In the texting age, does personal contact now require an intervention? New drama is challenging conventions of both theatre and our conversations, writes Peter Crawley
ONLY CONNECT! So goes the epigraph of EM Forster's Howard's End, an instruction as simple to comprehend as it has become difficult to follow. Despite the proliferation of communication methods, the substance of our exchanges seems to be shrinking. Sentiments are abbreviated and truncated like so many "txt msgs", information is widely available but more shallow, people disburse smiley face emoticons more regularly than smiles.
What then, about the lost art of conversation? As We Are Here 3.0 ramps up, the technologically inclined performance festival co-produced by Project Arts Centre and Dublin Docklands Development Authority, a number of companies have designed works that place the audience as participants in a conversation, recognising that personal communication requires an intervention.
"I don't think we have a mission to make people talk to each other in a better way," says Silvia Mercuriali, co-director (with Ant Hampton) of the boldly experimental Brighton company Rotozaza. With Etiquette, though, the show they are bringing to KC Peaches cafe on Pearse Street, "We suggest the possibility that we are not communicating anymore on a deeper level with each other. We mostly stay on the chit-chat level and find it difficult to look in each other's eyes."
Etiquette's solution is the mother of all icebreakers: two participants sit opposite one another, receiving recorded instructions and dialogue via headphones, in order to execute a private performance in the middle of a public space.
We are asked to regard the table before us as a stage, and a voice informs us that we are actors on opening night who have forgotten our lines, before feeding us cues for an exchange lifted directly from Jean-Luc Godard's film Vivre Sa Vie.
Those who have seen previous Rotozaza shows, such as Romcom, Doublethinkand Five in the Morning(all of which graced the Dublin Fringe Festival in previous years), will be familiar with their method - one that has found popularity among other festival participants Brokentalkers and Maeve Cheasty of You're Only Massive - which the company calls "The Theatre of Command and Response". The idea began with [Bloke], in 1999, a show designed to lure a visual artist friend of the company onto the stage.
"We really wanted to see him perform," Mercuriali recalls, "but we knew he was never going to want the responsibility of learning lines and a character." Instead, he was issued a number of simple imperatives to obey, "as if you had the director onstage". Rotozaza have refined that idea across several other shows, inviting unrehearsed guest performers to improvise through loose narratives according to a theme: the relationship at the heart of Romcom, or the insidious theme park of Five in the Morning. Those instructions tended to veer towards the startlingly abstract ("Try, and fail, to relieve yourself of sadness") to simpler, starker requests ("Die").
The instructions for Etiquetteare more forgiving, though, designed with non-professionals in mind: "Sniff, collapse into your chair, look down, cover your mouth".
"You have to feel confident that you can carry out the instructions," Mercuriali says of the design of the show. "So we kept it simple: What is it that anyone can do? The idea of etiquette and an exchange between two people was always something we had in our minds, but the idea of transposing the whole idea of performing and being an audience member into a conversation came later. It is exactly the same thing, though: someone speaks and the other person listens. Conversation, for us, is exactly like performance."
SOMETHING SIMILAR HAPPENS with Rimini Protokoll's Call Cutta in a Box, subtitled, accurately, An Intercontinental Telephone Play. The Berlin-based company, who last year brought Cargo Sofiato the We Are Here 2.0 festival (a show that might have been described as an international trucking play), originally conceived of Call Cuttaas an exercise in navigation rather than conversation.
Commissioned as a site-specific production for the city of Calcutta, in 2005, it initially involved Indian call centre workers guiding participants through the warren-like streets of the old city. A subsequent version seized the ironies present in globalisation when the same long-distance call centre operatives instructed Berlin-based participants along unfamiliar paths between Kreuzberg and Potsdamerplatz.
In the latest version, installed in an office in the Docklands, the sole participant for each performance answers a telephone and strays no further than the room, its features - a computer, a printer, a kettle - all operated remotely by an agent nearly 10,000km away, while they strike up an uncommonly intimate conversation.
"People in call centres navigate you in various ways," explains Rimini Protokoll co-founder Helgard Haug. "They navigate you through the use of your computer or the number of your credit card. You let them know personal information so they can help you. The starting point [for the performance] was that despite all of these call centres that have been built in Calcutta, and all those service lines, you never get close to that person. You never get to know something about his or her life."
There's a fine line between intimacy and intrusion, and the conversation that begins Call Cuttainitially resembles a brusquely impersonal survey ("Is there any history of disease in your family?") before becoming startlingly frank ("Are you satisfied with your life?").
The call-centre worker opens up too, describing their life, their family and their working conditions. In a video made of a recent performance, a personable young Indian woman might have been analysing 21st-century living as she described her office.
"Inside there's this loud noise," she says, "everybody is very busy, there's lots of activity, but we are all in our own little spheres. We are not talking to each other. We are all connected, but our connections are going outside the office."
In a sense, the show is a critique of globalisation, although Haug recognises that Rimini Protokoll is somehow implicated in the exploitation it is highlighting. The call-centre operatives are, strictly speaking, performers, but in a revealing moment of the recording, the young Indian woman refers to Helgard not as her director, but as her boss.
"That was a bit of a joke," says Haug, "but of course we do employthem. So it's a strange situation for us as well."
Just as transnational corporations are outsourcing their customer helplines, so Rimini Protokoll are doing something similar with their performers. "That's it," admits Haug. "Our performers are paid a little bit better than the people in the call centres, but it doesn't compare with wages we would have paid to people in Europe. We work in a different way, but still economically it's the same thing as what companies do in Germany or Ireland."
ALTHOUGH THEIR RESPECTIVE groups have each gnawed away at the definitions of theatre, both Haug and Mercuriali regard their conversation pieces as performances - albeit ones where the spectator must be a more active participant than usual. Both shows incorporate theatrical gags, with Etiquette's dialogue quoting slyly from Ibsen's A Doll's House, while Call Cuttaconceals a webcam behind a miniature red curtain.
"I wouldn't say we distrust the traditional theatre," offers Mercuriali, "it's just not something that we are interested in doing ourselves."
Haug, who says that Rimini Protokoll was born out of frustration with a theatre that "was not reaching out, not connecting with people", admits to playing teasing games with the theatre.
"All the projects that we do are dealing with the question, what is theatre? What are the rules? While exploring the possibilities of playing with identity."
Although their new show cannot take place without direct conversation (and you are advised that your call may be recorded for training/rehearsing purposes), Rimini Protokoll do not necessarily excel at bringing people together. Recently a woman discovered that her long-term boyfriend had attended the show, revealing to his interlocutor in a moment of candour that he did not plan on having children anytime soon. This information, relayed to his girlfriend the following day by the same employee, was clearly news to her.
"It was really shocking to them," Haug says, "because although they hadn't talked about this themselves, they could tell someone else, 10,000km away, the answer to such a big question." Haug thinks for a moment. "I guess they split up after it."
No such consequences have been reported by participants of Etiquette, whose scripted banter, Mercuriali notes with some satisfaction, "will instigate another conversation after the show".
Neither practitioner ought to worry about that. Whatever happens, these technological endeavours to jump start the art of conversation should, at the very least, give us something to talk about.
Rotozaza's Etiquette runs from June 23rd to July 5th at KC Peaches, Pearse Street, Dublin.
Rimini Protokoll's Call Cutta in a Box runs from July 1st to July 26th at the Dublin City Moorings Base, Custom House Quay, Dublin 1. For details of these shows and other events in the We Are Here 3.0 festival see wearehere.ie