Von Torunn Hansen-Tangen
03.10.2006 / ERICSSON Homepage
Picture this: You go to your local theater to see a play. Instead of a theater ticket, you receive a mobile phone. Ten minutes later, you get a phone call from a stranger. What do you do? What do you say? Welcome to Call Cutta.
Mobile phones take to the stage.
Picture this: You go to your local theater to see a play. Instead of a theater ticket, you receive a mobile phone. Ten minutes later, you get a phone call from a stranger. What do you do? What do you say? Welcome to Call Cutta.
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Call Cutta is the world’s first mobile theater in which real places, such as streets and office buildings, become the stage.
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Call Cutta is the world’s first mobile theater: real places – such as streets and office buildings – become the stage and the members of the audience become active participants. In short, it is about two people having a loosely scripted telephone conversation in a confined area.
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The idea was born when Rimini Protokoll, a group of German directors, authors and playwrights, visited the Indian city of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), on invitation from the Goethe Institute last year.
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Daniel Wetzel, a Rimini Protokoll member, says: “We have done a lot of theater that puts the stage outside the actual theater building. Our aim is to try to connect the theater and the man in the street in different ways.”
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An outdoor stage
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Rimini Protokoll was asked to develop a theater concept that would incorporate Kolkata. The result was a one-hour walking tour of Hatibagan, an area of the city, involving mobile phones and a call center – hence the name Call Cutta.
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Wetzel explains: “We were looking for a place where India connects with the West, and we ended up with a call center because it’s a place where Indians imitate westerners by adopting their names and speaking their languages.
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“A call center in Kolkata allowed us to use some of its workspace to establish our theater service, and we hired 12 call-center agents. Together, we developed a script that included self-made maps and pictures of Hatibagan, which is now a thriving area of Kolkata,” he says.
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Last February, the call center welcomed the first group of theater-goers and for the next three months it ran shows for, on average, 20 people per day.
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Wetzel explains how it worked: “People who took part would visit a theater where they’d be given a mobile phone instead of a theater ticket. Every 10 minutes, a new theater-goer would get a call from our call-center agents, and that would be the start of the play.
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“The agent, turned performer, would guide the spectator through the city, past historic buildings and sites where they had to find various clues that would connect to an overall story. As such, the play became a dialogue where the spectator would turn into a performer.”
From Kolkata to Berlin
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After three successful months in India, the mobile-theater concept moved on to Berlin. Wetzel says: “We used the same call center in India for our shows in Berlin, but the plot was different. In Kolkata, it was focused around Hatibagan, which was a booming area two centuries ago and a place where the Indian freedom fighters drove out the British through small lanes – the same lanes that the theatre-goers were guided down. In Berlin, we had an autobiographical plot that linked the two cities together. Basically, it was about Subhash Chandra Bose, an ideological opponent of Mahatma Gandhi, who spent some time in Germany during World War 2. There he established an Indian liberation army, with German money, with the intention to liberate India.”
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Over a five-month period, Call Cutta drew more than 1700 people of all ages and from different countries and cultural backgrounds. Thanks to strong feedback, Rimini Protokoll decided to develop its theater concept further. “Apart from the scripted dialog suggestions, we couldn’t control what people were talking about – there was no director present to listen in and correct the dialogue. But that is also why we have decided to continue with this project,” Wetzel says. “The mobile phone lets you integrate a person into your imagination much more strongly than if you saw the same person on stage, wherever you are.”
From city to room
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The next phase of Call Cutta will involve a room, such as a hotel room or an office. Wetzel explains: “Let’s say you are in London. You go to a theater where you receive a letter and a key. You are told to go to the 20th floor of an office building where you lock yourself into a room and talk to a stranger for the next hour.
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“The dialogue will be much more intimate and it opens up new possibilities, like one-to-one computer interaction.”
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The play will run for a year and take place in eight cities simultaneously, involving 12 theaters. “We’ll have 16 performers in a call center in Kolkata, which means we will have two performers per city,” Wetzel says.
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Wetzel is excited about the new possibilities mobile phones have created. “You now see monologues on every street corner – people making huge gestures, screaming and laughing into the air – and it’s this kind of acting that inspired us to create Call Cutta,” he says. “Since we increasingly spend more time on our mobile phones, it is only natural that it becomes a place for theater.”