Performativity became very important in the creation of Autohoodening: The Rise of Captain Swing. From the first creative cycle of this piece, in its Zoom-theatre format, we realised that how we performed the musical material could reinforce the communication of important ideas on different levels. In that first cycle (Figure 9 in 3.2.1 Autohoodening: The Rise of Captain Swing), we performed the hoodening song alongside a series of repetitive actions linked to hoodening or to Amazon (such as Morris Dance dancing steps or picking boxes) in a Zoom environment. By having each performer confined to a square on the screen doing these actions and singing words such as “we are not even treated as robots”, we aimed to stress the isolation of the workers and the constant surveillance and control they suffer at their workplace[25].
A clear example of the use of performativity in this work can be seen in "The 2nd Punishment". The composition for this scene takes the form of a musical game. A group of workers start performing the Amazon tune, slowly. Every time Alexis the Scanner snaps directly at a worker, this will perform the musical motif faster. When a worker gets to a speed impossible to perform, the worker collapses. The game keeps going on until all the workers have collapsed. This is accompanied by the Line Manager and Alexis’ “motivational” speeches[26]. The Line Manager sings the speech with the Amazon tune and the Scanner with the scanner motif. The performativity informs the musical result, which showcases the constant push to work faster that the Amazon workers described in the data collected in the research:
- “Targets are twice as much as they were before, people give their all and by that, I mean even their lives. Several people died in BHX1, and hundreds more collapsed during work”[27].
- “For the 10 hours you're working, you’re practically a robot. The targets they give you , even robots cannot do”[28].
In the film version of this work, the scene features this game differently[29]. We applied the same principle to a repeated step of Morris dancing that represents picking and packing boxes. Every time Alexis snaps at a worker, the dancing goes faster. The soundtrack of this section was still produced as described above and can be seen in the post-credits scene.
Example #6
Comparison between the "Post-credits" scene and "The 2nd Punishment" scene. The first features a musical game being performed and recorded to be used in the film. The second showcases the visual adaptation of the same game in a Morris dance setting. The soundtrack of the second uses the recording heard in the first, with the "motivational" speeches of the Line Manager and Alexis the Scanner sung on top.