Jess and Morgs' Deepfake Uses Live Cameras to Expose Erosion of Truth — SkimNews
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- Jessica Wright and Morgann Runacre-Temple (aka Jess and Morgs) premiere Deepfake, a dance-theatre piece built around a fictional TV interview between a journalist and a politician defending himself against a scandal he insists is fabricated.
- The production uses four live cameras in a green-screen studio, broadcasting both real footage and an edited version with manipulated backgrounds; seven dancers in green-screen suits manipulate the environment but vanish in the final edit.
- The choreography draws on iconic political interviews including Jeremy Paxman's 1997 grilling of Michael Howard (in which he repeated the same question 12 times) and Prince Andrew's Newsnight appearance, alongside today's media-trained politicians who "bombastically evade any questions at all."
- Rebecca Bassett-Graham (of Wayne McGregor's company) plays the journalist and Kennedy Junior Muntanga (an Akram Khan collaborator) plays the politician, with text by writer Jeff James.
- Runacre-Temple argues the deeper danger of deepfakes is not just that people believe fabrications, but that "they start to disbelieve things that are true, and this gap opens up of doubt and scepticism about everything."
- Jess and Morgs scored a 2022 hit with Coppélia for Scottish Ballet, which reimagined a 19th-century dancing-doll ballet as a cautionary tale about AI automatons and "tech bro egos," and earlier this year made their Paris Opera Ballet debut.
Why it matters: By staging the mechanics of image manipulation in real time rather than showing finished deceptions, Jess and Morgs make the audience complicit in how a deepfake is assembled — a structural argument that the corrosion of trust, not just the spread of fakes, is the real threat. The piece lands at a moment when AI-generated political imagery is already being deployed to discredit real scandals.
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