CALL CUTTA – mobile phone theatre

CALL CUTTA: walk through the city, the show is at the phone … so then it is just logically that I found a postcard about that project by walking outside on this nice day. Don’t know what caught my attention to pick it up … call cutta – walking through the city with remote guidance .. that is a very literally understanding of remote conversations. It’s an artistic project with some nice ideas behind it …

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…

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! …

… on the otherside I ask myself if no one realized that for the second stage of the play when The actor will still be in the call centre in Kolkata and the “walker” or the theatre-goer in Berlin it will just be a re-play of the typical call-center set-up strategies of out sourcing .. as being located in some low income area with relatively cheap connections to be established to the areas which wish to have the service provided – or may be that is just on purpose …
(project by HAU, rimini-protokoll and the goethe-institut).

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2 thoughts on “CALL CUTTA – mobile phone theatre

  1. i want to work in kolkata bpo m-9810768412 plzcotact me

  2. Hi Samarpan, I think that piece is over since a while. As well I am not sure how the theatre people located their call – center people. Finally I haven’t been involved – this is just a blogpost as I liked the idea to point to outsourcing this way eventhough I think there are lots of points which might be discussed around the idea and realization. … Nevertheless good luck with finding a job: you might be more successful by searching a connection in the city or via Calcuta website …

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