Staging Humanity in a Digital Age

On a Friday in April, inside Barnard’s Movement Lab, several people wearing mixed-reality headsets sit on cushions, taking notes on scripts or laptops as they wait for the performance to begin. A voice from the control booth cues an actor. She moves across the stage, striking up a conversation with someone. But that someone — an avatar in a pink tracksuit — is visible only through XR goggles. 

The scene unfolding is part of a dress rehearsal for the Movement Lab’s Spring 2025 Artist-in-Residence Hope Hutman’s new work, Your Mind, Girls…. Inspired by Class of 1970 alumna Ntozake Shange’s coming-of-age novel Liliane, the piece uses mixed reality to explore the consequences of living in an algorithm-controlled world and how it impacts personal autonomy — and “what it will mean to be human in the future,” she says. 

Using mixed reality as a framework for storytelling, the Oakland-based artist seeks to examine some of the most pressing questions and issues around our technology-driven society while expanding how we experience theatre and the arts. 

Your Mind, Girls… first emerged from research Hutman conducted in Barnard’s Ntozake Shange Archive. In her adaptation of Shange’s novel, we meet 100-year-old Liliane in 2042 when technology sustains people as the world becomes more and more dangerous from environmental decay and war. Avatars harvest the memories of the people who lived in the “before times” and use them to design and build future humans. What ensues is an intense dialogue between the on-stage actor Liliane and the digital avatars as they grapple with what it means for humans to have a sense of self when we no longer have control over our bodies. 

For Hutman, Shange’s emphasis on embodied knowledge — the idea that our experiences, memories, and knowledge remain rooted in our physical body — forces us to confront not only the way we interface with technology but how we continue to move through a quickly changing world. 

The workshop performance, which took place on April 24, was a yearslong undertaking for Hutman and a creative collaboration among several contributors, including Kym Moore of Brown University as director and Agile Lens, a XR Creative Studio, as co-producer and development partner. The result is a mixed-reality piece that mediates the space between the ethical concerns surrounding everyday technology and the recognition of its utility and promise. 

“I think there’s an anxiety we all have about technology, right? And then being immersed in that made a lot of sense [for this work],” says Hutman. “Technology is not all bad — there are a lot of good things that are coming from it, but it’s not good if we don’t understand it, if we don’t engage with it, and we don’t know what we’re making or why.”