Jess & Morgs Choreograph the Post-Truth Interview

DEEPFAKE, which premieres at Sadler’s Wells East in October, drops a fictional prime minister into a high-stakes television interview with a political journalist. He assumes no one will believe his stories, and he’s proved right. Not because the truth finally surfaces, but because, buried under enough competing stories, it stops mattering. It’s a piece about the crumbling of objective truth, arriving at a moment when that hardly needs explaining. “It feels like something to do with lots of different versions of ourselves, and lots of different versions of reality,” says Wright.

To tell this story, Jess & Morgs are turning the theatre into a working television studio. Live filmmaking happens in front of the audience, cameras and all, so that they watch the image being constructed rather than receiving a polished result. “There’s something visceral about seeing this unfold in real time, witnessing both the finished product and the chaos of how it’s being created,” says Runacre-Temple. When I was allowed to attend a rehearsal one afternoon earlier this month, it was intriguing to see how the different elements were being layered together into something almost surreal by the duo and their technical team: voiceovers that aren’t the dancers’ voices, projected footage, moving bodies wearing those funny green screen suits.

You do get the sense that, whilst the pair are dancers (they originally met at ballet school), they are also instinctively intellectual about their process, with Wright mentioning their fascination with “the nuance of language,” and how they’re “always drawn to exploring what feels topical, of the moment.” Not content to simply develop choreography, they are experimenting and assembling a “puzzle” to construct their vision here. Or rather to deconstruct it, laying bare the layers of artifice that go into making anything look true. They have chosen to place their two performers, interviewer and interviewee, in front of a green screen: “It’s playful for the audience,” Runacre-Temple notes, “because they’re looking at one thing on stage and seeing something quite different on film.” It’s certainly no easy task for the dancers, who have to balance miming the text with their intricate, physically demanding movement.

They are visibly excited by this way of making. Wright calls it “storytelling in action,” and Runacre-Temple adds: “It gives the audience access. They’re watching an effort, and we’re exposing the technicalities of how an image is created.” Sometimes when one hears about the incorporation of technology and dance, it can elicit a sigh, but I get the impression that the tech is never gratuitous in the work of Jess & Morgs. It is an active participant, genuinely pushing their work forward, with something to say. 

At Sadler’s Wells East October 1–3.