FIND YOUR PERSONAL REVIEW FOR CALL CUTTA IN A BOX (From: Inta Balode, Martin Bernátek, Riina Maukola, Anna Teuwen) 1. What is your marital status? a) This doesn t concern anybody b) Whole blood single, marriage is for the bourgeois c) Waiting for the right one d) Engaged since 8 years and marrying soon 2. What's your job? a) My only job is looking for a job b) I made my carrier surfing on a cash flows or at least I want to c) I produce high art for low money d) I work as a robot in a factory 3. How you can describe your relationship to your cell phone? a) I m totally under control of technology b) It's my treasure, my pet and friend c) Love and hate d) I don't use a cell phone, I prefer Skype or Messenger 4. How much you know about the Bertolt Brecht's thoughts on radio? a) I've read his reflection Radio as the apparatus of communication where he speaks about dialogue use of radio in a sense of self-education of listeners. b) I know the experiments of Max Neuhaus in the 1960s and 1970s. For example in the piece Public Supply in 1966 where he mixed the calls of listeners to who called to his radio studio and broadcast the sound back again to different persons. c) I have seen his opera Der Lindbergflug (The Lindberg Flight) staged in 1929 in Baden- Baden Festival. He transmits the piece into several rooms as a pure radiophonic event. There was also the supposing that the event should be realized by listeners by their radio sets at home. d) Nothing but I listen to the radio. 5. How much you know about Rimini Protokoll? a) I know Rimini Protocol with one L, it's a proposition made by Colin Campbell to afford Third World countries from oil imports by stabilizing oil prices to production costs. b) I heard about it from my friends who discussed the program of Baltic Circle while we were having beer and I think it sounds interesting. c) They are recognized inventing neo documentary theatre an by working with non-actors. They staged for instance Karl Marx's Kapital Band 1 in Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, the piece recently got a price at the Mühlheimer Theatertreffen 2007. d) What protocol? 6. Are you making friends easily? a) When I m drunk I m quite talkative, that helps b) I m an open minded and spontaneous person, so I get to know people quickly c) Real friends are hard to find d) Yes I have about 300 friends in Facebook. It is important nowadays to have friends all over the world 7. Are you afraid of loosing your privacy when considering the Internet? a) I don t use the internet b) I have no secrets Mobile Lab for Theatre and Communication 1
c) Google and personalized commercials are scaring me soon we will have the Big Brother- Scenario and you will be supervised by everything you do d) I didn t know that there could possibly be any danger 8. Where do you go on holidays? a) What is holiday? I spent the last 17 years in my callcenter-box b) To India c) I go to see all performances of Baltic Circle theatrefestival in Helsinki, Finland d) I just choose any last-minute-all-inclusive-package to somewhere warm 9. How often you visit theatre? a) About once a month b) Less than that c) 4 times a week d) Never 10. Do you believe there is a connection between art and reality? a) What is reality? b) What is art? c) The world is a stage d) I suppose All answers a) are red All answers b) are green All answers c) blue All answers d) are yellow Find out your dominant color and move on: If there is not one clearly dominating color, chose the ones that match best. Red Irritation of speaking, available for free, designed strategy Green Positive, surprising, innovative, communitative, intimate. Blue Questions of expertise, connected to the world, particular spectator, answering machines Yellow Challenging, interactive Irritation of speaking, available for free, designed strategy After having seen Call Cutta in a box one could ask them, whether maybe the famous sentence of Joseph Beuys, promising everyone to be an artist, would be more true than ever. In this performance, we can feel ourselves as artists when all that happens is us having a phone call to someone in India. Actually, it is not about everyone being an artist, but more about no artists needed anymore to create things, that were called art. Call Cutta in a box plays with the irritation of speaking to someone, that we don t know, but who seems to know more about us, than we can be sure of, which provokes an annoying feeling. The foreign person seems to have might over the whole long distance - he or she can light up lamps, can make the printer print pictures and make the water boil in the teapot. He or she asks irritating questions that confront the visitor with thinking about intimacy and truthfulness, with a role, we can play when being part of theatre and about the question, if this is theatre or life and if we do not always play roles and present us in a special way when believing that nobody would discover it. Mobile Lab for Theatre and Communication 2
Anyway, Call Cutta in a box have mistakes that damage the nice try. If the teapot is not working, and the person at the other side doesn t find out about it. If the call operator gets irritated when the spectator asks too many or the wrong questions. Suddenly it is no longer the call by chance but a designed strategy, that can t be hidden so well or that can be trapped easily by going through the waste and finding the left traces of former visitors. When once finding out, that this is not an individual experience or at least not as much as it seemed to be it is just disappointing and boring and suddenly lets feel the impersonality of the other, his job-doing behind that that takes all possible being touching. After this the whole experience seems exactly the same which is available for free every minute we go online skyping with a stranger trying to hit on you.we know that there is globalization; we know that different nations have different accents in English and we still get each other, we have experienced situations when someone we don t know asks too many questions. So what? What does simple reminding about all this gives to me as a spectator and to the theater as an art form? Positive, surprising, innovative, communitative, intimate. What animal you would be, if you were animal? a man in a call-center in Calcutta 10,000 miles away asks. I choose a horse, because I have always liked them. My new friend in India does not sound very satisfied with my answer. At the very beginning call-center employee Souptic Charkraborty in Rimini Procol s performance Call Cutta struck me a very kindly but a gushy person. He starts by accusing me of lying my age. He assures me somewhat aggressively that I am eighteen years old and he does not believe my objections at all. He then asks how old I think that he is. I say 35. He is 22. The difference between his age and my guess is exactly the same as the difference between his estimation and my actual age but controversially. Later in the discussion we communicate with web-cam and he starts again accusing me of lying about my age all over again. Very soon I start to regret that I am not a better liar and had not told about my husband and my nine noisy kids. Thanks to either Indian culture or the script of this play, it seems two single people of opposite sexes who find themselves in a one-hour virtual conversation could not lead anywhere except the obligation for him to nearly propose a marriage to me. The conversation continues like that. Tell me about the biggest mistake you have ever made. Some of the questions sound prepared beforehand. I am not sure, if I should leave leading the discussion for him or if asking questions belong to my role, too. However, I quickly forget that I am participating in the performance. He sings. I sing too. Well, you are definitely not a singer, my new buddy admits, but consoles, that I am a positive person anyway. Then I dance the Indian Bollywood dances in my new office front of the webcam and I after all I am quite surprised that I even enjoy it. The connection to Calcutta has born. Rimini Protokoll theatre group is on its way to explore the theatre reality again. The project Call Cutta started in 2005 with the aim of discovering the theatricality of Indian call center operators. In the first version, the story of Mahatma Ghandi and his political opponent Subhash Chandra Bose was narrated via cell phones. Single spectators were guided through the streets of Berlin by a person in an Indian call center. In Call Cutta in a Box everything happens in a small cube dressed as an office. It has been called it the largest theatre in the Mobile Lab for Theatre and Communication 3
world. The use of Skype technology allows the spectator to share intimate moments with his own actor from India. A chat about common topics follows the guideline. The range of sensory experiences follow, involving the spectator through images sent by fax, the cooling breeze of a fan and taste of original Indian breath freshener follows. It can be seen as the extension of 19th century symbolistic theatre, a reconfiguration of the concept of naturalistic theatre and a reflection of the Renaissance notion of image as a window to the world. The spectator can still observe real Helsinki life happening outside the window while singing favorite song to someone who thez have never met. The production is intimate piece of theatrical architecture constructed from invisible bits of mediated messages and intangible magic moments happening between Helsinki and Calcutta. In general one will get quite a positive feel good experience. The technical tricks of performance did not have to directly amaze. For me, the biggest surprise in this show was my own conduct: I sang and danced for a web-cam and I even had fun doing it. Call cutta challenges a spectator's own anxieties around communication with himself, not pushing him into uncomfortable expressions. That white little box you occupy for a became nest to breed your own desires and share them with temporal best friend on the phone. The box condenses the universe into one in which you are the sun in the middle. Questions of expertise, connected to the world, particular spectator, answering machines Call Cutta is the project of the German artist-collective Rimini Protokoll, who made itself a name by working out a style of expert-theatre. In their performances they use to work with laymen, who are themselves on stage, and play their own roles. That s why Rimini Protokoll does not call them laymen, but actually experts which sounds like about the opposite. Rimini Protokoll is leading and building a trend one could call Reality Theatre, which questions the borders between theatre and real -life and often discovers the real life as being more theatrical than any drama. Within this their work raises questions of expertise as an artist and the human uses as a readymade that has aesthetic value, when just set in another context. With the piece Call Cutta in a box they tie in with a project, they did earlier, that only was called Call Cutta. Call Cutta in a box as well is a one-to-one performance, which basically consists of a phone call between the particular spectator and a person in an Indian Call center. The spectator is guided to a small cabin, designed in office-style, where he locks himself in. A phone stars to ring, and with picking it up, the performance starts. Is it is all about a play with distances and the question of intimacy? Who is the person on the other side? Is he or she really in India? Where do they know from, what the office looks like? How fast can you establish a close relationship? Do you speak open about your intime relationships? What happens to the life when it s researched and rethought, and transformed into performance situation? Call Cutta in a box deals with the concept of communication. It demonstrates once again how easy it is now to be connected to the world without appreciating the fact that your conversation partner is in Calcutta, India. This is totally different from actually only about 15-20 years old history when we needed to call to call center, which was not always easy to reach, in order to get a conversation with some other city. Then we needed to wait back from the call center sometimes for hours, and forgot about talking to your friend in Moscow Mobile Lab for Theatre and Communication 4
in New Years Eve. After watching your phone as a gate to some other universe and finally getting the chance to talk every minute was special. The act of communication got a special value. Now staying and getting in touch is easy and that s much better I suppose. Call centers call us, many people call us, it s enough to make one inattentive step like ordering pizza on the phone and you get connected. And while days pass you start not picking up the phone if you don t know who is calling. Our suspicions grow and technology supports us with answering machines, voice mails and stuff. The result could be pretty much history like I have lost my phone, I m somewhere in the middle of nowhere, but there is one phone booth, I call my friends and relatives, they even don t think about picking up this for sure commercial kind of call, hours pass, I hope that I will guess who is still happy when we don t know who calls. Challenging, interactive Legend: challenging controversial suitable for children interactive must see! not recommended emotional dramatic postdramatic more than two hours easy going text based documentary/realitytheatre Mobile Lab for Theatre and Communication 5