The Red Phone? It’s for you
Challenging micro performance built around telephone booths
Boca del Lupo is back for a second go-round of its Micro Performance Series with Red Phone.
Designed for very small audiences and frequently utilizing contemporary technologies, this trend in global performance art allows for different interaction between the audience and the artist than is possible in the standard theatrical venues.
It can take place in a pitch-black room, around someone’s dinner table, or perhaps speaking into the receiver of a mysterious red phone.
“Jay (Dodge, Boca del Lupo writer) sits on the Professional Alliance of Canadian Theatres board and wondered how it would be to have an emergency red phone we could just pick up to talk to each other when something important was happening,” says Boca del Lupo’s Sherry J Yoon. “That led to the idea of urgent conversations that Canadians should be having right now and how that could be made into a show.”
Yoon, Dodge and tech person Carey Dodge put together two ornate enclosed classic phone booths, each with an integrated teleprompt device and a red phone.
Various writers were commissioned to come up with topics which were urgent, moving, vexing and more. Each audience member enters a booth located in the Granville Island performance space and is taken into a discussion around one of the topics prompted to them, along with the person in the other booth.
The experience takes about 10 minutes and every one of them will be different depending on the participants’ reactions to the suggested topics.
“There is something so generous around the dialogue, too, because the two people aren’t going into those booths to pick up that phone in front of an audience,” she says. “They are going in to experience something that is supposed to be moving, challenging and deeply personal.
“A lot of testing went into it and we are in a continuous dialogue gathering scripts ... to get more content that each couple may get to engage in.”
So it’s something like a curated conversation which — in beta testing — produced some interesting results for participants. While not directly stated, it does sound like the Red Phone experience is akin to the confessional booth where you engage in a conversation that is focused around the discussion and not the face-to-face relation.
“We envision the possibility that we could move the piece into different theatre and public spaces and cities where new writers could develop topics specific to that location that are relevant to those audiences.”
Among the data the company hopes will be gleaned from Red Phone is how long discussions could be, whether people are keen on some topics more than others and letting the two audience members know who the script writer for their segment was and possibly follow up with a video out-interview. All of this with an eye on future micro-theatre possibilities.