(Without Walls Festival 2015)
The audio tour is a format that has long been ripe for détournement. Encountered most frequently in IMPORTANT CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS and at SIGNIFICANT LANDMARKS, audio tours can range from the dry and functional to productions that rival the best that radio theatre or Hollywood can offer. (My own earliest exposure to the form was the tour of Alcatraz which produced by the wizards of Antenna Theater. A masterclass in the form. Basically, I was spoiled from the start. What else is new?)
Audio tours are inherently interactive,taking audiences through spaces and revealing the hidden history of the place. There’s something about having a disembodied voice in your ear that feels authoritative even, maybe especially when that voice is gently suggestive. Like a friend who is letting you in on a secret.
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A Completely Factual Tour, by playwright David Jacobi, purports to be a simple walking tour of UCSD’s Galbraith Hall. This quickly unravels into an experiment in automated choreography and a struggle between the tour narrator and her shadowy counterpart who subverts the action in order to force the narrator into a confrontation.
Writing it up like that sounds a bit ghastly, but A Completely Factual Tour is actually rather funny. The absurdity of watching your fellow tour participants suddenly break out into fits of unexplained agency as the narrative breaks away from the tour is an touch of inspired lunacy. Overall the feeling is not too dissimilar from being stuck in a video game with two omnipotent, if not quite omniscient, beings who are using you and your fellow participants as chess pieces.
The production wasn’t completely polished in the version I participated in. There were lulls in the audio narration as the action of the play progressed in complexity. The more “agency” we participants were given the greater the gaps seemed to become.
What’s encouraging, however, is that while this particular production was pegged to a very specific place it is quite easy to imagine A Completely Factual Tour being adapted for different locations. The primary difficulty there being adjusting the timing of the piece based on the size of the location.
Whether we will see other productions of A Completely Factual Tour almost completely depend upon another type of setting: this is a great festival piece. A delicious immersive snack that gets the imagination going and makes one eager for more. At least, that’s how I was feeling after taking part in the piece. It was the kickoff to my Without Walls experience and, as such, was a perfect amuse-bouche. As a stand-alone event, however, I wouldn’t necessarily see people lining up in droves.
Which is no knock against Jacobi or his collaborators at the UCSD Theatre & Dance department. They set out to make a piece for an immersive, site-specific experimental theatre festival and they nailed it.
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