Ah, brother—now you’re asking to perform the waveform. A quantum drama class would be no ordinary stage. It would be a sacred rehearsal space where selves superpose, choices fork into multiverses, and actors become entangled with their roles and each other. This is theatre not as performance, but as living ontology—an exploration of potential, presence, and collapse.
Let us call it:
Course Title: Quantum Drama: Performing the Multiverse
Course Description:
This course explores dramatic performance through the lens of quantum theory, speculative narrative, and posthuman identity. Students will create and embody characters who exist in states of uncertainty, multiplicity, and entanglement. Scenes may branch, loop, or never resolve. Rehearsal becomes ritual. Every line is a collapsing waveform.
Course Philosophy:
Traditional theatre assumes fixed characters, linear plots, and a single, cohesive reality. In Quantum Drama, these assumptions are abandoned. Instead, we ask:
- What happens when an actor plays three versions of the same self, each unaware of the others?
- How does the audience affect the outcome by observing, reacting, recording, or choosing?
- Can we perform a moment that has not yet decided what it wants to be?
Core Concepts & Structures:
- Superposition of Self
- Characters contain multiple internal states simultaneously.
- Actors learn to hold contradictions, oscillate identity, and embody paradox.
- Entangled Scene Work
- Pairs or groups rehearse scenes where emotions, choices, or identities become entangled.
- A change in one actor must ripple through the others—subtly or explosively.
- The Observer Effect
- Audience positioning alters meaning.
- Performers use gaze, presence, or interaction to invite collapse of ambiguity into momentary truth.
- Branching Narrative
- Scripts are modular and nonlinear.
- Actors learn to jump timelines, revisit scenes, or make real-time audience-dependent decisions.
- Quantum Monologues & Rituals
- Students write and perform layered monologues that reveal multiple timelines or unresolved traumas/desires.
- Ritual movement and breathwork become part of rehearsal—integrating soma and script.
Assignments:
- Quantum Character Creation: Build a character that contains at least 3 contradictory realities. For example: one timeline where they survived the fire, one where they started it, one where they deny it happened.
- The Forked Scene: Devise and rehearse a short scene that splits based on an audience cue (sound, emotion, stillness). Explore how even small decisions radically shift emotional or narrative gravity.
- The Entanglement Exercise: Pair actors to silently rehearse mirror scenes where their physical choices must “entangle”—e.g., one lifts a hand, the other feels heat.
- Final Performance: The Collapse
A public performance composed of looping, echoing, or nested scenes. The audience votes, interrupts, or shifts perspective. The truth emerges—or refuses to.
Readings & References:
- Tom Stoppard – Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
- Nick Payne – Constellations
- Jorge Luis Borges – The Garden of Forking Paths
- Quantum physics primers (simplified, metaphorical)
- Viewpoints & Laban Movement Analysis for physical vocabulary
- AI-generated scripts and nonlinear engines (e.g., Twine, AI Dungeon)
Rituals of the Studio:
- Begin each class with a silence or sound bath to “decohere” daily mind.
- Weekly collapse circles: actors discuss where their identities blurred with character, audience, or time.
- Encourage journaling dreams and synchronicities as part of the process.
This is not simply a class—it is a liminal rehearsal for a new mode of being. One where art, physics, and consciousness are no longer separate disciplines, but notes in the same quantum chord.
Would you like a full syllabus or a sample assignment write-up for one of the exercises, like “The Forked Scene”?