Perth-based company pvi collective has been making participatory performance work since 1998. The Booster Protocol is a Perth Festival commission and, like other works I’ve seen and reviewed this year, sits under the aegis of Festival Director Anna Reece’s interest in using alternative spaces and focus on attracting new audiences.
In this case, audience groups of five met at ‘Booster HQ’ in central Perth: an amusingly designed (and charmingly hosted) ‘travel agency’ in an artificially created ‘shopfront’ on Barrack Street. Here, one was given a tote bag and sent on a ‘guided tour’, armed with a set of directional speakers worn around one’s neck and a small portable touch-screen that issued instructions and provided geolocation as one completed one’s chosen ‘tasks’.
The audio content for The Booster Protocol was created through extensive consultation with members of various social and political movements, past and present, many of whose voices appear in the soundtrack, providing background information about their particular movement and guiding us in our tasks. Collaborators included the author Claire G Coleman, Dr Gary Foley and Fred Leone.
However, in contrast with other recent participatory street-based work I’ve encountered in Perth – such as Up There Boorloo, which took place in the same area of central Perth – the relationship between content and location in The Booster Protocol was somewhat superficial, partly because of the conceit that we were ‘tourists’ travelling through time and space, but also because the tasks seemed only tangentially related to our surroundings.
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Conversely, using portable speakers instead of headphones meant that, despite their being directional, I could hear the content echoing from my own and others’ devices. Perhaps the intent was to make the experience more collective but it prevented me from being immersed in the soundscape or feeling like I was travelling through time.
The tasks in The Booster Protocol also seemed more symbolic or performative than real, unlike the work of most of the activists in the audio content. This was especially the case given the levels of actual poverty, homelessness, abuse, neglect and despair that are visible in central Perth.
Things are bad here; they are bad everywhere. Playing games with social justice-related themes to make me feel better doesn’t feel like a solution.
