Coney puts Russians and Brits into a virtual hotel for a diplomatic treaty
“I wanna be in the room where it happens.”
This is a sentiment expressed by the character of Aaron Burr in the musical Hamilton but is also a desire familiar to many people. But what if there is no single room where a small group of powerful people determines the fate of the world? What if there are, in fact, many rooms in which decisions are made daily and it’s the summation of them that constitutes an outcome?
The Delegation, an interactive virtual experience by the British company Coney, looks into the power distribution of pandemic capitalism on the international arena. To do that, the director Tassos Stevens has created a virtual hotel, “Hotel Zajets,” where he acts as a concierge/moderator during a convening of two diplomatic delegations. The audience members (numbering a little over 30 participants on the day I attended) are assembled into delegations of two countries, Russia and the UK. The experience was a part of the International Summer Festival of Art’s The Access Point, a platform for site-specific and immersive work taking place in Russia and all over the world, online. As an attendee of this festival, I find myself as part of the Russian delegation.
We, the delegates, are encouraged to “check-in” via the hotel’s web site before our scheduled Zoom meeting. Among other things, I am asked to select a room number, think of my favorite word in my mother tongue, and choose a song to represent my country. The songs will be played later during time set aside for socializing and our favorite words will be offered as a prompt to strike up conversation during more intimate hangouts at the virtual bar.
Although the Zoom-based Hotel Zajets has no depiction of its interiors, its bare-bones design provides the delegates with all the expected facilities. On Zoom, there is a common space for official business, breakout rooms for deliberations, and the hotel bar for more intimate gatherings. These “quarters” are regulated by the moderators of the experience and the participants are simply moved from one room to the other at the appropriate time. In addition to Zoom, there are some parts of the hotel which the participants can use freely, namely the Conference Center hosted on a separate web-based platform with a mysterious Diamond suite guarded by a passcode. In addition to these tools, there are a couple of Google Docs to which the participants can contribute and a WhatsApp channel for those who seek an alternative way to communicate. And simultaneous audio translation to both Russian and English is available during the official program to all.
The imaginary grounds of the game property are vast and the program is packed. We have “three days and nights”-worth of activities (which comes to nearly two and a half hours in real-time). The main agenda of each of the three days is to divide a certain amount of points between the two countries. Each delegation is split in two parts, North and South, for working out the best strategy for each round and over the long run. Every day after the strategizing session, Russia North meets with the UK North to negotiate, as do their Southern colleagues. At the final stage, everybody comes together and, after building up suspense, the score is announced.
Although the main agenda of this game appears to be that of diplomacy, dividing an arbitrary number of points seems suspiciously superficial to me right away, especially without any correlation with the real world. The moderator of our group assures us that these are just points, and, if we wish, we can assign them some meaning. But with such an oblique set of instructions, how can you not become suspicious of your fellow delegates, or the representatives from the UK, or even the conference organizers? The seemingly transparent design of the game screams of conspiracy to me.
Even when I am left alone in my “hotel” room every night, I can’t shake off my paranoia. After each day of lectures, deliberations, and mingling, the delegates are offered to shut the door to their room by turning off their camera; we each listen to an audio track in solitude. These mini contemplative sessions are a nice counterbalance to the highly interactive and occasionally intense main body of the experience. The recordings are also used to reinforce the suspicion and to pour some oil on the flames of secrecy. You are alone in your room. Or are you? What will you do if somebody tries to reach out?
There are also informal interactions at the hotel bar in small groups of three or four people every evening. We receive prompts for these sessions, some quite innocent sounding (our favorite words in our languages), some potentially heated (opinions on how your respective governments are managing the pandemic). Depending on who is in the room, these icebreaking chats can be very awkward or heartfelt, just like in real life. The synchronous live language interpretation that is provided during the official events of the day is absent here, so the delegates are left to figure out the language barrier on their own. I enjoyed these pockets of total improvisation in the otherwise structured game. The participants were free to continue talking about work, use the given prompts, or just talk about whatever they want.
(A few minor spoilers follow.)
As we soon find out, the game itself allows for some radical creativity coming from the participants, if that’s what your delegation chooses to explore. I won’t give away any spoilers or go much deeper into any detail, but towards the third round of dividing points my group (Russia North) decides that we are through with the meaningless activity of dividing points, and propose to our British colleagues (UK North) an action of solidarity with those who are repressed by our governments. It might sound like an idea coming out of the blue in my retelling of it, but there is a point in the experience where the program takes a sharp political turn.
Soon, nearly everybody else joins in and the points are forgotten. We are reminded that our actions in the world of the game might have consequences in our lives, and it’s up to us to make it happen. Unfortunately, the big reveal in The Delegation lands a little flat because of our political activism and only confirms the same conclusion that we the participants came to collectively: that power is distributed into many hands and it’s up to us to use it for the right cause. Rather than speculating about some room where all decisions are being made by others, we should take charge and seek to make “the room where it happens” our own.
(This review was published on NoProscenium.com on 7/31/20)
