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The Kunstenfestivaldesarts Diary (5)Dateline: 15th May, 2008I was on the phone to an Indian man in a call centre. He was sang me a Bollywood love song and asked me to sing something for him, but I really can't sing. Really! He insisted and I kept protesting, but he was so adamant that he wanted to me to sing something for him, and he was such a nice man that I was really embarrassed to let him down….so….the best I could do was: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? I recited Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 18 to him, or what I could remember of it, and not very lyrically, because I was still a bit embarrassed. After all I'd only known this man for half an hour and he lived on the other side of the world, even though he was a magician who could make the kettle in my office boil to make my tea all on its own, and send me pictures of his colleges through the printer next to my desk. Lights are flashing and sirens screeching in the brains of everyone who has ever had to negotiate the sticky business of getting something straightened out using an often poorly-trained and under-paid call centre operator on the other side of the world who calls himself Kevin and tries to pretend he's a born-and-bred Essex lad and is just like you. So, call centre crooners and Shakespeare's sonnets? This doesn't happen! You are overwhelmed with disbelief. Is she dreaming? Is this Surrealism for the postmodern age? Or, might it actually work if we were to see these people as human beings, with colleagues and families and friends, and a mortgage and an overdraft and three kids they're trying to get into a good educational institution, and a mother who needs a new pair of bifocals…just like you and me, after all! In case you are thinking of reciting a bit of the bard to sweeten your interlocutor when you make an irate call to complain about the mistakes on your bank statement, or the impossible amount of your electricity bill, the occasion for my conversation with a very nice young man in Bengal was a piece of theatre produced and directed by the Swiss collective Rimini Protokoll. Call Calcutta in a Box This show is an absolute must! It's a personal experience you won't forget in a hurry. It's a bit daunting going into a modern administrative building in central Brussels like the Monnaie House and asking the security officer where you have to go for a piece of theatre. You are sent up in a lift and a receptionist directs you to an office where you sit at a desk with the usual accoutrements: computer, potted plant, blotting pad, telephone…ring, ring! The telephone rang and I answered 'hello' in mood of mingled hesitancy and defiance. For the next hour I talked to a call centre operative at Descom.com in India, who told me to make myself at home, to make tea (he made the kettle boil for me all the way from Calcutta), take my shoes off and put my feet up. He tried to guess my age and asked me to guess his, wanted to know my marital status and a whole host of questions that might well be considered intrusive by some folk. But isn't this what the people who work for your bank do anyway? Try to put you at your ease so that they can get a lot of personal information from you? On the other hand, no-one who works for Lloyds TSB has ever asked me if I do drugs before. He'd obviously been given training in negotiating the pitfalls, perhaps even better training that your regular operator. At regular intervals, he informed me that I was doing very well and had moved on to the next scene. I made it to scene 5, but I don't know how many scenes there are or even if it matters, because this is such a private and personal experience, it mimics reality, it seems so very genuine, and yet also seems at first so artificial. This is exactly the effect aimed for in most of Rimini Protokoll's work. What is a fiction and what is reality, and, more pertinently, who exactly has the power to decide which is which? We live in strange times and the boundaries of reality and fiction are becoming blurred in ways we couldn't have predicted a decade ago. These days, things in the business of globalisation, or the globalisation business if you prefer, are getting even more bizarre. You can, from a hotel room in New York, order a take-away pizza by phone from a restaurant a block away, and not realise that your voice is being bounced by satellite link-up to an intermediary in Bangalore who will take your order, ask you about the trimmings, and pass it on to the restaurant a stone's throw from where you are speaking. Virtual offices in India can also sort your emails, make your travel and dinner arrangements, your hairdresser's appointments, organise your diary, coordinate your video conferencing and, for a grand finale, order flowers for you wife and birthday presents for your children too. Graduates of Indian universities can give online assistance to your children when they are doing their homework assignments and swotting for exams. Most people in Europe these days have been obliged to use a call centre at some time or another, and we've all been frustrated by them; we've all wanted to chew someone out on the other end of the line. In fact, the people who work the phones, for long hours, with few breaks, and often take hundreds of calls a day, are also the brunt of aggression and even abuse from stressed-out clients, and they even have productivity quotas, so that they don't really have much time to sing to you or listen to your poetry. In a better world maybe! Writing the review of this show poses certain problems. Firstly, I have no idea if you will have the same experience I had. I have no idea how genuine my 'friend' in Calcutta really was when we got chatty and, it seemed, started to enjoy talking to each other. I've no idea if the name he gave me was genuine, even though it was written on a card on the desk. I have no idea how Rimini Protokoll trained these call centre operators, what procedures have to be followed, how much leeway they have with questions and responses. But certainly what you bring personally to the proceedings will, to a large extent, determine your experience. I also don't want to give too much away. You have to allow yourself to be surprised, to improvise, to make on-the-spot decisions about what you tell this person, how much you tell, whether you tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth or bend it all just a bit…or perhaps you can play the game by lying and creating your own fictional persona. The latter I think would be difficult for various reasons. These call centre operatives, like their real-life counterparts, always remain in control of the situation. I certainly came out feeling that the call centre staff had been humanised and given identities and that they are nice people just like me. In some respects, I also felt I'd been humanised as well. In retrospect, I realised I'd dropped my defences, shed my façade, and revealed something of myself in response to my seemingly-genuine new friend. Perhaps, the 'show' revealed as much about me as about the phenomenon of call centres and our relationships in a global economy. As Rimini Protokoll point out in the programme notes, people who work in call centres are actors of a sort playing a role. The people who staff this particular call centre are not full-time operatives, nor are they professional actors, they are somewhere in-between. And that's the great thing about this show; it opens up a gap in which we can experience the unexpected. And that is the raison d'être for their work in general. Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel herald from Switzerland, but studied at the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft in Giessen, something of an elite school for the German avant garde. They collaborate together in different combinations, and first drew attention to themselves by rubbing the President of the Bundestag up the wrong way by attempting to hold a happening in the Reichstag building using words actually spoken during a sitting of the parliament. They have continued to explore the boundaries between politics and art and fiction and reality ever since. The theatre movement they have started, which is more real that realism is referred to in Germany as 'reality trend'. In 2006, Kaegi became the hit of the Avignon Festival with two productions, one in which the audience sat in the back of a lorry being driven around while watching films of journeys made by long-distance European lorry drivers, the other a bizarre happening in which six geriatric model train enthusiasts told their life-stories, played games and ran tiny engines around a huge network of tracks, villages, bridges and tunnels and even a gold fish tank. (See the review of Mnemopark). He will be back in this year's Avignon programme with Airport Kids. And I'll definitely be there. Rimini Protokoll are definitely hitting it big in Europe at the moment, finding increasingly inventive ways to challenge audiences. And to engage as well. I still have no idea what was 'real' and what was 'fictional'. But I was drawn into the intimacy; I forgot to be sceptical and found myself responding very genuinely to this nice young man, hence the sonnet. He introduced me to his colleges and said I could email him and, of course, if I ever come to India, he would be my guide, which, of course, inclines me to scepticism once again. But, that's the point of the show. It sends you no messages, but raises a lot of questions about ourselves and our personal interactions in a world that is changing so fast, one wonders if one is really capable of adapting to it, and, where those adaptations will lead us as individuals and as a human race. This show runs throughout the month so phone up and book your hotline to India straight away. Unfortunately, he couldn't order me a chicken korma with a chapatti and pillau rice. Jackie Fletcher >> Next
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