Performing Virtual Intimacy in Landline
Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol 49, no. 1, 2024, pp. 186-201
The interactive site-specific theater performance LANDLINE, by Adrienne Wong and Dustin Harvey, is a reminder of how physical and virtual space exist together (even pre-pandemic) and how the social and collective aspects of theater might not always be the result of physical co-presence, but rather how co-presence, intimacy, and connection can be performed at a distance. With its centring of the mobile phone as a conduit for attachments to close and distant people and places, LANDLINE uncovers the ways in which these spaces, though necessarily hybrid and technologically driven, continue to be deeply human-centred. Through a close examination of how relationships are performed in LANDLINE, this chapter explores how the play positions the mobile phone as a site of intimacy between geographically distant, but digitally co-present, individuals. To this end, LANDLINE reaffirms the body as central to discourses about technology and technological mobility by insisting that notions of telepresence rely on a sense of situatedness of the body, as it is through identifying the body in place that we come to understand the relationship between “here” and “there” and how these notions are altered through mobile technology’s blurring of time-space parameters.
