Cyborg? Dystopia? Science fiction?

“It really is the most cryptic text I’ve ever written,” the playwright Maria Milisavljević admits to me during our video call.

A few days earlier, I had attended the open rehearsal of the one-woman play. The character, played by Sofia Borsani, is dismantled, repaired and rewired. She merges with the digital matrix whilst simultaneously despairing of this symbiosis. None of this is visible, but unfolds through the conversations between Sofia and her countless projected avatars. The text packs a punch. No explanation. Just poetry. The alternation between surreal associations, mantra-like recitation and fragments of dialogue does not aim for a prosaic approach, but unfolds the effect of music and creates a hypnotic trance.

During our conversation, I am still not sure whether, whilst in this trance-like state during the performance, I might not have missed something essential.

The author comments: “Yes, because the text completely refuses to explain itself. And at every point where you hope it will finally explain itself, it gets even worse.”

But the text is anything but meaningless. Questions about physicality and the crisis it faces, about pain and redemption, clearly hang heavy in the air. ‘Ultimately, it is a text about the individual’s struggle for access to the world. The world that surrounds us, with which we want to connect.”

And alongside the natural and the animal, we now find ourselves rapidly moving into a digital environment.

“This is that other world which can somehow do everything and in which we must be able to do everything, but which consists only of such polished surfaces because nothing is allowed to have a scratch anymore. And that is then transferred to bodies as well. And it would have been too easy for me to then draw a parallel with the Kardashians, with cosmetic surgery and make-up. I wanted to leave it in this ethereal realm, where one has to try to make sense of it all. But it doesn’t, because this digital world ultimately breaks everything down.”

Maria Milisavljević notes that it is certainly helpful to know that the text was written during the coronavirus pandemic.

“A time when suddenly there was nothing social left. I only met other people on Zoom. It struck me: I don’t actually know you at all. I just see how you look at me through a computer screen, and at the same time I’m looking at myself through that same screen. I don’t know what your flat smells like, I don’t know what makes you tick. I don’t actually even know your real energy, because I’ve never felt it. During that time, I watched a documentary about people who attached copper wires to their skin, which had been covered in cream, whilst in the forest, in order to connect with trees. To feel the trees. I thought, why don’t you just hug the tree? But I suppose that’s how people now perceive our world. Through copper wires and data highways rather than through feeling or silence.»

Our longing for connection is complemented by our addiction to optimisation. Maria refers to this as the search for healing.

“That is perhaps the main question in the text. What is healing? Healing is constantly being sold to us: the new coaching course, your new mobile phone, the new playlist, the new arm, the new heart, the new brain. Consumption is supposed to heal. But is that healing? Healing is when you say, yes, I see my scars, I look at them too, I keep looking at them again and again.”

The obsession with optimisation, with the perfect, scratch-free surface – even though we’ve known since Leonard Cohen: There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.

“People don’t love us because we’re smooth and polished and everything about us fits. But the world acts as if that’s what’s needed. With all this obsession – it’s a beauty obsession, it’s a therapy obsession, it’s a healthy eating obsession, it’s a vitamin-and-minerals obsession. And in the future, at some point, it will also be the craze to replace everything that doesn’t fit even just a little bit. And that overwhelmed me, so I thought, okay, then I’ll let the text be overwhelmed too.»

Maria missed the premiere due to illness, just like me, but naturally wants to come to Zurich for one of the next performances without fail. I have the same intention and am very curious to see what effect the play will have on me after this extremely stimulating conversation.