Pedestrian: A Walking Tour for Multiple Voices and Portable Phones
“The site-specific and mobile nature of the project posits city landscape as performative space, which casts ordinary passersby as both unintentional audience members and unwitting performers … The three performers of Pedestrian’s debut invited separate groups of up to ten audience members to ‘eavesdrop’ on their personal confessions and revelations, while leading a thirty minute guided tour of the neighborhood. The audience attending the tours listened all performance text via cellular phones, connected by a conference call service. This allowed each tour participant to hear all three guides simultaneously, while following only one of them. The piece incorporates the unique topography of the various international cities where it is performed, which provides visual support or counter-point to the physical and textual tracks of the piece.”
“Operating on the borders between fact and fiction, a residential apartment is transformed through a routine dousing of water from sources suggested, known and unknown. Through poetic visual rhythms, and soundscapes, the barriers between the natural and unnatural, and the transcribed and fact, are dissolved. The seamlessly looping video merges perceptions of reality and unreality by blending timelessness with a sense of regularity and normality. As if on a regular schedule, water begins to come out of nowhere. The sound of the impending spray of water builds as a thunderstorm and comes crashing against the wall, floor, and electrical fixtures like a cascade of ocean waves. The boiling of the kettle and the dousing of water come as a matter of course; they are automatic events of everyday living. Augmenting the artificiality of the constructed environment in which we live transforms the banal into a space of metaphor and imagination.”
One of the best things about blogging is that interesting people write you to tell you about even-more-interesting projects. Thanks Shoshana and Eric!