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by Staff | Jun 14, 2007 11:38 am

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Posted to: Arts

Cell_15.PhotoJ.J.Tiziou.jpg By Christopher Grobe
Standing at a bus stop, you eye the people around you, many with cell phones pressed to their ears. A couple gives you a darting glance. Storm clouds drift further away, toward the horizon. A woman down the block checks something off on her clipboard. Is she observing you? Someone whistles a song that you don’t quite recognize. When will the show begin?

This is the overture to Headlong Theater Company’s interactive performance piece, Cell, part of this year’s International Festival of Arts and Ideas. Or rather, this was the unique overture to my version of Cell, since, as far as I know, all of the performers in this scene were members of the New Haven community who were entirely unaware that they had an audience of one.

This takes some explaining. The premise of Cell is simple: the performance takes place on the streets and in the buildings of downtown New Haven and has an audience of only one person. Following instructions from a woman who calls you on your own cellphone, you are led from location to location, from activity to activity.

These various “scenes” range from the mundane, like sitting on a bench, to the absurd, e.g., participating in what could only be called “freestyle walking” with two playful members of the Headlong company. (A grizzled man skirts around us and quips, “Someone’s having fun.” He’s not a cast member, right?)

The goal, seemingly, is neither to tell a story nor to manipulate emotions, but to create a state of mind, a level of consciousness beyond the mundane. Placed in a world that resembles good old New Haven but that carries with it odd rules and strange customs, I found myself becoming open and imitative. If someone comes up to you and holds out his right wrist at chest height, you touch your wrist to it, don’t you? If someone starts speaking to you in a language you don’t understand, well, you can still make out what he’s saying, can’t you?

At one point, while I was sitting on a bench talking to my guide over the phone, a young woman sitting at the other end of the bench scooted over and began speaking my guide’s exact words into my other ear. Indicating the cigarette butts, the traffic, my stereophonic guides declared, “Everything has been put here specifically for you.” What a high, what dangerous, egoistic pleasure we can derive from the thought that everything revolves around ourselves alone.

This mindset opens up new levels of experience. Without the hyperconsciousness that Cell inspired, I’m not sure I would have noticed the odd beauty of that uprooted tree stump sitting on the sidewalk along Chapel, looking almost like an abstract sculpture with its dirt-clotted roots. But, for me, there was something ominous in this self-centeredness. After all, this is the same solipsism that everyone decries as the worst fallout from a technological society, where we spend hours toying with the cell phone, the television, the Internet.

After this hour-long journey through New Haven’s alter ego, the last stop is “the Hive,” the mysterious, buzzing center of this world. I won’t reveal what secrets lie within, but once you have emerged from the Hive, you can read the reactions of those who came before you, and, if you feel like it, contribute your own.

Some people felt like they were the star of their very own thriller. Others felt like a coequal member of the Headlong company. Still others expressed the joy or discomfiture of an hour of voyeuristic wanderings. After contributing my own thoughts to the guestbook, I exited into the New Haven evening.

That was the last I saw of the Headlong folk ... as far as I know. Cell might sound like one of those pieces that are more fun to talk about than to experience, but when you return to the real world, you will realize how crucial the experience itself is.

Like the ringing in your ears after a rock concert, Cell stays with you, pulsing just below the surface of things. And in the same way that the ringing in your ears is said to mark the death of a few damaged cells in your ears, the lingering buzz of Cell feels like a loss of innocence. I first experienced this in the nearest coffee shop.

I was emotionally exhausted after my participation in Cell—you only realize gradually how energetically you yourself have actually “performed”—and needed nothing more than a nice jolt of caffeine. As a barista made my espresso-based beverage of choice, I suddenly realized all that Cell has to say about the service economy that caters to our every whim. My guide’s pronouncement that all the world had been arranged especially for me is exactly the illusion that advertisers, waiters, and salespeople flatter us with day and night

As I mused over this, the barista asked me if I was heading home—my exhaustion must have been apparent. I responded that I was in between festival events, and she suddenly blurted out, “You know what I really want to see? What’s it called ... Cell!” If my immediate thought was—“So she’s working for them!”—I can only say, in my defense, that this persistent distortion of my personal reality was exactly what the members of Headlong were aiming for all along.

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