Work
Call Cutta in a Box
Maker Rimini Protokoll · Work date 2008-??-?? · Medium telephone · Role work
Description
"Imagine you are buying a ticket at the box office for an individual show on a specific day, but are not led to the auditorium of the theater. Instead, you get the key for a room and a sketch of how to get there... You open the door and you find a phone ringing. You pick up the phone and a person with a strange accent strikes up a conversation with you. The person seems to know the room you are sitting in, even though he is about 10,000 km away. The voice belongs to a call center agent from Calcutta, India." — "On the notebook desktop in your room images and videos are opening up out of nowhere." Subtitle: "An intercontinental phone play." The participant stays in the room; the agent steers what happens in it.
Source. https://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/project/call-cutta-in-a-box
On the medium. Landline in a private room, with a laptop screen that opens images during the call.
Anatomy
Thirteen criteria after Lauren R. Beck. Each carries a source grade: M maker-confirmed, P published, F first-hand, I inferred by the compiler, ? not yet established. Definitions are on the anatomy page.
- Participants listen through headphonesnoI
Delivered over a landline handset in the room, and a handset is not headphones.
- Participants move through space as part of the worknoI
The description states the participant stays in the room while the agent steers what happens in it, so no relocation is required for progress.
- Audio technology is necessaryyesP
The whole encounter is the phone call from the Calcutta agent, so removing the phone ends it.
- Site-, situation- or language-specificSituationI
The work names the circumstance it needs — the participant alone in a prepared private room with a ringing phone and laptop that the agent already knows — but that room is provided by the presenter and is not one unrepeatable named place.
- Engages with the history of a siteunknown?
The description covers the setup, not the content of the conversation, so whether documented history of a real place is referenced is not established.
Did you experience this? Tell us - Created for an urban environmentnoI
The work happens inside a single room reached from a box office; nothing in it requires city density or infrastructure.
- Created as an artwork other than theaternoI
Framing given is entirely theatrical (“an intercontinental phone play,” box office, auditorium) with no non-theatrical discipline named.
- Intended to be understood as theateryesP
Subtitled “An intercontinental phone play” and framed around buying a ticket at the theater box office for an individual show.
- Accidental real-world sights and sounds are importantunknown?
The room is a prepared, controlled setting and the description says nothing about uncontrolled surroundings carrying meaning.
Did you experience this? Tell us - Spectator must participateyesP
“A person…strikes up a conversation with you” — the piece runs on two-way talk with the agent.
- Has live performers other than the participantsyesP
A live call center agent in Calcutta speaks with the participant in real time.
- Involves game playnoI
No rules, objective, or win/solve state appear anywhere in the description.
- Uses props other than the listening deviceyesI
The participant is given a physical key and a paper sketch to reach the room, and a notebook computer is part of the work in the room.
2 of thirteen are still unknown for this work. If you experienced it, you can settle them in a minute.