By Subhro Saha
27.10.2004 / The Telegraph Calcutta
Gift of the guide gab: Call centre employees in the city await a new role. (Picture by Amit Datta)
A theatregoer in Berlin opens doors to unknown buildings he would never have dared venture into on his own, gets to know the code with which an inconspicuous sausage-vendor opens a rear room, steps into the strange territory of Gleisdreieck or enters the Hebbeltheater through the rear entrance. All this while being Œpiloted‚ by a young and friendly voice stationed more than 10 flight hours away in Calcutta.
Call Kutta, a unique telephone theatre project by a German-Swiss creative group with call centre employees here, seeks to connect Calcutta and Berlin on a very contemporary, inter-cultural plane using a novel medium. The performers in the two-part project would be call centre employees in Calcutta, taking their cell-phone audiences on a remote-controlled guided tour through the bylanes back home, and in Berlin.
„It’s service theatre in a call-centre situation,” explains Daniel Wetzel of Rimini-Protokoll, experimenting with theatre and other art forms. „A call centre is in itself an audio-theatre, where thousands are given the inner assurance 24x7 that they are speaking to someone from their own cultural domain. So, those guys on the mouthpiece are perfect role players for our project,” he observes.
Daniel, along with co-directors Stefan Kaegi and Helgard Haug, is researching city-based call centres for the project, supported by Max Mueller Bhavan (MMB) Calcutta, looking at 10-minute performance windows, with every phone-call triggering „a new show”.
To be among the audience in Calcutta or in Berlin for the Call Kutta project in March-April 2005, one buys a theatre ticket and against that, gets a cell phone and a card with a personal service number and carrying the request to call immediately. „We will teach them (the call centre staff members) smart service German to kick off the dialogue, after which they can switch to Hindi or English or even a bit of Bengali. For them, it would be a funky shift,” assures Stefan. The performer will navigate the theatregoer through precise instructions as if he/she can see exactly what the theatregoer is seeing. The conversation is partly a real dialogue between two persons from very different backgrounds and partly guides the caller to fictitious locations, while he is passing through the real city. In the end, it will work as a „theatre exchange or a walking movie”.
„There’s often a flirting melody in the tenor of the call centre employee’s voice to answer the demand for a constant telephone theatre of being located right in the neighbourhood. Still, the threshold is low and well-contoured, and it‚s these skills we are banking on while we scout for willing call-centre partners in Calcutta,” Daniel stresses.
For MMB director Martin Waelde, involved from scratch, Call Kutta is an effort to do something outside conventional theatre space. „The perception of the Third World in the West is changing drastically and by using Calcutta as a stage, we can connect forcefully with German artistes and change images of the city,” he says.
Stefan is aware that public spaces are defined very differently in Berlin and in Calcutta, and knows the importance to capture the divergent strands.
Anjan Dutt, canning the out-of-the-box project in both the cities for a TV docu-film co-financed by MMB, is also keen to focus on the contrasts and the commonality. „It would be interesting to see how much of Calcutta can be Berlin and vice-versa. These remote-controlled tours are more in spirit than from a tourist’s point of view and I‚m expecting a lot of drama when the theatregoer is on that phone,” observes the actor-director gearing up to shoot street-side interviews by the reconnoitre crew.