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Dial In

We may be living in the Zoom era, but some theatremakers are turning to another, oft-forgotten medium to connect with audiences. We talk to Leonie Rae Gasson and Melanie Frances about reclaiming the power of the humble telephone

Interview: Eliza Gearty

Can you remember the last time you actually left a real-life voicemail for someone? Not a WhatsApp voice note or a Facebook message or a text; a real, raw, after-the-beep voicemail? Leonie Rae Gasson, Co-Artistic Director of the theatre company Produced Moon, can’t. “I couldn’t tell you the last time,” she laughs. “I’ll joke that if someone’s left a voicemail, they’re not our age – that person’s over 50! For millennials, calling feels a bit retro. We WhatsApp, leave voice notes, have Zoom parties now... but we don’t really call.” We’re talking, along with Gasson’s fellow Artistic Director Melanie Frances (and via Zoom, of course), about Produced Moon’s upcoming show, HOTLINE. Gasson, a performance artist, and Frances, a mathematician and artist, have been creating work together as Produced Moon since 2012. They “make work for the digital age”, by creating, as Frances explains, “artistic experiences, theatre pieces, adventures and interactive narratives that take place both on technology and about technology, and the way it interacts with our lives.” It’s a wide-ranging, forward-thinking vision, and the company is accordingly ambitious. Since its inception, Produced Moon has created 360 VR films, theatre-video-games, ‘robot cabarets’, drag king flash mobs and city-wide immersive experiences. But with HOTLINE they are, in a sense, scaling it back. During what has to be the most online era in history, Gasson and Frances are logging off. Their next show will be shared with audiences via one of the earliest methods of electromechanical communication – the phone call. Why the phone? And what is it about the idea of a theatre show over the phone that feels so, well, soothing? “We were sick of Zoom!” says Gasson, laughing. She points out the need for a different sort of escapism for many people working eight-hour days at their laptops. “We use our digital platforms for everything, and feel so connected to everything all the time,” adds Frances. “Right now I’m using Zoom, but I also have my email open and I’ve been online all morning. Whereas on the phone, the only thing you’re really connected to is the other person at the end of the line ... the simplicity of that connection in comparison to the sometimes overwhelming nature of digital platforms really appealed to us.” The idea also grew out of sessions with young people early on in the pandemic. “We’d been throwing ideas about... at first we thought, we’re really miserable. Wouldn’t it be nice to just ring a number and be told really nice stuff about ourselves, like ‘You’re great! you’re wonderful!’” says Gasson. “[But] sometimes I want to go on an adventure and be out of this world, quite literally, and I want to imagine new futures and do something else. We wanted to make a show that would meet people where they’re at.”

The resulting piece responds to both of these classic lockdown feelings. Satisfying both a craving for comfort and a thirst for adventure, Hotline is an interactive outer space game wrapped in the nostalgic medium of a one-to-one call. Simulating the famous 1969 phone call to the moon, participants will be invited to dial the provided number and ‘hack’ the call between president Nixon and astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. “It asks, do you want to listen and think and dream or do you want to press loads of buttons and solve this escape-room puzzle?” explains Gasson of the piece, that was devised alongside artists Meghan Tyler and Nima Séne, and commissioned by Tron Theatre. They’re keen to clarify that it won’t just be pure escapism, though. “At the time of the phone call, the Civil Rights Movement was happening, Stonewall had just happened. There’s a song we use in the show, Whitey On the Moon, which explicitly says, why are we spending millions of dollars sending two white guys to the moon when look around you? We’re interested in that perspective.” It’s not the first time artists have explored the dramatic potential of the COVID-proof call. Back in June, Scottish artist Zoë Irvine collaborated with the Bergen National Opera to create This Evening’s Performance Will Not Be Cancelled – a call centre that connected callers to ‘ushers’, creatives who had worked on opera productions all over Europe that had ended up being cancelled due to COVID-19. The ushers shared music and stories from their lost productions. “I was struck by the intimacy of the Image: Teka Wreka experience,” says Rachel Boyd, a participant. “We ended up discussing the experience of making calls, and how the technology had changed. [The usher’s] generation was the time of landlines and telephone boxes, geared by loose change, whereas now I feel that the impetus to make a telephone call is so often geared by the negative – it’s the reserve of communicating bad news. Even counselling and ‘listening services’ are adapting the short-hand of instant messaging.” For Irvine, who works primarily with sound and has created ‘phone shows’ before, the live, audio-only aspect was a very deliberate decision. “The phone call provides a liveness and an intimacy that Zoom is missing,” she says. “By focusing on the auditory it feels less invasive – but at the same time there is nowhere to hide.” That liveness and intimacy is part of what makes the call between Nixon and the Apollo 11 astronauts so compelling. To Gasson and Frances, it also represents what we are capable of when we dream big. By throwing us into the world of such a wondrous phone call, HOTLINE may provoke audiences to reevaluate the potential of the newer technologies at our fingertips. “The sheer boldness of that vision is what we need now in our approach to anti-racism, to transphobia, to building a more fair and equal society,” reflects Gasson. “We’re interested in the powerful joy of a dream that big.”

Call HOTLINE anytime between 26 Feb and 6 Mar

Sign up with this link to receive the number when lines open: tron.co.uk/hotline-launch-registration

Or countdown to the HOTLINE launch with @TronTheatre on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

Listen to extracts from This Evening’s Performance Will Not Be Cancelled online: thiseveningsperformance.net/listen

Fade to Black

American filmmaker and photographer Michael O Snyder plunges us into the Polar Night with his latest documentary Into the Dark, which follows a team of scientists studying the Arctic’s hardiest marine life

Interview: Jamie Dunn

It’s February and you’re most likely reading this in Scotland, therefore you probably know a thing or two about the dark. Spare a thought, then, for the inhabitants of Tromsø, Norway, where the sun hasn’t risen above the horizon since November. Michael O Snyder’s new documentary, Into the Dark – which screens as part of Curious About: Our Planet, Glasgow Science Centre’s digital science festival – opens in Tromsø, and takes us even further north. It follows a team of scientists on the Helmer Hanssen research vessel – comprised of a crew from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the

“If we get it wrong on climate change, we get it wrong on everything”

Michael O Snyder

Scottish Association for Marine Science – who are examining how the world’s most hardy sea creatures survive Polar Night, the Arctic’s months of endless darkness. Snyder explains that, until recently, the orthodox view of Arctic life during Polar Night was that it was functionally dead. “The thinking was there’s no light at the North Pole for six months, and without light, there’s no primary production, there’s no plants to eat, you can’t see to reproduce, you can’t hunt. So essentially, life goes dormant.” Around a decade ago, however, scientists discovered that was not at all the case. “It turns out the environment there is so finetuned and so evolved that it functions with truly infinitesimal amounts of light, like a millionth of what we can see.” What the team of jovial Scots and stoic Scandinavians are particularly interested in is how climate change will affect this light-sensitive habitat. As the Arctic ice thins and recedes thanks to increasing temperatures, more light will be able to penetrate these once perennially dark ocean waters. The only way to study these light-sensitive sea creatures is for the Helmer Hanssen to switch off all its lights and the scientists take their readings in complete darkness. Conducting delicate scientific research in such conditions is, shall we say, tricky. And making a film is no picnic either. “It was an enormous technical challenge,” confirms Snyder. “Cameras essentially paint with light, so in the absence of light, what do you do?” Well in the first instance, Snyder was assisted by some cutting edge tech. “The timing of the filming was quite fortuitous, with GoPro and Sony both releasing brand new sensors right before the production started on the film,” he explains. “We were very pleasantly surprised by our ability to see in that darkness with some of this technology. And of course, that was mirroring the technology that the scientists were using, because they are also trying to quite literally see in the dark.” Snyder’s other technique for capturing the eerie atmosphere of Polar Night was much more straightforward: “Very early on we made the editorial choice to allow the Image: Michael O Snyder audience to just sit in darkness for a little bit, because the truth is, it’s just very, very dark.” This blunt-force effect, of course, would have been particularly powerful in a pitch-black cinema space, but unfortunately Curious About: Our Planet’s programme is fully online, so be sure to have your lights off while you watch at home. Beyond the technical issues, the biggest challenge any environmental documentary filmmaker faces is to

Image: Michael O Snyder

create a film that’s more than just a portal through which to dispense facts. Thankfully Into the Dark is as compelling narratively and aesthetically as it is informative. “I see my job as to tell great stories,” says Snyder. “So we’re not simply just presenting lots of information, we’re getting underneath that, we’re getting into why people do what they do, and what the emotional experiences are like doing that.” Not only does this make the film more enjoyable to watch, it’s more likely to sock its message across too. “All the research tells us that the data on its own is not enough to move most of us towards a more sustainable lifestyle. As human animals, we are rational to a certain extent, but we’re also emotional and connections oriented. So telling a good story is vital.” Snyder’s films have taken him to different communities with different issues all over the world, from the water crisis in Uganda to ancient dream cultures living in the Amazon, but climate change has been a throughline. “There are so many issues that need to be addressed in this world but the thing about climate change is that it’s a magnifier for all other issues,” Snyder says. “If we get it wrong on climate change, we get it wrong on everything, whether you’re working on security issues, whether it’s violence, whether it’s migration, whether it’s public health, whether it’s species protection, water access, it doesn’t make a difference.”

Curious About: Our Planet runs online 18-20 Feb Into the Dark has its UK premiere on 19 Feb at 8pm, followed by a live Q&A with Michael O Snyder and research scientist Dr David McKee, who features in the film curiousabout.glasgowsciencecentre.org