Imagine a nanny texting her young ward in the next room to ask, “Juice or Milk?” Imagine a young girl awakened in the middle of the night by her father’s video-chat invitation from Mumbai. Imagine a young man so isolated that the idea of being in the same city as his girlfriend is considered too much commitment. Shocked yet?
Probably not. Still, these are some of the tidbits from our wacky wired world that take center stage in Continuous City, a recent multimedia piece at the Brooklyn Academy of Music created by the tech-savvy Builder’s Association. According to its marketing tagline, the play “explores our accelerated relationships in a sprawling multimedia world.” J.V. (Rizwan Mirza) is an internet entrepreneur trying to strike it big with a new social networking tool, XUBU, by tapping into markets in expanding cities around the globe. He has enlisted Mike (Harry Sinclair), an urban anthropologist, to trot from metropolis to metropolis, attempting to drum up financial and popular support for this revolutionary (and potentially lucrative) new tool. At home in the states, Mike’s daughter Sam (Olivia Timothee) grows distant and depressed while her nanny Deb (Moe Angelos) works on her new video-blog. Poor Mike begins unraveling as the stress of travel and distance from Sam begins to gnaw away at his faith in the power of the product. (Perhaps not surprisingly, the director’s note mentions both Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” and Mike Davis’ “Slum Cities” as inspirations for the piece.) Here’s the trailer:
In theory, there seemed to be a lot in this performance that would be of interest to students of communication, which is why I brought my COM 1010 class to see it. And the play earnestly tries to raise questions about our faith in digital communication (particularly in connecting “global cities”) and its limits. There are two conventional stage spaces (depicting the Xubu office space as well as Sam’s bedroom), and, thanks to a dizzying array of video screens, we jump between cities with a pace that would probably wear out even Bill Clinton.
Within this media mess, some genuinely fun innovating goes down: J.V.’s videochats with his family are actually live and unrehearsed videochats with the actor’s family members, and the video blogging done by Deb changes with every city the show tours. Perhaps coolest of all, there’s a phony website for Xubu.cc where anyone can record a message that might be used in the show as an example of Xubu.
My students were unexcited by the prospect of recording their own Xubu video messages, and they claimed to be confused by the frenetic non-linearity of the performance. They seemed to be more attracted to the slickness of its screens than anything else, and at one point during the show I turned around to find two of them sharing i-pod buds; a strange confirmation that perhaps some of the themes of the play both resonated and didn’t.
It is true that, as my friend put it, some of the conceits behind Continuous City felt a tad cliché (“We can’t communicate! Or remember our daughter’s birthday!”), even while it would seem that this is a company on the cutting edge of exploring the uses of this technology in performance. All of the miscommunication seemed to fudge up the rhythm of the dialogue in a way that was more distracting than anything else— the frustration that motivates many of us to just hang up on someone when we have a really bad connection is the way I would explain the emotional response that the play elicited in me. As an audience member, watching other people unsuccessfully multitask or attempt to navigate the impossibilities of time zone coordination tended to alienate more often than engage.
Along with all of this, Continuous City also allowed me reflect a bit on my own relationship to video chatting, as I’ve very recently become acquainted with this weird plane. While it of course hasn’t been a perfect experience, it’s made a tough long-distance communication situation better, not worse. (I couldn’t help wondering if Mike would have been a crappy father even if he lived in the same city as the neglected Sam.) Trying to sustain a meaningful conversation over video chat can be strange and self-conscious; at one moment it feels like an invaluable alternative to the tinny-ness of cellphone, and at others it feels boring and fractured.
For all its benefits, my v-chat experiences have also made me dubious about people actually doing business over this thing, which was also exposed in J.V.’s frantic video-conferencing; video chatting seemed to reveal itself as a horrible way to try to be productive and/or efficient. It didn’t surprise me to see that the video chatting done by the characters in the play was most successful during the simple moments of visual playfulness—like when Mike puts his computer camera on the grass in a park and plays virtual hide-and-go-seek with Sam. In its current incarnation, it often feels like a blessedly unproductive medium somehow, maybe because it creates intimacy by forcing you to sit down and focus on someone (on a screen) in an engaged, patient way; there’s no masking of any other activities, and, most of all, you need to really work to catch the freaky rhythms of the conversation. All of which, of course, we don’t necessarily manage to do even when we happen to be sharing time zones.
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