Call cutta

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Call cutta is a theater project by the German-Swiss artist group Rimini Protokoll from 2005, announced as “The world's first Mobile Phone Theater”.

procedure

The basic principle of the performance is that the audience - or "theatergoer" (Rimini Protokoll) - telephones the actor and is steered by the actor along a pre-planned route through the city. Each spectator goes alone, the performances take place in the afternoon until dark and the next one starts every quarter of an hour.

The performers sit in a call center in Kolkata (formerly anglicized Calcutta ) and control the isolated performances using a text book that is available to them as a digital document. The piece gives the walk through the city and the phone call that is made different levels of meaning. It treats u. a. the working conditions of the mostly very young Indian call center employees, who are trained to disguise everything relating to their cultural identity and to always give the customer, be he in Europe or the USA, the impression that he is speaking to someone who is at home in his cultural area. Opposite this call center theater are the sometimes profound conversations between actors and theatergoers - about love, lies, goals in life, etc. - and sometimes those that focus on the everyday life of the two conversation partners, exploring similarities and differences. The focus is on the playful handling of the unusual theater situation , in which the question of who is the actor and who is the recipient cannot always be clearly answered. The telephone theater of the call center, with all its vocal and strategic tricks, is also opposed to the “city as a stage”, which is fictionalized by the stories and sounds played over the telephone and loses its unambiguous legibility.

The first stage of the project in the Hatibagan district of Kolkata led fictitiously along some of the call center agent's childhood locations on the phone and told the story of his entry into the call center job machine and thus the beginning of the practiced disguise of identity for the purpose of customer proximity and inspired by the Indian boom in the Information industry. Here lay the proverbial “worlds” between the old Kolkata of the market district Hatibagan, which has not been affected by modernization, and the call center, which is located in the satellite town of Salt Lake City ( Bidhan Nagar ), which has been developing on drained lake areas since the 1970s , where the companies are of new technologies and their executives are based.

The second, Berlin corridor, with more than 12 flight hours and (during the performance months in summer ) 3.5 time zone hours between the call center and the audience , also told the story of Subhash Chandra Bose (1897–1945). He was a political opponent of Mahatma Gandhi , who had negotiated with Hitler and Nazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop in Berlin in the 1940s about the Third Reich's involvement in the liberation of India from the hegemony of England and from Berlin he addressed inflammatory speeches to the Indian people. The speeches should sound like he's not far away (like the call center calls today).

Call Cutta in a Box

In 2008 the project was reissued. The theatergoer is alone in an office and is on the phone with one of the call center employees. The performance consists of a conversation that begins like a job interview, in which the viewer is asked about private details - health status, marital status, self-assessment as an employee, as a person - then the conversation takes more and more a course that the two interlocutors themselves is designed. The call center agent structures the conversation with the help of simple technical aids, which, by controlling them remotely from India, have a special effect: the kettle starts, the radio comes out Indian music, the printer comes out with pictures that the other person is talking to at home has photographed, a sheet of paper falls from the ceiling, the heating goes on and off, if desired the fan goes on and the desk lamp is switched lighter or darker, etc. In the last third the communication situation changes, instead of just telephoning the conversation partners see a video connection. The viewer gets in camera pans u. a. The call center is shown, in which the conversation partner is sitting, the colleagues who are currently playing the same play with other theatergoers, as well as other work groups in the distance, e.g. B. are trying to sell cell phone contracts and internet packages to Australians and supplementary health insurance to the US. The performances usually take place in different cities at the same time, in which two or more offices are set up for a period of a few months.

Performances

TV

  • Call Cutta. A theater project by “Rimini Protokoll”. Documentary by Anjan Dutt , Germany, 2007, 50 min. (First broadcast: ZDF / Theaterkanal June 2007).

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