The future is the past is how we speak now
What follows is a rough adaptation of what was already a pretty rough text that I put together as a guest speaker for the event Futures After the Pandemic: Transmedial Stages and Posthuman Dramaturgies , organised by Joseph Dunne-Howrie and Bianca Mastrominico, which took place at Rose Bruford College on Friday 9 May, 2025. It was one of those juicy, challenging days that opened up questions within questions, not least in discussing creative interactions with AI (everyone, read guest speaker Hannah Silva’s book My Child, The Algorithm ) and briefly broaching the environmental impacts of working across “posthuman” landscapes (although Caridad Svich , another guest speaker, felt this wasn’t considered nearly enough). I talked about theatre club because I always talk about theatre club, and because western society is no more post-human than it is post-feminism: or rather, western society remains defined by a patriarchal capitalist agenda that would eliminate care and genuine ju...