Call Cutta - Mobile Phone Theater

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh () hserus net>
Date: Sun, 10 Apr 2005 12:46:06 +0530
To: <dave () farber net>
Cc: <ole () cisco com>, <declan () well com>
Subject: Call Cutta - Mobile Phone Theater

Sounds interesting

-srs

ps - Kolkota is the local spelling / pronunciation for the city of Calcutta,
India

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http://call-cutta.in/index1.htm

February 26 to April 30, 2005 (Wednsday to Sunday, 2 to 5 pm) Starting
Point:
Star Theatre, Hatibagan. To make a reservation call 98318 80501
 
The world's first mobile phone theatre takes place in Kolkata from February
onwards. Theatre that transforms the city into a stage. A mobile stage. Or
into
a game. Or into a film. You start off as the audience, but you might become
the
player, the user, the hero, of your personal scenography: Kolkata. Calcutta.

You buy a ticket at the almost 100 year old, newly renovated Star Theatre at
Hatibagan in north Kolkata. Where you expect to be ushered to your seat in
the
auditorium you are handed a mobile phone and shown the exit! Almost
immediately, bright young cheerful voice speaking accented English calls you
and starts talking, becomes your guide, your actor, your blind date and
helps
you, the theatre-goer, step by step, through the streets of Kolkata. As you
begin to find your way through places familiar, as you transit through
unknown
spaces, the city you thought you knew becomes a movie which you shoot with
your
own eyes. The soundtrack is the conversation you are having with a person
you
have never met, who nevertheless is remote controlling you within a certain
matrix. Or it could turn Kolkata into something like a computer game but
this
time for real. No screen, no keyboards, just you and the city.

During the conversation you will try to picture your partner. Who is this
person with this American or British accent but with this smiling Indian
background? What kind of character is she who has dedicated a big part of
her
life to talking behind a telephone to customers in the USA? Who is this man
who
used to work for a credit card hotline calling people in the UK who have a
hundred times more money than him? Will you try to find out who this person
is?
Or will you step from stage to stage, level to level through the city as
soon
as possible? Time is running out but the game is not over yet!

CALL CUTTA is the theatre project created out of an invitation from the
Goethe-Institut Max Mueller Bhavan in Kolkata by Rimini Protokoll, the
German/Swiss performance of collective of Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and
Daniel
Wetzel. They have visited Kolkata thrice to research on the questions of
tele-working, fictional city transformations and selling personalities.
After
much discussions and talking, tea and coffee-laden brainstorming, they
realized
they would never fully understand Kolkata in all its diversity. And so they
decided to put another layer on to the city. Now they will come back to work
with dozens of artists and call centre employees on a radically subjective
vision of the city in a theatre piece as an individual as can be imagined.
The
first mobile theatre piece in the world encompassing dialogue that often
shares
confidences; between architecture, spaces, manipulation and music.

CALL CUTTA is a kind of remotely guided tour through a city, a sort of user
interface for theatre-goers. It has an interactive stage"set" which takes
you
behind the scenes and beyond. However, the conversation can only be
controlled
up to a limit, swinging between small talk, intimacy, and the biography of
the
people talking, all of which is used to manipulate information. At the end
it
is always up to the theatre-goer to decide how far he wants to get involved
in
the game. Other "callers" or actors may switch to a waiting call, or take
over
another tour. Sometimes the "audience" gets switched to a pre-recorded piece
of
music or is told to sit somewhere: I'll call you back later, have a coffee
till
then - and all of a sudden the assistant or guide is no longer in comforting
earshot, the film reels are being changed, the city returns with all its
unknowns!

In the second part of the project - from April 2005- CALL CUTTA connects the
metropolises of Kolkata and Berlin. The actor will still be in the call
centre
in Kolkata and the "walker" or the theatre-goer in Berlin. Together they
form a
symbiotic relationship. They help each other through places and spaces,
spying
on aspects of the city, sharing and trading confidences, and developing
mutual
trust which overcomes any loneliness the theatre-goer may feel. In Berlin it
becomes it becomes an intimate conversation between two people from
different
cultural backgrounds, and the theatre-goer opens doors to a building which
he
had never dared to do before on his own, perhaps uses an elevator at the
Potsdamer Platz, or learn a code which will allow a unsuspecting sausage
seller
to open a backroom door, trusting his Indian guide increasingly, trusting
the
voice of a person who has never been to Berlin himself.

The idea of CALL CUTTA is not only to present new concepts in German
theatre,
but to also work as a catalyst to bring India and Kolkata closer to Germany.
Kolkata has established itself in the call centre business, like the
bigpl_yers
in Bangalore, Gurgaon and Hyderabad. Every day, as India comes to the dose
of
another normal working day, British and American customers usually, are told
that they are talking to John or Christy when it is actually Jai or Charu
with
perfectly trained accents at the other end of the line. In this situation
the
call centre itself becomes an audio theatre.

To make the project available to a wider audience, the preparatory work and
the
actual "performances" are being filmed by the well known Bengali film maker
Anjan Dutt, who will produce this documentary for German and Indian
television.

The launch of CALL CUTTA will happen on Saturday 26 February 2005.
Details of daily shows will be informed through the media at a later date.

FUNDED BY 
German Federal Cultural Foundation
Goethe-InstitutlMax Mueller Bhavan Kolkata
Hebbeltheater am Dfer Berlin
AND SUPPORTED BY
Databazaar India


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