One way that Karl Marx defines “alienated labour” in Capital is as the surrender of control over one’s body. Employment quite literally means the process of being used by someone else; when we enter into employment, it is no longer our free will but an “alien will” that animates our muscles, our hands and feet. Set against a stark white backdrop under harsh white fluorescent light, and sonically textured by ambient industrial drips, rattles, and mechanical groans, Isaiah Wilson’s Score is an eviscerating depiction of alienated labour stripped to its barest components. Three dancers are harnessed into cables and adhesive electrodes that umbilically extend across the stage; through electric muscle stimulation (EMS) triggered by computational code, their bodies are involuntarily choreographed. Electric signals to the muscles bypass the brain and the will. Obedience is a reflex.
This is a rich and deeply intelligent confrontation with technologies of control, one that feels as pertinent to today’s accelerating technofascism as it is to a centuries-long continuum of human history: of how power organises labour and bodies, but also the infallible truth that the mechanisms of that power, the mass surrender of human will to the will of capital, remains an unnatural carapace strapped onto our naked bodies. Computation is not an exceptional tool in this regard. It is not abstract or devoid of materiality but the exact opposite, made manifest in the visible infrastructure of its cables and electrodes as well as in the physical muscular response of the dancers. The origin of the algorithm, after all, is the assembly line.
As the piece progresses, the dancers awaken to and process their lack of agency in different ways: sometimes in uncanny simultaneity and then total disparity, moving through glazed-over submission to befuddlement to hysteria and grief. What lies in plain sight, however, is the fact that all of them – and all of us – are plugged into the same machinery of control. What we do with that information remains up to us.
Score, Assembly @ Dance Base, until 24 Aug (not 18), 9.40pm