Laurence Dauphinais. The French actress interacts with the Siri application Photo: Disclosure/Julie Artacho
RIO — A cell phone app is the main character in the Canadian show “Siri,” premiering this Thursday at Oi Futuro do Flamengo. The play, starring French actress Laurence Dauphinais, uses Apple’s eponymous app, a type of personal assistant that responds immediately to user requests and is similar to a human. On stage, the actress interacts in real time with the application, generating new and unusual dialogues every day. The objective is to question this relationship between man and technology and to ask the question: “Who is the real programmer?”
— Our intention is to investigate further because of all the paradigm shifts we are going through in our relationships. These digital organisms are becoming more and more autonomous and human in our daily lives — explains Laurence, who wrote the screenplay with Maxime Carbonneau.
The actress says that, in a dramaturgical context, she attempts to discover the limits of Siri’s language, her programming restrictions and the rhetorical flaws of the binary structure of questions and answers from which poetry can even emerge.
— Siri is programmed to give different versions of answers to the same question. Having no memory, the theatrical object is constructed through insistence and repetition. Our challenge, based on this unusual rhetoric of language, this search for answers, is to know their strategies for moving forward in the story on stage, live — explains the actress.
Spoken in French, with extracts in Portuguese and English, the show will be simultaneously subtitled in Portuguese for all presentations, with translation by Letícia Tórgo. “Siri” will run until December 17, with a special session on the 3rd, with the help of a Libras interpreter for the deaf and audio description resources for the blind, with the presence of invited NGOs.
Passionate about technology, the young authors of “Siri” had already won awards in 2013 for another show on the subject, “IShow”. Two years later, they presented the current formula of “Siri” at the Festival TransAmériques, the largest contemporary theater and dance festival in North America. Since then, it has been performed in several Montreal theaters. This year it was part of the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, where it was a hit with critics and audiences.
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