Performing Arts

Perhaps because this New Yorker article was fresh in my mind, but all throughout Baghdad/Seattle Suite I kept thinking about chess.

It became clearer after the show: the article describes Bill Frisell’s style as “Minefield America, a forbidding territory of ascetic, chesslike improvisations—multidirectional interactions in which every note counts, every modulation is eventful, and intense concentration is a prerequisite for player and listener alike.” During the performance I kept picturing interlocking chess pieces, not only due to Frisell but also because of the whole sonic entente of the evening. Sitting equally paced from one another in a semi-circle, Frisell, Eyvind Kang and Rahim AlHaj gave the impression that they had reached a very careful musical agreement. There were no words exchanged between them, and it was clear from the initial moments that this would not be an evening of cordial, noodling, world music fusion. The music was careful, complex, subdued, and subtle. Although the night ended with a lighter piece, with musical phrases that were a little friendlier and a little more familiar, it felt very special to me to have been along for the whole ride. To me, it felt like the players could have been investigating the territory of a musical endgame.

Frisell performed a solo piece during the show that exemplified the “multidirectional interactions” mentioned in the New Yorker: with pedal and looping effects his guitar notes ventured out, then flew back together, reassembling. Frisell, perhaps out of all the players, best evokes a sense of space: listen to Coffaro’s Theme below (also featuring Eyvind Kang–pardon Sean Connery’s mug) and you can almost hear a skyline. YouTube user ‘Lillogambino’ says it better: “Only somebody who knew the city’s feelin could’ve written somethin like that”.

The musicianship throughout Baghdad/Seattle Suite was never less than incredible. Rahim AlHaj set the mood with his spine-tingling vocals, rhythmic playing, and friendly banter with the crowd. And violist Eyvind Kang seemed to make the biggest impression, with his fiercely meticulous playing over an extended solo (I was later told his solo lasted 20 minutes, it seemed effortless) that left the crowd in a state of awe, almost shock. It all made for the most intellectually rewarding music to pass through the Walker this season.

Premiere of Radiohole's "Whatever, Heaven Allows" at the Walker (January, 2010)

Nearly all arts institutions faced budget strains in 2009 that are not likely to let up much in 2010. The current issue of NEA Arts, the quarterly published by the National Endowment for the Arts, addresses the economic pressures facing performing arts presenters in particular; in “Focusing on the Work: Arts Presenting in Hard Times,” writer Paulette Beete sought perspective from Philip Bither, the Walker’s McGuire senior curator of performing arts, as well as Michael Kaiser, President of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

Both offered a number of often overlapping insights; for Bither, persevering in hard times means three basic things:

1. Take risks: “I would encourage my presenting colleagues in general that sometimes the smartest thing to do is to take the biggest risk. Surprisingly we have found that sometimes the scariest projects, the most ambitious and audacious undertakings, have delivered the greatest rewards” –not just in terms of acclaim, he noted, but in future support from funders.
2. Collaborate both locally and nationally: “Very infrequently [is the Walker] the sole commissioner of a new work. I think collaboration and cooperation between arts entities that’s on a national scale and on a local level are really part of what we define as requirements that allow us to be fiscally responsible and still support new work.”
3. Focus on the artists: “ … it’s a very vulnerable and lonely place, especially for emerging and mid-career artists, to not know who’s out there that might believe in them enough to not just put on their last hit but to actually support their next idea. I think in many instances the Walker saying to an artist, ‘We believe in you, and we want to help make this great idea you have come to life,’ is equally important, if not more so, than the cash we can put on the table or the range of resources we can provide.”

Radiohole’s production of Whatever, Heaven Allows, which played as part of the Out There series last month, was a case in point of point 3. The Walker’s commission – a partnership with New York’s PS122, Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum, and UCLA Live (see point 2) – allowed members of this company to work on a scale they haven’t before.

Other upcoming commissions for the current 2009-2010 season include new music from Bill Frisell, Rahim AlHaj, and Eyvind Kang, created during a residency in the McGuire Theater (February 6); Morgan Thorson and Low’s Heaven (March 4-6), also supported by a residency; and the John Jasperse Company’s Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking, and Flat Out Lies (May 20-22). Midwest debuts include Bruno Beltrao/Grupo de Rua with H3 (February 11-13), the Akram Khan Company with bahok (March 3), and Saburo Teshigawara/KARAS with Miroku.

My collegue Mr. Campbell asks ‘Why the great War?’  My answer:  Why not? Holland may have remained neutral terrirtory in this conflict but the physchological and physical effects of the war had great impact far beyond borders. I see no reason to criticize Hotel Modern for their choice of material.

In fact, the Great War as an object of respresentation and as part of cultural memory and as an event that still resonates and still figures largely in Europe is of little surprise. The Great War was and still is a large  part of  the European High School curriculum. I grew up in England and vividly remember these lessons. I remember being struck by the power of the first world war poets in my English literature class, our endless visits to the Imperial War Museum’s WWI trench displays (we went several times in history class) and every year on the 11th day on the 11th month we were attacked by poppy selling kids on Armistice Day (1918). Poppies were the symbol of the day to remember the dead of WW I and commemorate the end of the war (on the 11th hr of the 11th day of the 11th month…blah..blah )as these flowers were the first to bloom in the war ravaged terrain. As per Mr. Campbell’s experience, these texts were handed to me by my 6th form tutor and they had a siesmic effect on my young, pubescent mind.  In particular I became very attached to the work of Wilfred Owen (Dulce Et Decorum Est) and Issac Rosenberg (Dead Man’s Dump).  And they still have an effect on me and my approach to history. In fact I will venture that  WWI set into motion events that are still spinning themselves out and impacting us today. Following the war, the League of Nations sliced and diced what remained of the Austro-Hungarian Empire/the Ottoman Empire putting the winners in charge of rearranged territories into newly minted countries like Palestine, Iraq etc..and yes, I think those resonances continue on today.

But is that what drove our friends Hotel Modern? I think not. I found it interesting to discover from one of the performers after the show on Saturday that the makers were interested primarily in the impact of war on the landscape. Am I being literal or is environmentalism  a whole new way to , to look at old WWI topic?  Certainly images like the striking pile of dead and decaying bodies at the end underscored this concept but… really… REALLY? Did anyone else understand this piece as a green  meditation on war? Not me. The more I think about it the more I do not see it. The camera’s point of view, the performers point of view, all seemed to dwell on the individual soldier’s experiences and the pointless waste of human life. And this I agree with Mr. Campbell is not a new take on WWI events, I grant you.

However,  even with these inconsistencies I found the performance interesting and resonant. As I said, I will never tire of this topic I’m a bit geeky about it. And like my other collegue, Mr Kelley-Pegg, I also enjoyed the skill and inventiveness of the performers finding, dare I say, pleasure in their restraint and handling of the topic overall.  Is that a bad thing ? To find pleasure in such difficult, ugly subject matter? I will admit that part of my pleasure came from watching  the ingenious way the events unfurled before me.

My vote goes to Hotel Modern as the overall winner of the 2010 crop o’ Out There performances.

Gulgun Kayim

Skewed Visions

Indeedy, yep. Good stuff, Maynard. Breathe a sigh of relief and put down the shield.

For a change I’ll keep this brief.

Couple questions raised for me. Draw your own conclusions. (To be handed in at the box office.)

1)  Why World War I? The Great War. The Netherlands were able to remain neutral during this war, which to me raises all sorts of interesting issues about what it took to achieve that, and how that history lives in the present. Any connection to Hotel Modern’s thinking on this (see Extra Credit below)?

1a)  Was this choice meant to be representative of other, more contemporary, conflicts? Or war in general? Neither of these seem satisfactory to me as motivations for picking this disaster with its deeply  ingrained images. Which itself raises more issues about representation, so I remain curious.

1b) The program says “Just like any other war.” But what is not only more interesting to me, but is more important when representing senseless large-scale global violence, I think, is: what makes this particular? What are the specifics, the differences between this war and others? Or between current ongoing wars and That One a century ago? What made either/any possible? No difference? Many differences? Do these play into the performance at all?

1c) Is it actually possible that this was not meant to call these contemporary massacres to mind? If this is true…wha? And why not? (Return to #1.)

1d) If it it was meant to somehow comment on our current condition, I would respectfully question the realization. A general association with these beautifully realized images is not much of a mental stimulant.

2) Why the text? I read All Quiet On The Western Front when my English teacher picked it out for me in 9th grade. Is this literary experience clouding my reception of all other language related to this war (specifically, this production’s)? If not, why did all the text — including the “authentic letters home written by trench soldiers” — seem so familiar?

2b) Why “authentic”? Does it matter?

2.1) “Staggeringly realistic“? More on this red flag below.

2c) Why no credits for text sources? Do they not matter? If not, why not move toward eliminating the text to begin with? They were the weakest part, and the moments without text were among the strongest. (See aphasia.)

2c.02) Over and over again in the publicity material, there is the overt linking of this work with film — and not puppetry (“live animation film” for example, from the program). I am supposing this privileging of the celluloid over the material object is a conscious and purposeful cue to how to position oneself as an audience member. And is related to the structuring of the images on the screen. It Looked like film. Which raises my suspicions. What end does this production serve? I’ve read my Guy Debord, even if I can’t remember it all.

2d.011) Does the fascinating revelation of the means of production temper this effect? Or does it just provide an escape valve? Or is there a more complicated response? (Discuss.)

2q) I was first charmed, then puzzled, then frustrated with the construction of images on screen. Although I agree with my colleague, Mr Kelley-Pegg, that the combination of illusion and revelation were tangibly fascinating to witness in performance (and which I believe my colleague Ms Kayim may also respect, given her previous post) I have questions about the created images themselves. For the most part they tended to reify those that live in our collective (visual/imaginary/conceptual) understanding of this event. They reinforce what we already think about World War One: the trenches, the mud, the movies, the senseless slaughter, the movies, the loss of the innocence of refinement, and the movies. And the highly cinematic use of the cameras and effects tended to support this image which leads me to think it was somehow intended. Which ensuing aestheticization of the experience seems to be contrary to any critical perspective on this — or any conflict. So: how wrong am I? (Response timed.)

2q.b) The heads in the opening section came, saw, and left. I woulda liked them to come back. A post-image internal moment of positioning the war images with (a semi-Brechtian?) critical distance. Or would it?

2r.314159265) Leaving aside the question of whether this work can be described as “realistic,” what does the desire to describe it as such reveal? Are we so antipathetic to the realm of the imagination? Never mind, don’t answer that. Since the reality of the image is in the mind of the audience, is it “staggeringly” (or “astonishingly,” cf website) because you wouldn’t think you could achieve this result via effect (film, puppetry, theatrical, textual, etc.)? Or is it so to reinforce a sense of accuracy and acceptance that otherwise might be relegated to questioning and critical perspective?

See? Only two questions. Brief.

Extra credit:

Hotel Modern’s website: “Hotel Modern are idealistic in the sense that they believe the watching and experiencing of theatre can encourage reconciliation.” Does this goal of encouraging reconciliation answer all your questions? Do you have any questions?

—

Charles Campbell

Skewed Visions

Wow.  This is the reason I’ve been coming to Out There since I moved to Minneapolis twenty years ago.  I thought this show was simply fabulous, well textured, full of detail, intricately prepared and well executed, and overall – really groundbreaking.

I don’t want to repeat the summaries you can read elsewhere, but a short recap is this:  Hotel Modern, the performance company, recreate the atmosphere of World War I using miniature models manipulated live over cameras in closeup, and projected on a giant screen at the back of the stage.  Members of the company create the illusion of great mechanized battles and fields of mud and death, while a performer reads actual letters from soldiers.

We’ve already got great battle films, right?  And a billion-dollar professional special effects industry?  So why recreate a war that took place almost 100 years ago using dirt, amateur cameras, and homemade soldier dolls?  Because it tells the story in a much more compelling way than throwing a lot of money at such a project ever would.  What makes it work is the balancing act the viewer walks between watching the performers set up a scene using obviously fabricated elements, and then watching the (really compelling) version on screen.  This is where the show shines:  the images are moving, well composed, and shot expertly – with no trace of irony, or that “look at my cleverness” experimentalism that you so often get in this kind of work.  Instead you vascillate between compassion for the material and objective interest in how the effects are achieved.

All the visual effects would be lost without the skills of the Foley artist accompanying the show, Arthur Sauer.  A “Foley artist” creates sound effects, and Mr. Sauer does so live, almost without you noticing, as the performers manipulate the objects. Boots squish in the mud; a machine gun lays down an enemy company; a soldier urinates before being picked off by a sniper.  I was constantly torn between watching him queue up an effect and watching the result paired with the video action.  It was like being a kid again, playing in the grass with little army guys, making homemade sounds, overlain with the horrible mechanized reality of the Great War.

Finally, another reason to support live work.

Sean Kelley-Pegg

Skewed Visions

I went to Mr. Guenveur Smith’s “The Watts Tower Project” on Friday evening and have felt intellectually constipated and irritable ever since. Wait, before we go any further I want to first make it clear that I thought the performance was a fine shinning thing. The thing that has been bothering me finally clarifed this morning, after reading the other reviews of the performance. For that I will thank my collegue, Mr. Charles Campbell for cracking open this performance nut and helping me to the otherside.  

Again, to clarify – my crankineess isn’t because the work wasn’t finely  made -  I thought it beautiful, sonorous, poetic and at times transcendent. Nor was it that Mr. Smith is an unskilled performer -  the work was beautifully articulated. Or even that I found the work’s various points of view uninteresting or appropriate to our present moment – in fact I deeply appreciated, no, LOVED the composition of ideas, politics, art, biography…etc

BUT, But, But its… because.. how can I put it? I had an itch. What AM I talking about?  Well, I found the experience physically frustrating. I wanted to leap from my seat because the work was so good and the formality of theater space so stiffling, so limited, so BORING, so UNINSPIRING, so FLATTENING to the power and potential of this performance and performer.

Am I echoing what Charles is saying? Yes, I think I am. During the show I kept thinking this was good but how much better it would be if I could experience it in a smoky crowded room full of sweaty people talking back to Mr. Smith? In fact, one of the reasons I was thinking such a thought was because some of the younger audience members around me on Friday night kept murrmuring their opinions in response to or recognition of  Mr Smith’s words. One young woman even got up, answered her cell phone then got back to the show. At first I admit, I was mildly annoyed but then..THEN I realized that those around me were responding to the call of the performance. That these were feelings and responses to the words on stage and part of the greater harmony of this work. This work NEEDED a RESPONSE,  which the majority of us were too cultured to give (I include myself in this group). In fact listening to the comments around me, made my performance experience better. And how much better it would have been if Mr. Smith could himself hear what was being said, or feel our responses and respond back to us? Or even, refine the beat of his monologue to the tune of the audience. Or if we could all feel free to comment, groan, answer our phones and yell our responses back to him? Wow, that would be a fine thing wouldn’t it? (Yeah, yeah I know Brecht said this already). In fact Mr. Smith had tried to make the space, smaller, more intimate by arranging the projection screens as far down as they could go – something I’ve seen others do here.

Instead that damn proscenium space made the work distant and flat, flat, flat. It destanitized my experience of the liveness of this performance – that blood sweat and goo that goes into making a living, breathing piece of work, and delivering it to a live breathing audience and making it all work in a mess TOGETHER.

Friday’s experience also made me rethink of Radiohole. And think that yes their work suffered from ‘The Space’ syndrome more than I probably realize. That work belongs in the intimacy of their space: The Collapsable Hole. And I know for a fact that Eric Dyer struggles with the concept of touring their mega messes. (I totally realize that this is my thing, my obsession – site based performance – and yes, of course this is what I am likely to say. BUT one of the reasons I left the theater building is because I am devoted and disgruntled.) Maybe we all need to take a moment and think about what the drive to make more money, to build bigger theaters, to create these commercial, conventional performance spaces ..what it has done or can do to deaden the life of work that is made in another context for another context and what we need to do to get the LIVENESS back into live performance. You know what I think needs to be done. Any other ideas out there?

Gulgun Kayim
skewed visions

Those who’ve already seen — or rather, become a part of — Rimini Protokoll’s “Call Cutta in a Box: An Intercontinental Phone Play” probably know that at the end of the piece there’s an offer to stay in touch. At least one audience member accepted the offer, and has struck up a correspondence with one of the performers (see Rimini Protokoll’s website for photos from a special event with some of the performers). The two graciously agreed to share an excerpt from a dispatch from Calcutta:

Sorry I am a little late in replying to your mail from New York. My daughter had her school cultural event which is quite a big one that happens every four years and we were a bit tied up with the preparations. It went off well and now she is trying to get back to her study schedule.

Have you started reading NAMESAKE? There is a film in Hindi which has been made based on the novel. Maybe after reading the book you might like to see it.

Urvashi will be writing to you soon.  

Shows in Minneapolis are simply rocking. Almost all the shows are booked and we all are enjoying ourselves performing for the audience there.

The team has performed together for over two years now and are able to get back to the rhythm very well though we started shows this time after a break of almost 9 months. Actually this theatre is a show after our hearts and all of us just enjoy doing the shows whenever we get a chance to do them. We are hoping that the shows go on all over the world in the years to come. It is an amazing way of being connected to the world and you feel a true global citizen.

Today is a festival here in Calcutta and whole of Bengal. Saraswati Puja – the day of the Goddess of learning – Saraswati.  It is also a festival to celebrate the coming of spring so the predominant colour that we wear today is yellow and also white (white is the colour of Saraswati as a symbol of purity). It looks very bright and beautiful to see people of all ages going around in yellow and white.

I have to go home now to make arrangements for the puja at home. I will write to you again soon. Waiting to hear from you too.

Tickets are still available for “Call Cutta,” which continues through January 31; call the Walker Box Office for your reservation: 612.375.7600.

Mr Smith is unquestionably a highly talented writer/performer. He is one of those who have reached the apex of the form: fluent, deft and clear, with an accomplished and undulating musicality, following a wide-ranging, interpersonal, political, humanistic flow of images and stories. The sound- and imagescapes were works of great intricacy and grace, supportively layered and interwoven into the piece. The opening moment, a “palate-cleanser” in his own words, was easily the most exciting and beautiful section — full of potential and mystery, movement and power, the kind of stuff that lifts your butt off the seat. Then it landed, and the form began to unfold.

O Sole Mio, enough of this well-made play-type stuff! I’d love to complain about how the world will not withstand the onslaught of such perfection, but clearly such perfection is what keeps the world spinning. And the way this world is spinning is not something I’m comfortable with. I am at heart an aging dissident: restless in my Anti-dotage. Is it enough to mention Haiti?

Once again with Project we are in the territory of accepted performance conventions. Where Rimini Protokoll evaporated most attributes of conventional performance into an oddly static long-distance phone conversation, and Radiohole lightly stirred them into a messy satire, Mr Smith and Co. are settled comfortably into a different tradition (whose once unconventional attributes have been embraced as comfortably as Archie Bunker’s chair does his ample rear). This tradition has been firmly linked with both autobiographical exposure and a certain type of political/art activism. It is one of the culturally accepted positions for the Voice of the Outsider.

No matter how well-done and beautiful the performance, no matter how radical its sentiments (and Simon Rodia’s work and life can stand for both of these from a number of perspectives), when it appears behind the beautiful lights and curtains of this Tradition’s podium, the words spoken from this place are drained of blood and left a Fine Evening Out. And this sucks all excitement from the experience. This is doubly unfortunate in the light of the Watts Towers themselves that spoke from a scrap of dirt to a heavy neighborhood near a train track.

Lest you think that I am an irremediably cranky old man who can find no pleasure in his chosen profession, I will briefly say that there is a nameless collection of people who did a show in a cold basement under apparently semi-illicit conditions that I was lucky enough to take in after the Out There SpeakEasy. Because they are young, the gist of The Thing dealt with love and relationships, but the means by which this subject was approached allowed air in. It took place in the stank-and-funk basement(!) — a created environment in which movement, text, sound, bodies and light are given a rough ride and obliterate the proscenium and its minions of doom.

And once that arch was out of the way (and all that goes with it) you could take part in this experience, rather than sit and watch a Fine Evening Out. It was immediate, visceral, suggestive, and clever. Whatever it had to say was placed directly into your body, and revealed the passive artificiality of Dead Performance Conventionality. I was almost knocked to the wall a couple times and handed my half-eaten pancake so that one of them could stand on the table at my elbow. I was told what happened before that, and before that and before that, and that I was going to get a present. It reminded me of a manifesto I wrote back in the day. It was a manifesto. It was a highly engaging, effective piece of work that I hope will continue to shout out the doorway to the rest of the world “I like it rough!”

And I wish I could have seen Crotch, too.

—

Charles Campbell

Skewed Visions

The closest the Watts Towers have ever come to being transported to the Walker was when the Towers were featured in a 1974-75 Visual Arts show here, Naives and Visionaries, curated by then-director Martin Friedman. The Watts Tower artist, Simon Rodia, couldn’t be interviewed for or attend the show; he had passed away ten years earlier, but the show featured giant paneled photographs of his masterwork.

photo: Seymour Rosen

Now the Towers are here again, in spirit, through the performance of Roger Guenveur Smith and the accompanying film on the Towers made by Daniel Foster.

The Walker’s amazing librarian, Rosemary Furtak, showed me a great article from the New Yorker on Simon Rodia by the American writer Calvin Trillin, published in the May 29, 1965 issue. The article in its entirety is a great read, perhaps yet another reason to invest in this, eh? Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of the Trillin article, which sets the story nicely:

“If a man who has not labeled himself an artist happens to produce a work of art, he is likely to cause a lot of confusion and inconvenience. Working from 1921 until 1954, Sam Rodia, an uneducated Italian immigrant who had settled in a district of Los Angeles called Watts, constructed a dreamlike complex of openwork towers and other structures in his yard and encrusted them with a sparkling mosaic composed mainly of what had once been refuse. The result is almost certainly a work of art—though the fact that it is not only unlabelled but unique has made it difficult for art critics to decide precisely what kind of work of art—and it has certainly been an inconvenience.

For one thing, Rodia’s work is large—the tallest of his towers, a lacy spire that looks something like a bizarre, multicolored model of the Eiffel Tower, is ninety-nine and a half feet tall—so the question of what it might be takes on a practical as well as an academic significance. City building officials who might treat most works of art with deference, if not always with sympathy, tend to treat a large unlabelled one the same way they would treat an office building, a house, or, most damaging, a structure that fits no category at all.

photo: Simon Rodia

Rodia was not concerned with any profit he might make from the towers—in fact, he spent most of what money he did have on materials for their construction—and eventually he was not even concerned with the towers themselves. In 1954, when he was about seventy-nine, he deemed his property to a neighbor for nothing, announced that he was going away to die, and disappeared. Five years later, when it seemed almost certain that the City of Los Angeles was going to tear down the towers as a safety hazard, Rodia was discovered living in Martinez, a small city not far from San Francisco. Upon being informed of the demolition threat, he told a Los Angeles reporter, ‘I don’t want to have any more to do with them.’ He has not been back to Watts since.”

Simon Rodia died a month before the Watts riots, which his Towers survived completely unscathed. The Towers have also survived numerous earthquakes, and still stand. But visitors to the Towers aren’t allowed inside their fenced-in perimeter, so it’ll be a better bargain to invest in a ticket to Roger Guenveur Smith’s Watts Towers Project, running this Thursday evening-Saturday evening. Daniel Foster has already had more of an inside-look than any of us could hope for, and Roger’s “jazz-infused meditation” is sure to transport us to (as Trillin would say) “that district in Los Angeles called Watts”.

Many thanks to Barb Economon and Jill Vuchetich for finding these photos in the Walker archives.

It’s amazing how quickly you can establish a rapport with a coworker you’ve just begun working with. A bond is created almost instantly when you share experiences with the same solitary goal in mind. What’s even more amazing is how quickly you can establish a rapport with a coworker on the opposite end of the world.

This is something I have come to realize over the past couple of weeks while working on Rimini Protokoll’s “Call Cutta in a Box: An Intercontinental Phone Play.”

performers of Call Cutta in a Box

Working as one of the project managers on this performance for the visitor services department, I have been fortunate enough to interact with the members of Rimini Protokoll in India on a near daily basis. Our morning tech-checks give us the opportunity to chat face-to-face (via webcam) with many of our colleagues. These are rare and precious moments in which we can casually discuss the upcoming performances of the day, the weather differences between Minneapolis and Kolkata ( formerly Calcutta) , and other topics one would share with a coworker. This is our version of a water cooler conversation.

Because of an eleven and a half hour time difference between Minneapolis and Kolkata, the performers must begin their day at the call center at around 3 am (a time that I’m more comfortable going to bed at than waking up). However, once at the call center they are chipper and eager to get on with the day’s performances. The majority of our callers work for the call-center full-time, calling Europe and Australia, selling everything from travel packages to credit cards. Performing “Call Cutta in a Box” allows them the opportunity to step away from the daily grind and gives them an opportunity for creative expression.

Our between-show chats with the performers gives us a unique opportunity to see their personalities, albeit in a non-verbal way. It’s fascinating how the use of emoticons can showcase the performer’s personality. One of our more bubbly performers, Alakananda, loves to send smiley faces and strong arm emoticons along with her FULL CAPS messages to us. These little computer animations let us keep the mood upbeat and playful, especially in the frequently chaotic period between performances.

We have adorned our cubicle with photos that our Calcutta colleagues have sent us of them and their families, an album that grows with each day of performances (the photo of Susmita’s young daughter is quite a heartwarming image). The pictures are a constant reminder of the humanity and culture that we are interacting with. We get a sense of their daily routines, their humor and their style (Rishi, for example, is a particularly stylish fellow with his colorful shirts and aviator sunglasses).

At the risk of sounding sentimental, I must say that I feel I have established a bond between myself and my Calcutta coworkers. A bond that our guests experience in their hour long performance. We meet new people and follow them on a journey, ultimately feeling like you’ve just made a new friend upon the conclusion. “Call Cutta in a Box” presents us with a simple interaction that has the ability to strike a very deep chord with its participants. I consider myself lucky to be able to witness this on a daily basis.

- John Kaiser, Visitor Services Associate, Walker Art Center

“Call Cutta in a Box: An Intercontinental Phone Play” runs until January 31. To make an appointment please call (612) 375-7600 or click here for more information.