(TINGYING MA / KANG KANG)

“Future Host” (未来主人, noun [countable]) is an epithet commonly bestowed on children in officially socialist China. As the agent, product, and site of a speculative reality, they grow up with the schizophrenic dissonances of post-socialist life, haunted by an acute, belated disillusionment with the end of a utopian project that never was. A Future Host speculates with indifference to their origins in historical trauma, creating new conditions of social gathering to give presence to Future Hosts who stumble into the hostile present via an involuntary inheritance of the past.

“Future Host: A Speech Opera” marks the first declaration of Future Host at work in the theater. Straddled between the sensible here, the unbearable now, and a future that never was, “Future Host” transforms the dialectics of language and politics into a vulnerable operation that is as disembodied as it is visceral. Absent of actors, the performance features a multichannel spatial sound installation with live improvisational music by a Chinese American children’s string quartet, where the audience roams freely in open, emptied space.

Reviving the ancient, pre-individuation figure of the chorus, Tingying Ma’s original performance text channels historical methods and patterns of individual and collective speech-making. Nineteen non-professional Chinese voice actors, each embodying an anonymous chorus, speak in a succession of dialogue, unison, to simultaneous monologue with heightened awareness of but little regard for semantic authority. Fragmented chants, non-sequitur slogans, cynical wisdom, political dogmas and twenty-first century retail ideologies—instantly recognizable to contemporary Chinese speakers yet prankishly impenetrable—form a landscape of linguistic failures, as words race after their business of self-actualization and self-annihilation. In this extended speech act, the dialectics of the singular and plural, private and public, the us and the other, in assembly or dispersal, is transformed into a fully sensorial, affective present—one defined by the irreducibility of human timber.

Premiered on January 20, 2017, “Future Host” seized upon the coincidence with Trump’s inauguration to make an alternative claim to the theater vis-à-vis the catastrophic monumentality of political spectacle.

“Future Host” engaged the audience in an exercise of listening and public gathering—between fraught histories and the possibilities of other futures—hence engendering a new form of community and political imagination.