An epidemic scare is not new to mankind. The last decade itself saw a widespread fright of swine flu, Ebola virus, and more recently, the Zika virus. If you were to travel to affected regions, health inspection booths and protective masks would be a familiar sight. Now imagine that you board a flight, and one after another, your co-passengers start breaking into tears. You’re high up in the air in this bizarre situation, with nothing to do but wait till the mystery unfolds itself. British theatre artiste Daniel Bye’s latest show Going Viral takes you on a similar flight of claustrophobic imagination to showcase how epidemics spread in the technologically obsessed 21st century.
The theatre artiste, who has previously created shows like The Price of Everything , How to Occupy an Oil Rig and Story Hunt , is currently on an Indian tour of Going Viral and is performing across several cities in the country.
One man act
With an unusual format combining a lecture and performance, the show revolves around the global spread of a fictional disease that makes its victims cry uncontrollably. While a British male traveller inadvertently spreads the disease without being infected himself, an Indian female doctor doggedly seeks to demystify the virus.
Going Viral is a solo show, where Bye plays both the characters. “But there’s a sense in which I play neither of them,” he says, pointing out that the show is essentially a storytelling piece. So the artiste is not embodying the characters in terms of looks or voices, but relies on the audience’s imagination to build up the act. “Therefore, the audience is playing the characters, not me.”
Exploring empathy
At the core of the show is the emotion of empathy. The setup in which the audience is seated intends to evoke the same sentiment among the viewers. Seated in a circle around Bye, the audience is made aware of the presence of fellow members. The shared space aims to highlight the spread of disease and its reliance on bodily contact and proximity. “At the heart of it, there’s a sort of tension between empathy and wanting to be close to others, and the spread of disease making us wary of it.”
The idea for the show started off from Bye’s keen interest in epidemiology, the study of the spread of diseases. “I wanted to make a show about it because it is both science and sociology.” The inability to run a scientific experiment on the spread of diseases caught his fancy, and he wanted to explore the possibilities through art. Bye chose tears as the mode of transmission owing to their universal resonance with human beings.
Before writing Going Viral , Bye spent a week at the University of Warwick meeting sociologists, academics, scientists and clinicians to explore the science behind the spread of disease, virology, epidemiology and public health policy, which helped him write the first draft.
Idea of privilege
The access to information, even if it is in the realm of education, comes from a point of privilege. Being a straight, white European man, Bye is aware of his privilege. “I am basically a perfect storm of privilege,” says the theatre artiste, who opens his show with that line both to describe himself and his character. But unlike Bye, his character is oblivious to his privilege and functions within a bubble, rendering him devoid of empathy. “It’s not that he’s a bad person. It’s just that it hasn’t been brought to his attention in a way that it captures it.”
It is due to the character’s inattention that the plague spreads around the world. The show also touches upon dynamics of power, which is founded on privilege, and its bearing on epidemics. “In Britain, the show reads like an indictment of me and people like me, and by extension, people in the audience,” he says.
Touching upon the role of media, especially television news channels, in fuelling paranoia, the theatre artiste noticed a reflection of British entitlement in the news coverage of the Ebola outbreak. “The news coverage then was ghoulish and grisly, and Britain had this island status, looking at it like a car crash from a distance.” But when reports of the virus affecting a couple of Englishmen surfaced, the situation grew grim in the country. Bye used this insularity to form the background of Going Viral without drawing heavily upon real-life instances. After all, for Bye, the show is a narrative experience laced with humour, aimed at making the audience contemplative without espousing cynicism.
Going Viral will take place today at 1.30 p.m. at Sophia College for Women, Bhulabhai Desai Road.
