Reviewed by:

• Utopian Hotline by Kayla Asbell et al
• Cati Kalinoski

How do you imagine a more perfect future?

The recorded phone message asks you to speak your answer to this question after the tone. On the other end of the phone is an implicit guarantee: someone is listening. In their first piece since the start of the pandemic, the Brooklyn-based company Theater Mitu listened and engaged with those collected manifestos of an imagined future. The group used these answers left on their hotline’s voicemail as well as messages from astronauts, astronomers, and middle-school students as wide-ranging source material for their production Utopian Hotline. The process of making this production produced not only the live event and the public hotline, but also an installation, a virtual archive, an album, and a vinyl record. Theater Mitu is asking not only what theatre looks like in our entangled “now” of media connections, overlaps, and documentation, but they are asking how to continue thinking about theatre after the event ends.

Kayla Asbell in Utopian Hotline. (Photo: Courtesy of Theater Mitu.)

Walking into the space, I was instructed to take my shoes off and find a seat on a sprawling pink carpet that framed the performance area and encompassed where the audience sat. The small audience of twelve filed in, found their seats around a set of long white tables that featured sound devices both contemporary and vintage: record players, tape recorders, rotary phones, and reel-to-reel players, alongside a variety of stage microphones and wired headphones. Above the tables were large projection [End Page 372] screens that did double work as a ceiling that made the space feel smaller, closer. When I sat on the ground, I was instructed to put on large black headphones through which the entire soundscape of the piece was experienced. The headphones allowed me an intimate experience with the piece as each voice was channeled directly from microphone to my ear, foregoing even the short trip against the black walls, as if I were able to get closer to the performers through our technological connection. As one performer explained, “I’d like to speak to you directly.” There was no attempt to hide the machinery; the black cables screamed across the pink ground under the tables to each of the spots to which we were guided. At first, I felt isolated in this high-tech bubble of curated sound and felt limited in a seemingly open space by the cable tying me to others. But as the show began, we were asked to look around at our fellow audience members with the same reflection of the pink carpet hitting our faces. After a brief introduction to the rules of the space (no shoes, how to put the headphones on), we were asked to imagine each other’s lives, realities, and futures by “sift[ing] through the contents of your mind—specifically, your dreams” in a ritualistic opening monologue from one of the performers. My isolation faded away as I considered others in my own dream of the future. Soon I found myself bound not only to the performers but to my fellow audience members by the big black cables. It was a mediated closeness in the age of pandemics, but a time that more than any other attempts at closeness in the past two years asked me to look into the future by first looking into the eyes of strangers. I started to look beyond the masks and COVID protocols that we were abiding by and instead see “directly” by listening-with. In the words of one of our performer-guides, I felt the cables had become “a tether to their humanity.”

A screenshot from the digital experience of Utopian Hotline. (Photo: Author.)

Utopian Hotline integrated the recorded messages of the...

审核人：

• Kayla Asbell 等人的乌托邦热线
• 卡蒂卡利诺斯基

你如何想象一个更完美的未来？

录制的电话信息要求您在提示音后说出您对此问题的回答。电话的另一端是一个隐含的保证：有人在听。在大流行开始以来的第一部作品中，总部位于布鲁克林的公司 Theatre Mitu 聆听并参与了那些收集的关于想象的未来的宣言。该小组使用热线语音邮件中留下的这些答案以及来自宇航员、天文学家和中学生的消息作为其制作乌托邦热线的广泛源材料. 制作这个作品的过程不仅产生了现场活动和公共热线，还产生了装置、虚拟档案、专辑和黑胶唱片。米兔剧院不仅在询问在我们纠结的媒体联系、重叠和记录的“现在”中剧院是什么样子，而且他们在询问在活动结束后如何继续思考剧院。

乌托邦热线中的凯拉·阿斯贝尔。（照片：由米图剧院提供。）

走进这个空间，我被指示脱掉鞋子，在一块铺满表演区的粉红色地毯上找到一个座位，并包围了观众的座位。十二人的小观众在一组长长的白色桌子周围找到了他们的座位，桌子上有现代和复古的声音设备：电唱机、录音机、旋转电话和卷轴播放器，以及各种舞台麦克风和有线耳机。桌子上方是大型投影[完第 372 页]屏风兼作天花板，让空间感觉更小、更近。当我坐在地上时，我被要求戴上黑色的大耳机，通过它可以体验整个乐曲的音景。耳机让我对这首曲子有一种亲密的体验，因为每个声音都直接从麦克风传到我的耳朵，甚至比靠在黑墙上的短途旅行更早，就好像我能够通过我们的技术连接更接近表演者。正如一位表演者解释的那样，“我想直接和你说话。” 没有试图隐藏机器；黑色的电缆在桌子下的粉红色地面上尖叫着到达我们被引导到的每个地点。首先，在这个高科技的声音泡沫中，我感到孤立无援，在一个看似开放的空间里，我感觉自己被束缚在别人身上的电缆所限制。但是随着节目的开始，我们被要求环顾我们的其他观众，粉红色的地毯打在我们脸上。在简要介绍了空间规则（不穿鞋，如何戴耳机）之后，我们被要求通过“筛选”你的思想内容来想象彼此的生活、现实和未来——具体来说，你的梦想”来自一位表演者的仪式性开场独白。当我在自己的未来梦想中考虑其他人时，我的孤立感消失了。很快，我发现自己不仅与表演者有关，而且还被黑色的大电缆与其他观众联系在一起。这是流行病时代的一种间接亲近，但在过去两年中，比任何其他亲密尝试都更要求我通过首先看着陌生人的眼睛来展望未来。我开始超越我们遵守的口罩和 COVID 协议，而是通过倾听“直接”看到。用我们的一位表演指南的话来说，我觉得电缆已经成为“他们人性的束缚”。

乌托邦热线的数字体验截图。（照片：作者。）

乌托邦热线整合了...