CURRENT at Tribeca Film Festival

The Financial District of Manhattan is an ever busy part of town, crowded with tourists and workers; it’s also surrounded by water on three sides. Annie Saunders and Andrew Schneider, the two narrators and the co-creators of CURRENT, invite the audience to join them for an hour-long soundwalk through its streets: all you need is a charged phone and a pair of headphones. The tour starts in Zuccotti Park every half hour. The one-and-a-half-mile-long route takes the listeners down Broadway, past the New York Stock Exchange, and through a labyrinth of winding streets and alleys, some of which are so narrow you could easily miss them otherwise. 

‘CURRENT’

Obscure historical facts are intertwined with the authors’ peculiar and poetic observations about the surroundings. Just like the city blocks we are strolling through, the narrative reveals multiple layers of local and personal histories. Did you know that multiple burial grounds of free and enslaved Africans are found here, where skyscrapers are built? Or that Pearl Street once was the natural edge of Manhattan Island? CURRENT starts out as an unconventional city-centered audio tour and gradually builds up to be a philosophical reflection on urban development and the precariousness of human biology.

There is no one single map that someone can follow during CURRENT as all the directions are given verbally, which presents some challenges at a couple of pivotal points. Occasionally, I exchange questioning glances with a stranger who was clearly also listening to CURRENT in tandem, and we are able to navigate as a collective. This act doesn’t feel burdensome or annoying, however; if anything, it felt a bit like a treasure hunt. “Find a ‘no parking sign’ and stand next to it,” says Annie’s friendly voice. And soon I’m scanning the environment with intensity and attention to the minute details of the cityscape. It’s a focus I can rarely afford when running errands in this part of town. 

CURRENT’s listeners are encouraged to follow the pace of Annie’s footsteps in order to not to fall behind during the experience. Normally, I consider myself a fast walker but this time I wasn't able to always keep up to the narration. Luckily, there are a few rest stops along the way, during which we get to hear fragments of interactions and interviews with the inhabitants and visitors of Manhattan. But I wished the pauses that followed the dialogue fragments weren't completely dead. Hearing nothing but silence for a few seconds after a conversational moment made me compulsively check my phone to make sure that I was still connected to the experience. I have a similar thought around the ending of the experience. The audio track unfortunately stops rather abruptly, right after we complete our loop and arrive back at Zuccotti Park; it’s a choice that leaves the listeners of CURRENT feeling somewhat adrift.

(This review was published on NoProscenium.com on June 18th, 2020)