Delusions of grandeur

By Anador Walsh

“I need to hear some sounds that recognise the pain in me, yeah”.

The first time I saw Sarah Aiken’s Make Your Life Count was at this work’s premiere at Arts House, Naarm (Melbourne) in 2022. After two years of living alone through lockdown and relating to the world predominantly through the intermediary of a screen, this work affected me deeply. As the lights came on and Aiken walked back onstage to take her bow, I found myself struggling to pull myself together. Tears and snot streaming down my face and makeup pooling at my chin, I was a puddle in a theatre seat. I felt exposed. But when I looked around me, I realised I wasn’t the only one in the audience wracked with emotion. There were many of us.

A world of your own making

Make Your Life Count navigates the relationship between the dancing body and its documentation to explore the duality of contemporary existence. In this work, Aiken employs a large-scale projection and an onstage, fixed camera to create, minimise, expand and extrapolate her own image in real time. In this way, she steps through the digital frame, blurring the line between performance and its documentation and critiquing the constant performance of identity demanded by techno-capitalism.

In 2023, we believe we are all main characters and that “all the world’s a stage”. Our existence is marked by the transformation of our day-to-day lives into digitally digestible content. The star of this content is a larger-than-life persona of our own creation, whose character develops through a combination of self-mythology and mythologisation by others. But despite this cultivation of a grandiose online self, contemporary existence is also tempered with the very real and at times crushing self-awareness that people like Aiken, myself and those around us in the theatre that evening, are largely insignificant.

Conversation with a giant

Aiken reflects on the powerlessness of ordinary people to have any real impact on the pressing issues of our time – like the climate crisis – by staging a conversation with herself. During this conversation, Aiken assumes the role of both a digital giant and an IRL (in real life) figure (herself), who is dwarfed by this giant, even while standing atop a huge ladder. In this conversation, the giant espouses a series of meaningless platitudes, that emulate the kind of wellness jargon that has been co-opted by late capitalism: “To have more impact, busy yourself with ambition and mantras”, “Multiply to multiply success”, and “Take responsibility for your happiness and hydrate”.

In stark comparison to this, Aiken’s own responses are jarringly authentic, offering real, vulnerable insights into her own psyche: “I have no distinguishing features”, “It’s a bit of a mess down here”, and “I’m compared to everyone else”. This exchange came to a head in a heart wrenching exchange, where Aiken inquires: “How do you think you’re perceived by others”? Only to have the giant reply: “I would never ask this broken and fleshy question. Have more ungrounded confidence”. In this moment, Aiken encapsulated what I would describe as the great paradox of our present moment. We are expected to be constantly online, self-promoting and showcasing how 'great’ our lives are. But when we are sincere or express how we actually feel, we are dismissed as if we have broken some kind of unspoken social contract.

You are infinite potential

This is not to say that Make Your Life Count is designed to make you feel bleak about the current state of affairs. Instead, Aiken expertly utilises theatre staging elements to evoke a generative, critical reflection on existence under capitalist structures. This is clearly evident in the final scenes of this work. Following their conversation, the projection zooms in on the imperfect, fleshy surface of the giant’s skin. To a soundtrack of ambient computational noises by Andrew Wilson, Aiken begins dancing. As she moves, her double appears in the projection, mirroring her gestures and dancing across the giant’s cheek. Each time Aiken crosses the stage, another double appears, until eventually there are a myriad of Aikens.

Into this, Aiken begins to introduce shadow and form, spotlighting some of these figures using a series of white, geometric props. She pauses self-reflexively to observe her work, before exiting the stage. At this point, she is seamlessly replaced by an IRL double (Claire Leske), who begins tearing this staging down. As she strips these props away, a constellation of stars enter the projection. Aiken’s digital doubles begin to warp and move backwards out of sight, as if being sucked into the orbit of a black hole, until eventually everything is consumed by Aiken’s pupil. The lights come on, the house music swells and we are left with a timelapse of a giant Corpse Flower growing, as Leske jumps against the screen to highlight a motto in the background that reads make your life count.

Make Your Life Count is a technically and conceptually brilliant work of dance that cleverly co-opts the language of our time – the image – to evoke a contemplation of what it means to live and make art under late capitalism. Using the full arsenal of her skillset as a dancer and choreographer, Aiken builds, confronts and then destroys herself in a way that shatters capitalism’s delusions of grandeur and exposes our insignificance as individuals.

However, Aiken does not present this insignificance as something negative, and this for me, is what makes this work so compelling. Make Your Life Count touches on the disconnect between expectation and reality, and the crushing weight of constantly having to perform yourself, your identity and values. Despite existing in a climate of rampant individualism and the impetus to create a bigger, better version of yourself, this work's core message is that it is okay to just be yourself. This is a universal sentiment that is as beautiful as it is liberating, and I believe, is the reason that I, and those around me in the theatre that evening, were so deeply moved.

footnotes

1. The Verve, Bittersweet Symphony, Virgin Records, 16 June 1997, CD.

2. William Shakespeare, As You Like It (United Kingdom: 1599), Act II, Scene VII.

3. Sarah Aiken, Make Your Life Count, 2022, performance dialogue, Arts House, Naarm (Melbourne).

4. Aiken, Make Your Life Count.

5. Aiken, Make Your Life Count.

6. Watching Make Your Life Count live in the theatre in 2022 and then revisiting its video documentation twice in 2023, I failed to notice that this was the moment Aiken was replaced by Leske. Instead, I thought Leske replaced her much later, when the time lapse began and the lights came on. Only when I submitted this piece to Aiken for feedback, did I learn that the last 10 minutes of this work are performed by Leske, such is the skill and subtlety of this transition. Aiken also shared with me that this is a common misconception, shared by many people who have seen this work.