performance
"13th NIPAF 2006"; Die Pratze; Tokyo, Japan. 2006
It is St. Valentine’s Day. I invite 8 people from the audience to sit on chairs on stage. There is a mobile phone placed on each of the chairs. Each person is asked, “Whom do you love?”
They say the name of the person they love, and are then invited to call that person on the phones provided, and speak to them for the duration of the performance.
Some people had come that evening with their loved ones; the one on stage calls their lover sitting in the audience on their mobile phone and they speak with each other in the same room on the phone. Others loved people on the other side of the world, and were grateful for a free long-distance phone call (pre-smartphone days!), albeit in front of an attentive audience.
About 7 different languages / dialects were spoken by those on stage, guaranteeing a certain degree of privacy for their intimate conversations.
photos by: Makoto Kondo and Ichimura Tomoko