|
Cellular phone technology has created a new entrance into the private lives of total strangers.
The most common cell phone chatter amplifies the mundane redundancy of anonymous lives, but at times we also overhear one
another’s rawest emotions and most intimate experiences. These one-sided, conversational fragments have become elemental
to the urban, aural landscape, which transform passersby into an unintentional audience.
Pedestrian: A Walking Tour for Multiple Voices and
Portable Phones is an outdoor, site-specific, performance piece, which explores this
public airing of private, even intimate speech. The project, which is intended for performance in international metropolitan
areas, had it’s world premiere at the HOWL! Festival in New York City’s East Village on August 27th, 2005. Because each city has its own unique historical and
contemporary connotations, the text of the piece necessarily takes up different themes to reflect the location. The theme
for New York City’s performance was loss, appropriate for a city that has held tightly to the loss of the twin towers
and the myriad losses borne from that initial tragedy. Pedestrian’s fragmented
text is a confessional cobbled together from the personal stories of the performers about losses past, present and possible,
from the loss of a lover or a sentimental object to the loss of identity.
The three performers of Pedestrian’s debut invited separate groups of up to ten audience members to “eavesdrop” on their personal confessions
and revelations, while leading a thirty minute guided tour of the neighborhood. The audience attending the tours listened
all performance text via cellular phones, connected by a conference call service. This allowed each tour participant to hear
all three guides simultaneously, while following only one of them. The piece incorporates the unique topography of the various
international cities where it is performed, which provides visual support or counter-point to the physical and textual tracks
of the piece. As the New York City tours wove through the East Village, crossing paths with one another, they interacted with
lost urban landmarks that had become invisible because of their now pedestrian nature. One of the guides pointed out an Exxon gas station that stands on the outer edge of the East Village. It was once a bathhouse, a hub for homosexuals, which offers a stark example of underground institutions lost
to the more “acceptable” presence of mainstream, corporate America.
The site-specific and mobile nature of the project posits city landscape
as performative space, which casts ordinary passersby as both unintentional audience members and unwitting performers. In
New York the spectacle of the tour guides and their attending audience all on cell phones attracted much attention from the
people passing around and through the piece. Some perceived the group as taking part in a show, and were drawn to stop and
watch momentarily while others observed and interacted with the guides and audience without discerning the performative context.
To others the piece was invisible, especially those also talking on their cell
phones, and they became an integral part of the piece as they entered the frame of the performance space, blurring the boundary
between what was constructed and what occurred spontaneously.
|
