county, how are we going to feasibly have multiple data centres? What does the world look like if no one is thinking, innovating, and creating anymore, leaving that to the AI systems who want to become (or so it seems) our overlords? Because at this point it is obvious that there are only a handful of people benefitting from what feels like a get rich quick pyramid scheme…
The fact remains though, that the discussions have to continue, because AI is here to stay, whether we like it or not. What remains to be seen is how we react to its presence on the continent. Many of these discussions are happening this month, and into December, via the UKKE Season Finale, which is lining up activities through December 12 to celebrate art, culture, and heritage in Kenya. These include Nai-Hunt, the biggest scavenger hunt that Uhuru Park has ever seen, this Sunday, Unfold Conversations, which explores the intersections of climate change and AI, and Into Protopia, the closing bash on December 12 that marks the end of the season.