Unbreakable: Kaleider and Reverb’s ‘You With Me’

I’m hiding in an alcove behind McDonalds in an underpass in Exeter. My pursuer runs past me oblivious to my location. I let out a sigh of relief. I’m winning the game.

I’m experiencing You with Me, a pedestrian performance developed by Kaleider (Seth Honnor) and Reverb (Rachel Burton, Zach Price and Rob Stenson) which takes place entirely through a mobile phone.

I have been notified in advance of the meeting point and the number I need to call. I arrive early, and look for confirmation that I’m in the right place. Unlike a traditional trip to the theatre, there is no material threshold for me to cross here. No ticket booth or auditorium. I don’t even know how many other audience members (if such a term has relevance here) are present. It’s the beginning of the Christmas shopping period and I’m in the centre of town. I try to filter out possible performers from the everyday, transposing a traditional theatrical frame on the everyday world to distinguish my space from the performance. However the fleeting movements of people make this an impossibility.

At the designated time I call the number. I speak to a person and together we go on a walk together. I never see this person, but they know where I am at all times.

This isn’t my first performance audio walk. I took part in Duncan Speakman’s excellent As if it were the last time (2009), in Bristol a couple of years back. However, whilst Speakman’s “subtlemob” was entirely pre-recorded, You with Me is a live performance all occurring in real-time.

Due to the quite intimate dynamic of such an experience, a lot of people have felt compelled to outline in full their experience of the event online. In order not to spoil the surprise, I therefore won’t reveal as to what my experience was. All I can say is that it was a combination of small talk, playing and thought-provoking discussion in which I walked and talked with a person who I will probably never meet in person.

My walk took me all over the city, to places I wouldn’t usually visit. I discussed rationalism on top of an empty multi-storey car park, ate my lunch whilst sat on a bollard in front of the cathedral. It’s amazing where your legs take you when you’re on the phone.

Honnor said that one of the impetuses for the project’s devising was due to his desire to create something which ‘couldn’t break’. It’s interesting because I found that when I was walking (particularly during the game of hide and seek) I felt as if I was trying to pull the performance apart at the seams. Although the logistical and technological challenge of putting on the piece does hinder the ability to do this, I could have easily hopped on a bus and left the city. It’s not that you can’t break You with Me, it’s just that you do not want to. It reminded me of a comment an audience member made with reference to Fiona Templeton’s YOU – The City, (1988):

In a theater you know you can leave. But here, yes, he’s an actor, but so he’s also a person trying to break through, its primal, it’s hard to let go of that other person. I just never considered leaving.

(in Templeton, 1990:28)

However in Templeton’s production, the performer was actually present, but here in You with Me, all I have to do is hang up to ‘leave’ the performance. It’s strange but the mobile phone communication actually made it easier to stay, due to the fact that the performer was challenged with a larger barrier to break through than that found in YOU – The City. It made it easier to strike up a rapport with them, something which Honnor and Burton were adamant in ensuring from their performers. I was given space to breathe and move on my own terms, echoic of Mike Pearson’s assertion that in the city “we can be anonymous. This perhaps increases our freedom of action. We can be who we want to be, without the pressure of communal sanction” (2010:97). Interestingly, the performative framing of the event allowed me to be completely honest with the performer on the other end of the line. It was almost like a mobile confessional, in which I would get thoughts and feelings off my chest as if I was saying them from a darkened auditorium.

Remaining with YOU – The City, we can make some interesting comparisons between it and You with Me which shed some light on how to categorise it. Whilst the former involves a single audience member fed through a chain of performers throughout a city, the latter concerns a mobile conversation between a single audience member and a single performer. Both are meticulously constructed events which require a lot of planning and improvisation in order to compensate for any chance occurrences. However both deal with ‘You’ differently. Whilst Templeton’s play addresses the relationship between the individual and the city and “by which each comes to inhabit (at times, invade) the other” (Garner, 2002:105), Kaleider and Reverb place emphasis on an act of companionship and the sensation of what Misha Myers would refer to as “conversive wayfinding” (2010:59). Here, possible tensions incurred by our conversation are overstepped by the action of walking, which gives the performance a momentum determined entirely by the audience member themselves.

Therefore, whilst it is feasible to describe You with Me as being site-based – due to its emphasis on the individual within the urban environment – I would suggest that it in fact adheres more closely to what Claire Doherty would refer to as situation-specific, concerning works displaced from their surroundings (2004:10) that are dispersed across location and time (ibid:12). Although I was asked in one instance to determine the ‘centre of the city’, You with Me is not specifically conceived for a particular location. It can exist almost anywhere. Anywhere in which there is people; people that can allow the performers to hide; people that can create situations.

You with Me is a fascinating, playful and thought-provoking experience. The prospect of a one-on-one performance will undoubtedly be daunting to your typical theatre goer, however you’re in very safe hands here and I highly recommend it.

Cover photo by Robert Darch.

_____________________

Doherty, C. (2004) ‘The New Situationists’, in Doherty, C. (ed.), Contemporary Art from Studio to Situation, London: Black Dog Publishing.

Garner Jr, S. B. (2002) ‘Urban Landscapes, Theatrical Encounters: Staging the City’, in Fuchs, E. and Chaudhuri, U. (eds.) Land/Scape/Theater, Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

Myers, M. (2010) ”Walk with me, talk with me’: the art of conversive wayfinding’, Visual Studies, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 59-68.

Pearson, M. (2010) Site-Specific Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Templeton, F. (1990) YOU – The City, New York: Roof Books.