Remote performances provide a quiet space for urban dreamers
My mother’s friend used to have a collection of postcards called “Cities at Night.” Each was entirely black, with a small piece of yellow or white text in the corner or on the bottom saying “X at night,” X being a name of any city on Earth. I loved leafing through pages and pages of her album with these postcards, simultaneously disturbed by the total blackout and moved by the joke. When I think of our cities now, during the pandemic, they seem much like those postcards to me: quiet and waiting, with myriads of stories behind the vastness of black paint.
I feel like I myself am about to step into one of those postcards in Invisible City, Episode 1. This interactive, episodic show takes place via Google Hangouts. It is a part of Theatre On-Call, a festival of performances occurring over the phone and other platforms, created by the Toronto-based DopoLavoro Teatrale.
Following the pre-show instructions, I dim the lights and settle into the nest of my bed ten minutes before the start time. I put on my headphones and listen to a four-and-a-half minute pre-show audio track titled “Going to the Invisible City.” A dreamy electronic tune is joined by a sound of metal clanging, the rhythm of which reminds me of a train slowly rolling out of a railway station at first. Increasingly, the music becomes more abstract and futuristic, and I am not on a train any more, but in a spaceship. And then the call comes through.
There are five of us participating tonight. Our video cameras are turned off, so we are represented just by our Google Hangouts profile photos, names, and voices. Natalia is from Vancouver, a theatre and film post-doc researcher; Margit is from Minneapolis, and is a psychology professor; Jeremy is from St. Paul, and is a luthier (a maker of stringed instruments), and, lastly, we have Kolpack, the moderator who is coming somewhere from Canada. With gatherings, both public and private, becoming increasingly more global these days, I feel like only two geographical aspects are important now: someone’s time zone and their city’s COVID-19 case count and imposed social distancing restrictions. But we hardly talk about any of that during the experience. Instead, prompted by Kolpack’s questions, we talk about the people we love, the things that make us happy, and our relationship with art.
The format is less of a dialogue and more of an interview as Kolpack asks each of us the same questions, changing the order of the responders. And as the experience progresses, it reminds me of: a classroom with a teacher calling upon us; a radio talk show where a host interviews four random people; a group therapy session; and, lastly, an overnight train car with five strangers gradually warming up to each other. In real life, we could be riding a subway car together or passing each other on the street but we would never talk. With the safety of an anonymous digital connection, we are suddenly drawn to each other and willing to share our own deep thoughts. All of us have different lives, yet I recognize a lot of similarities in the answers. I nod vigorously to some of the revelations. My gesture is unseen but, it feels like, understood by ther others. Some of the experiences the participants share are unfamiliar to me and I try hard to imagine what it means to love your child more than you love your spouse, or what it’s like “having it all” but still experiencing a midlife crisis.
It is difficult to pinpoint exactly why Invisible City, Episode 1 left such a deep impression on me. At first, the format felt somewhat awkward, if not pointless. In the beginning, one of the participants couldn’t turn their mic on, so the technical difficulties felt like an interruption of the flow. But before I knew it, I was taken by the conversation completely, relishing in the stories of my newly-acquired acquaintances. Often closeness and a sense of profound human connection are born out of anonymity, and DLT has created a wonderful space to evoke those feelings. Being unseen and not seeing my partners in conversation, as well as not knowing them outside of the experience, brings forth trust to open up, as a sort of confession booth. Sometimes I find myself surprised by the words coming out of my own mouth and I can see how this aspect of Invisible City by itself can be therapeutic.
The thoughtful framing plays a crucial part. Pre-show emails provide clear, step-by-step instructions and I found a sudden comfort in following them, anchoring myself amidst the daily chaos. Following the instructions was like re-creating a magical ritual even though they consisted of fairly routine actions: brush your teeth, put on your pajamas, dim the lights, get comfortable, and listen to an audio track. I was probably eight years old last time somebody was giving me instructions to prepare for bedtime. Receiving them now felt like an act of care, and a promise of a wonderful adventure in the form of a bedtime story. Invisible City: Episode 1 lived up to its promise and I got to travel, not to some fairytale country, but to the streets of Vancouver drowning in spring bloom, and to a balcony overlooking the panorama of Minneapolis, and to St. Paul, lit up by bright street lights. Life goes on, and even in the darkest night, there is the light of human kindness and our own imaginations.
The next evening, for Invisible City, Episode 2, I travel to New York City. I get a Zoom call from Rory, which starts with him reading an excerpt from City of Glass by Paul Auster. I imagine wandering through the streets of New York City with Quinn, the protagonist of this story, traveling the “labyrinths of endless steps,” getting lost in my thoughts. Prior to the quarantine, I spent the majority of my working and leisure time in New York City. I haven’t stepped foot in it for nearly a month. I share this sudden realization with Rory. “Do you think the city will be the same when you come back?” Rory asks me. I don’t know. I won’t be the same, for sure. Honestly, I don’t know if I want to live in a big city ever again. I can relate to Rory’s observation that cities seem the best place to be when everything is great and the worst places to be trapped in when everything isn’t great.
This hour-long experience consists mostly of readings from City of Glass and Invisible Cities (by Italo Calvino, free-style conversations prompted by Rory’s questions, sharing our urban memories and dreams, and musical pieces that he plays for me. Together we listen to the somber and mysterious “Awakening of a City” by Luigi Russolo, one of the first noise artists of the early-twentieth-century. Amidst the engines roaring and flying away to the stratosphere, I hear Rory typing and sniffing a couple of times. Turns out, the joy of sharing art with somebody is not entirely lost even if we are physically not next to each other.
With just the two of us on the line, the conversation seems more informal than in Episode 1. I suspect both episodes are designed for a few audience members at a time and it just happened to be a one-on-one in my case. If not for an omnipresent rectangle labeled “DLT Experience” (the third silent wheel in our soulful conversation) and the red dot indicating “Recording,” I could easily forget that I am in a theatrical experience. Being listened to while being recorded also makes me somewhat uneasy. Rory, on the other hand, is a wonderful narrator and a conversation partner. I regret, a bit, being robbed of the illusion that we are entirely alone.
This episode of Invisible Cities made me reminisce about various immersive one-on-one experiences that I have gone through, both physical and remote. In reviewing past physical one-on-ones, I was never truly alone with the performer, with their (and sometimes my) characters remaining as a wedge between us, not to mention the presence of security cameras as well as any given production’s official rules of engagement and social protocols. Paradoxically, the encounters over the phone seem the most intimate to me, maybe because my dating life occurred in the pre-video-calls era or because of the sense of ease and mystery that voice conversation provides. This format, although bearing its own restrictions, seems a little more flexible, a little more playful. Also, it was nice to close my eyes after a long day staring at screens and drown in the voice reading about the lures of urban spaces.
Some of the cities are invisible because they are imaginary, like Isidora, Anastasia or Irene from Calvino’s whimsical novel. But as Rory reads about them, I feel the heat of a noon sun on my skin as I walk through the streets. I hear the splashing water of secluded basins where women invite the passersby to disrobe and chase them into the water. New York is invisible to Queen because he is so lost in his thoughts, he no longer cares where he is, but the city is there, described beautifully on the pages of Auster’s detective story. For Rory, New York City is invisible because he hasn’t been there yet, saving the visit for some special occasion, but it is now on his bucket list for a time after everything is “back to normal.” From where I live, I can see New York City across the Hudson River. I see the city on the news and on social media and in conversations with my friends, but I lack real connection. I ought to keep the social distancing, for now, but I hope to freely walk the New York City streets soon.
As a final act of Invisible City, Episode 2, Rory and I listen to “4:33” by John Cage. It was composed in 1952, for any instrument or combination of instruments, and the score instructs the performer(s) not to play their instrument(s) during the entire duration of the piece, which is 4 minutes and 33 seconds. In the shared silence between us, I hear a few cars driving by, faint music coming from the apartment upstairs, and a dog barking. Even when the lights go down and our cities seem unusually quiet, life goes on. So let’s fill the quiet space between us with meaningful sounds and conversations. It’s so easy to get lost in the roaring sea of news, social media, and television binge-watching. Instead, let’s take time to connect to ourselves, the ones we love, and—maybe—to the ones we don’t know yet.
The first step is easy: just listen.
(This review was published on NoProscenium.com on April 9th)
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