1. WHAT IS 2021?

2021 is a live narrated video game designed for a participatory performance, accompanied by live music.

2021 is a collaborative storytelling event between performers, audience members, and AI.

2021 is an exploration of the significance of human data and the challenges of preserving dignity in death for those we fundamentally disagree with.

2. THE STORY

Brian was many things:
He was Canadian. He was American.
He loved socialist healthcare. He was a Republican.
He was a homeowner. He died unhoused.
He was a proud Vietnam veteran. He suffered from PTSD and feared war.
He was a technology enthusiast. He could barely use a remote control.
He was an abandoned child. He was a father who abandoned his children.

A right-wing American man is dying and his left-wing Canadian daughter tells his story. Together, they navigate what it means to die in an age when human data can be used to revive loved ones after they are gone. 2021 asks: How do we provide dignity in death to someone we fundamentally disagree with?

The performance unfolds through a video game played on stage by one audience member as a stand-in for Cole's unhoused Veteran father, Brian. In playing the game, the player reenacts Brian's final weeks in a New Jersey hospital, with Cole live narrating the journey, accompanied by a live musician. As the player encounters different obstacles and objects in the hospital, the audience—who freely offers advice to the player—becomes the player's caregiver and, by extension, a stand-in for Cole as she cared for her Trump-supporting father via mediated technology.

Upon winning the game, the story concludes with the appearance of a fully functioning 3D virtual AI Brian trained on his life’s documents. Cole and the AI version of her father improvise a conversation about the significance of his human data and whether Brain’s data is worth saving.

3. THE EVENT

2021 is an immersive, live-narrated video game experience where a single courageous audience member, known as Patient 203, navigates a virtual hospital setting with guidance from the audience. During the show, you can expect a 2021 audience to be:

• playing/watching the game for 100-120 minutes

• calling out to offer or request help

• engaging in dialogue with a large language model

• laughing (death can be funny!)

Keys to a successful 2021 experience:

• OPEN DURATION: Once the game starts, the player will take the time it requires to complete the game.  The show cannot be interrupted after it begins and the creators of the project nor staff from the venue will not intervene. It will last approximately 90-120 minutes.

• INTERMISSIONS: There are no intermissions throughout the show.

• SUPPORT: Every show and audience member is different. Whenever possible, we suggest support be offered for audience members who have/had cancer and/or are/were caregivers.

4. TEAM

CO-CREATION, DATA CURATION, PERFORMANCE Cole Lewis

CO-CREATION, PROGRAMMING, PERFORMANCE Patrick Blenkarn

CO-CREATION, PROGRAMMING, MUSIC + SOUND DESIGN Sam Ferguson

3D MODELLING AND ENVIRONMENTS Eric Ing

2D ILLUSTRATION AND ANIMATION Clarissa Picolo

LIGHTING DESIGN Itai Erdal

SCENIC DESIGN Helen Yung

PROJECTION DESIGN + TECHNOLOGIST Wladimiro A. Woyno R.

CHOREOGRAPHY Heidi Strauss

TECHNICAL DIRECTION Alex Grozdanis

AI CONSULTANT David Rokeby

DISABILITY PRODUCER Anika Vervecken

DRAMATURGICAL CONSULTANT Fatma Sarah Elkashef

SHOW OPERATORS Sam Ferguson, Alex Grozdanis, Christopher-Elizabeth

EARLY PHASE COLLABORATORS Emma Cuzzocrea, Ezri Fenton, Laura Maieron, Shaan Tahir-Mehdi, and Daibei Wang

Produced by Guilty by Association

Co-Produced by National Arts Centre of Canada’s National Creation Fund and The Elbow Theatre

Developed in part through Mitu’s Artists at Home and Expansion Works

Developed with the support of Canada Council for the Arts, Tarragon Theatre, Nightswimming Theatre, Design + Technology Lab, The Chrysalis, DART at Brock University, Playwrights Workshop Montreal, Precursor Lab, and BMO Lab

Guilty by Association (GbA) shifts our process with each new project as we conspire with an ever-expanding network of collaborators from far-out disciplines to faraway places. Led by Co-Artistic Directors, Cole Lewis + Patrick Blenkarn, together we seek to expand what theatre can do, devising work from design ideas, exploring modes of storytelling, and scheming to fuse media to the stage.

Cole Lewis, Co-Creator/Writer/Performer

Cole Lewis (she/her) is a mom and mad theatre artist from St. Catharines, Ontario. She specializes in creating live performance from design ideas, exploring new modes of storytelling, and fusing technologies to the stage. Her practice includes directing, playwriting, and the design of moving image works. She is Co-Artistic Director of Guilty by Association. Twice nominated for Dora-Awards, Cole’s practice uses humour, design, and technology to explore notions of violence, expose questions of bias, and unsettle standard conceptions of ‘truth’ to explore alternative futures. She has an MFA in Directing from Yale and her thoughts on performance have been shared at LMDA, Howlround, FOLDA, Yale CCAM, and Canadian Theatre Review.

RECENT: Co-created 2021 at Tarragon Theatre’s 2024 Greenhouse Festival. Began a new play about social welfare and neoliberalism at Caravan Farm Theatre’s 2024 National Playwright Retreat. Co-researched Dramaturges of the Unreal through Nightswimming’s 2024 PureResearch. Lead Artist Mentor (2023 + 2024) for Suitcase in the Point’s Electric Innovations program. Attended 2023 LaMama Umbria with Thomas Ostermeier, Iman Aoun, Dmitry Krymov, and Keng Sen Ong. Completed the first draft of Grief Redux for Stratford Festival (seed commission). Adapted Kyo Maclear’s Virginia Wolf for Montreal’s Geordie Theatre. 


SELECT DIRECTING/CREATION: Wrote and directed 1991 which was presented by Why Not Theatre’s RISER Project through Guilty by Association. Conceived and directed these violent delights at SummerWorks. Wrote and directed Moderato Cantabile at SummerWorks. Directed the Canadian premiere of Anne Carson’s Antigonick at SummerWorks. Led the devising process and directed AGMI at ArsNova’s AntFest. Originated the direction and co-wrote Suitcase in Point’s Dora nominated Keith Richards: A One Woman Show.

SELECT INTERDISCIPLINARY: Development Workshop for Untitled Visit, an exploration in VR and MoCap, with GbA and Lauren Dubowski at Yale’s CCAM. Directed Redshift Music Society’s Still Life Continuum at Vancouver’s Orpheum Theatre. In collaboration with Niagara Artists Centre, directed Canada’s largest wearable art show, STRUTT and The Wine King Parade Float designed by graphic novelist, Seth.

Patrick Blenkarn, Co-Creator/Programmer/Performer

Patrick Blenkarn is a Canadian artist working at the intersection of performance, game design, and visual art. He is a director, writer, programmer, animator, musician, and polyglot, whose research-based practice revolves around the themes of language, labour, and democracy, with projects ranging in form from video games and card games to stage plays and books.

His work and collaborations have been featured in performance festivals, galleries, museums, and film festivals, including Festival TransAmériques (Montréal), Seoul Performing Arts Festival, NYU Skirball (New York), Under the Radar (New York), PuSh International Performing Arts Festival (Vancouver), Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Humboldt Forum (Berlin), Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires, the Humboldt Forum (Berlin), IF Festival (Barcelona), UMS (Ann Arbor), and many more. In 2020, he was nominated for Best Projection Design at Toronto’s Dora Awards. His video game performance projects, asses.masses (with Milton Lim) and 2021 (with Cole Lewis and Sam Ferguson) have both received investments from the National Creation Fund of the National Arts Centre of Canada.

Patrick has frequently been an artist in residence at galleries and theatres around the world, including USC Games (Los Angeles), The Arctic Circle (Svalbard), the Spitsbergen Artist Center (Svalbard), GlogauAIR (Berlin), Fonderie Darling (Montreal), Malaspina Printmakers (Vancouver), Skaftfell Center for Visual Art (Iceland), VIVO Media Arts (Vancouver), and The Theatre Centre (Toronto).

Patrick is the co-founder of STUDIO FUNFUG and the co-founder of videocan, Canada’s video archive of performance documentation. He has a degree in philosophy, theatre, and film from the University of King's College and an MFA from Simon Fraser University.

Sam Ferguson, Co-Creator/Sound Designer

Sam Ferguson is an award-winning sound designer/composer from Toronto. After moving to Vancouver to study under acclaimed electroacoustic music composer Berry Truax he returned to Toronto where he became involved with theatre. This experience led him to enroll in the Yale School of Drama where he received an MFA for sound design. Since graduating he has returned to Toronto and has been working in the industry ever since.

In addition to his theatrical work Sam has also been involved with audio postproduction on several documentaries/films, teaching microphone technique at Toronto Metropolitan University as well as the development of creative digital signal processing.

Previous credits include The Visit (Iseman Theater), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf (Centaur Theatre), 1991 (The Theatre Centre), Boy’s Girls and other Mythological Creatures (FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre), Philosophers wool (documentary), Love, Oran (Super Channel/ Amazon) and Mom Jail (short, winner of the HFX 72hour film challenge).