close window Press review | THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, April 12, 2003 Turning the telephone into Aladdin's magic lamp   by Michael Phillips
	In cities such as New Delhi and Bangalore, India, employees of American-run telemarketing and 800-number assistance "call centers" pretend to be people they're not, from places they've never been. "This is Phoebe," says one young Indian woman, who has appropriated her phony name from that most Anglo and most American of all big-hit white sitcoms: "Friends." "How can I help you today?" This terrific, unsettling notion, a global masquerade, forms the center of a calmly seductive multimedia project known as "Alladeen", continuing Saturday and Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art. A collaboration of two companies — The Builders Association of New York, and London's motiroti — director Marianne Weems' staging is itself an act of cultural appropriation. The show uses the legend of Aladdin and his magic lamp, which in fact might have come from the French, not from "The Arabian Nights," as metaphoric guidance for its own vignettes, ranging from New York to Bangalore to London. The sum total is worldwide interconnectedness and worldwide isolation, often in the same instance. Conceived by Keith Khan and Ali Zaidi and director Weems, "Alladeen" begins with elaborate video imagery of street action outside a Virgin Megastore. A deadpan woman (Tanya Selvaratnam) juggles cell-phone calls, plans a trip with her boyfriend to the mysterious desert — meaning Vegas, and the Aladdin Hotel — and talks about visiting a karaoke bar. In the third segment, set in a sleekly soulless London nightclub, she is seen dancing alone. She never does get to sing. Everyone's persona in "Alladeen" mutates, depending on need. Interspersed with the often witty telemarketing scenes, enacted by the cast of five, documentary video footage shot at a Bangalore call center reveals some of the cultural schisms affecting those who work there. Maintaining a convincing, neutrally "American" dialect, and knowing just enough about Olympia, Wash., to fake one's way through casual conversation with a customer: Such are this strange job's requirements. Like so much progressive multimedia performance of the moment, "Alladeen" is a paradox. A critique of contemporary life's techno-obsessiveness, it's also obsessed with technology's theatrical possibilities. The 80-minute piece features elegantly interlocking components — everything from Christopher Kondek's video to Dan Dobson's sound design to the sharp, unsettling lighting design of Jennifer Tipton. Oddly, it's the central metaphor that feels forced. For all the archival film imagery sampling Aladdin's past (from the silent film era, Douglas Fairbanks Sr.; from the 1940 Michael Powell classic, Conrad Veidt, glowering as Aladdin's nemesis), for all the attempts to link the centuries-old global Aladdin myth with the bittersweet life of a Bangalore telemarketer dreaming of America, "Alladeen" hasn't yet found a way to connect past and present, myth and reality. And oddly, that's not too much of a problem. There's too much else going on in this active but never frantic dreamscape. This evolving show, which will tour the globe over the next couple of years, is shot through with mundane weirdness — the stuff, in other words, of most everyone's life, even if they're not taking toll-free rental-car company calls in India. top | back to reviews main page