Voice Call Exercises

Description

A caller walks you along a route and invites you to remember a person.

Version 1: Steve & Sabiha, Martin & Jouka
A performer walks a phone player along a route with a voice call. Locations along the walk prompt the performer to describe personal experiences relating to that location.

Version 2: Ju & Irma
A performer asks a phone player to think about someone from their past as they walk.

Version 3: Matt & Alastair
A performer asks a phone player to describe their personal experiences of the locations they walk through and memories of a specific person or experience in that place. In each case the phone player was asked to describe what they could see at the moment.

Duration: approx 40mins.

What was it like to play?

General Notes:

Voice calling was a rich channel for the experience
Ease of connectedness - it's easy to tell when you're disconnected
Nice detail when calling... 'Is now a good time?'

Version 1:

Sabiha & Jouka both referred to the experience as 'being told a story'
Does this reflect how Steve & Martin dealt with structuring the experience on the fly?

Steve (Performer) & Sabiha (Phone player):
- Steve had a good knowledge of the place and could tell where Sabiha was with minimal information from her
- talking softly made it feel part of a private experience
- using chance events to improvise the story was powerful (eg. counting 2 crows for a girl at one point in the walk led to the hospital where Steve's daughter was born)
- improvising a story without preparation is very demanding

Martin (Performer) & Jouka (Phone player):
- Jouka got lost
- became a to-ing and fro-ing of description to work out their location again
- J described it as 'Throwing a hook' to see if it meant anything to Martin
- the story linked one place to a later place which was satisfying

Version 2:

Ju (Performer) & Irma  (Phone player):
- Neither person had much of a personal relationship to the route.
- Ju described the experience as like having a seer or familiar.
- Hearing Irma retell her experience was an interesting part of the process for Ju.

Ju used techniques to make the place relevant to Irma's recollections
- look for people around you
- pick one who reminds you of the person you're thinking of
- used Irma's actual context as a prompt to think about the person (eg. empty places they'd been to together)

Irma described this as bringing her sister (her chosen person) into the environment
- Acting out being someone else, being in their shoes was a powerful way of remembering that person.

Version 3:

Matt & Alastair:
- Alastair knew the park where he was walking well, Matt didn't
- Voice allowed a deeper communication where other games allowed only rudimentary communication
- Alastair initiated a call after one was broken
- Matt invited Alastair to call back when he next thought of the person
- This led to a call structure where both Matt and Alastair called each other intermittently

...

Sabiha's feedback - Steve lead me through the university campus past a tennis court, a pub and a car park to the hospital where his daughter was born. This was the most exciting and emotional game of the three sessions, Steve was a very skilful director and included location details as well as environmental details into the conversation, I had the feeling that we were both taking this journey and all of the location details he described (the pub, the car park etc.) seemed to peak for him, in an extremely important event. When I stood in front of the hospital and found out that this is where his baby is born I was very happy and felt like I was introduced to a very personal and emotional experience in Steve's life.

...

Technical Notes

Out of 4 groups 2 suffered disconnections - 1 battery, 1 lack of phone credit. The problems were quickly recognised though.

How could it develop?

How could the structure be scaled up?
- You give your number and you're called at anytime during the week to play.
- Performers working from a call centre

A call centre where seats are available to members of the public rather than just taken up by performers. Members of the public could take a seat in the call centre to tell their stories to callers.

Opportunity to play it - when you arrive somewhere you always have 15 minutes of waiting around at an airport or train station - use this time to play.

Shared route telling - groups of phone players contribute stories for locations using voice messages or a conference call.

Pre-recorded stories dropped & found by later visitors
- allows scaling up
- weaknss in losing live/random elements in storytelling