That feeling you get when someone else is touching your phone
In a pitch-dark room, a boombox tinnily plays spooky music. A voice interrupts the music and invites the audience to use their phones to light their way to the stage to come sit in a circle. Sitting together in the semi-dark, lit by blue device-light, the audience/participants are guided through a ritual series of steps involving their phones. Caressing a stranger’s phone with their fingertips, having their own personal device ever so gently touched by another, the exercise is either meditative or nerve-wracking, depending on your relationship to your little rectangle. Given a number to text their thoughts to, the participants then split up and move around the room to find some privacy. One by one their phones ring, and as participants answer, the discordant variety of ring-tones gives way to a shimmering, phasing soundscape, each face lit ghostly from beneath.
Created for the Tank Theater’s Dark Theatre Festival in February 2013