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Theater

Let’s Chat with a Perfect Stranger: Multiple Literacy and Learning the Pandemic through Whatsapp Theatre

Essay
A.Y. Eldhose

Abstracts

This essay looks at an online interactive theatrical experience titled Project Perfect Stranger by ZU-UK that helps its participants reflect upon the pandemic and themselves through mediated WhatsApp interactions with a perfect stranger. Moreover, this is a participant observant inquiry into the project. The study looks at how virtual theatrical experiences can offer multiple possibilities/levels of learning. 

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Introduction

1When Covid-19 struck the world in the initial months of 2020, human life became a standstill. Lockdown experiences were painful and distinctive for each individual. Within months, people started living with the Covid, and the pandemic became a part of their daily life. They started doing vlogs or writing social media posts about their painful hospital days, the loss of their near ones, and the loneliness of quarantine experience. Artists worldwide started representing the pandemic through their medium—many artistic endeavors aimed at providing entertainment and hope for people in misery, despair, and loneliness. Project Perfect Stranger is an interactive theatrical program online that aims at learning about the pandemic and ourselves through WhatsApp interaction with a perfect stranger. In an interview by Tom Bailey, Persis Jadé Maravala, the writer of this theatrical project, comments, “This project seeks to transcend the limitations of social-distancing / self-isolation/lockdown/quarantine and allow us to meet in a different register altogether” (Maravala).

2Persis Jadé Maravala, the writer and director of this interactive theatre experience, planned Project Perfect Stranger, designed by a UK-based theatre group, ZU-UK, as “a series of playful provocations and collaborative tasks with an anonymous partner over five days. A set of instructions will be sent via WhatsApp each morning. You and your partner will then select a 15-20 min minimum time each day to connect” (“Project Perfect Stranger”). A grand union follows the WhatsApp interaction via Zoom meeting named the PlagueRound Game Show, where all the participants meet together. The project's first chapter was in collaboration with British Council & DICE from 29 July to 2 August 2020, and the PlagueRound Game Show was held on 4 August 2020. Due to the success of the first venture, ZU-UK collaborated with InGAME and the University of Dundee to coordinate the second chapter of Project Perfect Stranger from 15 to 19 September 2020, and the PlagueRound Game Show was held on 23 September 2020. Furthermore, ZU-UK collaborated with Future Fest and Nesta for the third round. It was held from 10 to 14 February 2021, and PlagueRound Game Show on 20 February 2021. Participating in the first and second chapters of Project Perfect Stranger provides you with the experience of learning about the pandemic through this interactive theatre experience.

How does the project work?

3This interactive theatre intended to develop a connection with an anonymous person with no judgments, prior knowledge, or historical or emotional baggage. The two participants will decide on their collaborative relationship, but they must stick to the program's rules. ZU-UK will share instructions through another WhatsApp account. However, participants will not be allowed to interact with the shared WhatsApp account unless any technical doubts or other complaints are communicated. Participants must complete the daily tasks with their chatting partner, a stranger, in a stipulated time.

4The identity of each participant will be revealed only on the final online live game show. Nevertheless, during the interaction, participants may get partial information about their partner from the chats and voice-notes they may send each other. The suggested time for interaction, which ranges from 15 to 20 minutes a day, can be extended to become a lengthy chat, depending upon the proximity one develops with the partner. Interactions do not begin with a formal introduction. According to the instructions from ZU-UK, the participants present themselves without providing formal details, which will be enough to create an impression of themselves. These casual interactions communicate with their partners about what they experience as individuals during these challenging times of the pandemic.

5On the second day, ZU-UK instructed participants to take pictures of their random surroundings and to share them with their partners. It could be anything representing the participants' immediate livelihood, for instance, a dustbin in their bedroom. On the third day, the instruction was to go for a virtual walk together without talking. The participants can share photos of their travels through WhatsApp. The next day we were asked to share a voice-note, and that is when we got to know the gender of the partner, but again it is arbitrary as gender cannot be recognized by sound in everyone's case. From this point, the participants get more freedom to interact in-depth about the nuances of their life, artistic wishes, hurdles of the pandemic, and even more intimate instances of loss and pain. The final day is more of a farewell to the anonymous interaction.

PlagueRound Game Show

6PlagueRound Game Show is an online event hosted on the Zoom application by ZU-UK as a culmination of Project Perfect Stranger. While everyone worldwide can see the PlagueRound Game Show through YouTube live-streaming, the participants in Project Perfect Stranger can be one of the 20 contestants in the live Game-Show.

The PlagueRound Game Show is a space of interactivity, participation, and fresh ways of generating remote connections. The session utilized game design to spark genuine human connection through the shared, global experience of the Covid-19 pandemic. We crack open how collective experiences can link us, how we find a sense of ourselves in the post-normal and how we can define what the post-normal looks like. Only if you have participated in Project Perfect Stranger can you apply to be a participant. (“Project Perfect Stranger”)

7Endeavours such as live online interactions and game shows are not new to people, but meeting a perfect stranger in a game show on a Zoom screen is a different experience as they have developed inner proximity, which is beyond the physical realm. The game show also included specific interactive discussions, theatrical games, short performances by the participants, and a pledge to stay connected and hope during the pandemic’s tough days. As a participant, knowing a whole new community consisting of people from different parts of the world, who share commonalities in pain, loneliness, and fear due to the pandemic, was a therapeutic experience. 

8PlagueRound is a show that aims to counter the hectic/controversial/fearsome/ times. For this. ZU-UK planned a silly game show with a silly methodology. According to the organizers, “silliness does not have to deny the gravity of the situation but can be used as a way to get to a place of ‘shedding norms’, i.e., doing things in unusual and unexpected ways can often open our eyes to a new way of seeing the world and ourselves” (Maravala). 

9The game incorporated playful activities, like eating something under their table, sleeping in different places of the participant’s house, wearing multiple clothes, or going for a walk blindfolded. These actions that the participants perform before a Zoom camera seem absurd, but this absurdness or playfulness of the game functions as a means to reframe the pandemic situation. It gradually becomes a theatrical mechanism that helps the participants to distance themselves from the trauma of the age psychologically. Eventually, the show becomes a tool for resilience. This capacity to recover from difficulties that the PlagueRound offers is vital. The sense of absurdity that this project evokes is critical because uncertainty is one of the significant crises people face during pandemics. Like the uncertainty of the Estrogen and Vladimir In Waiting for Godot, people eagerly wait for the ordinary days after lockdown. As Becket suggests, the best way to get over uncertainty is to celebrate absurdness/playfulness/and trivial things. 

Internet: the global stage

10In his work, The Global Village, Marshall McLuhan observes the possibilities of the World Wide Web (www) as a global village that allows netizens from any part of the world to interact freely. American anthropologist Edward Sapir wrote: “The multiplication of far-reaching techniques of communication has two important results. In the first place, it increases the sheer radius of communication, so that for certain purposes, the whole civilized world is made the psychological equivalent of a primitive tribe” (Sapir 79). When the radius of communication increases, people achieve the status of a global primitive tribe, where they virtually know each other. For instance, in a performance like Project Perfect Stranger, people from any part of the world interact and perform using mediums like WhatsApp and Zoom, redesigning these mobile applications into a global stage. When a participant of  Project Perfect Stranger sends an audio clip, a video recording, or a picture through WhatsApp, the WhatsApp screen transforms itself into a stage for his or her stranger partner. 

11One of the earliest notable online texting/chatting experiments to present dramatic texts via the internet was started in June 1995 at the University of Hawaii by the Association of Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) (Sant 249). Juli Burk created an online programme or, in technical terms, a Multi-User Dimension Object Oriented (MUDs and MOOs) for the association. They staged many plays through this medium. Juli Burk’s essays, including The Play’s the Thing: Theatricality and the MOO environment (1998), provide a detailed account of pioneering internet theatrical projects in the last decade of the 20th century. Nina LeNoir is another scholar who focused on internet theatre’s initial attachment with text-based plays from Greek and Elizabethan drama as they gave importance to verbal interactions (LeNoir 175–95). Gradually, the movement developed into online role-playing, virtual interaction, augmented reality, and the possibilities of graphical and interactive video games. However, one serious problem associated with internet theatre is network connectivity. Marc Blinder, a renowned theatre producer, comments that “global access to Internet bandwidth is the hardest part with this” (qtd. in Lavender 341). We must expect a pause or a loss of connection at any time. Erin Gilley makes it clear that: “[t]hings go wrong all the time, and it is rarely the same thing that goes wrong” (“Longitude”). Theatre has to overcome this difficulty creatively.

12To make it precise, internet theatre was very active for two decades before the Covid 19 pandemic. During lockdown days, when most human activities and exchanges migrated to the internet, internet theatre also got global visibility. Artists, who were earlier slightly tech-phobic, began to explore the medium radically. ZU-UK was already in its track of online and digital interface in theatre have made use of the situation in a much more elaborate and fundamental way. Rather than stage a written play, they prefer to make an interactive performance that uses the collaboration of artists and ordinary people. A theoretical reading of Project Perfect Stranger should focus on two entities; interactivity and anonymity. Mark Stephen Meadows sees interactivity as a significant theatrical dimension of online performance environments. He claims that “virtual worlds are interactive narratives, and the avatars are actors in a kind of street theater where the audience helps improvise the plot” (67). Each participant in Project Perfect Stranger is a content creator who helps to develop the plot and structure of the programme. Both Meadows and Sant connect this interactivity to Augusto Boal’s ‘Forum Theatre,’ where interactive performances are observed as a rehearsal for social change. ZU-UK never aims to be didactic in any sense, but it intends to counter the complex network of scandals, fake news, and peremptory debates in the digital public sphere by using the same platform. 

13The notion of “liveness and co-presence” (Lavender 340) that internet theatre offers can define the interactive nature of Project Perfect Stranger. There may be questions regarding the theatricality of Project Perfect Stranger as it is an internet chatting program. While asked about the theatricality of online interactions, Erin Gilley, director of an online show titled Longitude, responded in the post-show conversation that: “It’s live, and to me, theatre is about that connection between an actor and an audience that happens live” (“Longitude Q&A”). In Project Perfect Stranger, there is no permanent actor and audience; instead, both the chatters rotate their positions randomly. As a participant, the initial session with the fellow participant was performative. There is always an eagerness regarding their questions, giving the listener an aesthetic delight of curiosity. Most importantly, these interaction happens ‘on-live.’ 

14Another distinctive feature of Project Perfect Stranger that distinguishes it from normal Whatsapp chatting is the anonymity between the two participants, especially in the initial interaction phase. There is a common understanding regarding anonymity on the internet. People understand it as “a dichotomy – either you are anonymous, or you express your ‘true’ self” (Eklund 486). However, scholars like Helen Kennedy working on online anonymity disagree on limiting its possibilities between these dichotomies (859-860). Anonymity is not about hiding personal information. Nowadays, the social identity belongings of an individual are visible through social networking apps. For instance, an individual’s age, race, gender, profession, and sexuality are available on Facebook or Linked In.

15Nevertheless, Project Perfect Stranger works on the principle of mutual understanding that is relied upon by artistic responsibilities. Precisely, “anonymity is not simply whether one’s legal name is known or not, but whether various aspects of our selves, who we are, can be identified by others, consciously or unconsciously” (Eklund 489). There is a dramatic way of knowing/understanding a completely anonymous person. The strangers in the Whatsapp chat perform this unfolding process of understanding the personal geography of the perfect stranger. “Using drama to investigate the geographical imaginary, our notion of personal geography brings together ideas of space, time, place, and memory to craft a geographic aesthetic that can respond to the politics and educational policies of 2020” (Gallagher 640). Gallagher and fellow scholars make this observation while making a case study on using digital theatre for education during the pandemic. Digital interactions bring together the geographical as well as personal traits of an individual to create digital geographic aesthetics. Though the participants are anonymous, they share images of their immediate surroundings following the instructions from the ZU-UK. Here, a digitally sensitive intimacy between the two participants is developed by transcending the fundamental dichotomy of anonymity. 

16According to McLuhan, inside the global village, people transcend the micro-, meso- and macro-dynamics of their life daily and culminate to form a global circuit (4). People start getting involved in highly complex groups of networks stretching worldwide. Furthermore, these electronically established and maintained networks of individuals and communities resulted in new social clusters which were not free from the politics of gender, race, colour, ethnicity, and caste. Thus, social networking becomes a potential platform of hatred and unethical propaganda. In this background of media simulations, an interactive theatre programme like Project Perfect Stranger got cultural and political implications. The program mixes elements of truth-based theatres like verbatim theatre and testimonial theatre that can counter the simulative social media representations. 

17The pandemic should also be read as an age of false information. News channels and social media were not genuine in giving people the correct information about the disease, the number of deaths, or affected people, to name a few. In addition, there were also many discourses on the end of the world. To sum up, the media staged global paranoia. As a participant in Project Perfect Stranger, I would like to say that ZU-UK has used the same platform to provide accurate literacy of the pandemic. Richard Schechner opines that “...the growing global availability of the internet gives a speech and visual communication a strong lift over conventional literacy” (Schechner 4). The Internet can offer various means of communication and literacy. “Another way of understanding what is happening is to regard our time as witnessing an explosion of multiple literacies. People are now “body literate,” “aurally literate,” “visually literate,” and so on” (Schechner 4). ZU-UK provides its participants with activities commemorating visual, auditory, and bodily literacy. The participants share pictures, smileys, GIFs, and stickers, resulting in a visual literacy of the pandemic situation, the cultural nuances of a new geographical space, and the emotional intensity of two individuals. The audio messages and voice call that the participants share provides them with aural literacy. There was an exercise to share the breathing sound alone as an audio recording through WhatsApp. This exercise is intimate and philosophical, as it immediately connects two individuals beyond the boundaries of space, gender, class, and caste. The air we breathe connects two people and gives them a human identity. It provides a literacy that is beyond the possibilities of textual learning. It was in the PlagueRound that the participants met live. There the virtual body of all the participants interacted with each other. They made fun of each other, shared their feedback on Project Perfect Stranger, played games, sang songs, engaged in debates, and shared moments of hope in the age of the pandemic. These activities illustrate how the participants and organizers can have virtual body literacy. 

18Schechner further points out that:

Sometimes playful, sometimes dangerous, people travel actually or virtually to faraway places, communicating and hooking up across ethnic, national, linguistic, religious, and gender boundaries. Webcams and chat rooms flourish. Operating at many levels and directions simultaneously demand multiple literacy. These multiple literacy are “performatives” – encounters in the realm of doing, of pursuing a through line of action. (4)

19As Schechner mentioned, these online encounters are performative, offering multiple literacies for the participants. WhatsApp chats in Project Perfect Stranger are performative interactions that communicate the emotional manners of individuals with both intense and funny moments. This performative element is high during the pandemic because it offers the participants moments of Aristotelian anagnorisis, where they gather new knowledge over the manipulated knowledge they were forced to acquire through new media interactions.  

Possibility of an interactive and immersive theatre experience

20Jorge Lopes Ramos, Joseph Dunne-Howrie, Persis Jadé Maravala, and Bart Simon wrote an article titled “The post-immersive manifesto” that:

Post-Immersive participation should validate intimacy, tenderness, empathy, and care over immersive spectacles. Post-Immersive participation emerges when the individual becomes a part of a temporary community. Post-Immersive participation needs to be a collective thinking event centered on what it is to be a human being living in late capitalist societies. Post-Immersive artists have a responsibility to invite audiences to co-create. (196)

21The phrase ‘post-immersive’ becomes essential when people misuse the idea of immersive to go beyond the theatre and arts industry. From video games to guided events in famous shopping malls, there were immersive events that mainly aimed at giving their product an edgier public profile and increasing sales. Theatre groups like ZU-UK attempted to replace immersive spectacle with intimacy, tenderness, empathy, and care. This manifesto of a post-immersive theatre is very much visible in Project Perfect Stranger. Persis Jadé Maravala says that: “When I started in what would go on to be defined as ‘immersive theatre’, I thought of its participatory aspects as the only honest way to acknowledge the reality of the situations in which we were working, and of respecting the commitment of those who came to experience it” (Maravala). The instructions from ZU-UK via WhatsApp are very much tender, which has the potential to develop empathy between the chatters. For instance, there is an activity where the participants have to share photographs of minute things in their surroundings. The participants would share images of their dustbin, cupboard, or kitchen sink, which are very much personal, tender and compassionate. 

22The performance creates digital geography where anyone can log in and out anytime. They are a part of the system only for that limited time, i.e., until the host sign-out from the system. This acknowledged temporality is crucial in a world where people fake permanency. The temporality of virtual performance can make people rethink their relationships, professional bondings, ethical values, and mortality. “The blurring of the relationship between audience and actors has always for us been a way of creating temporary but genuine communities of resistance” (Maravala). In a Brechtian sense, Project Perfect Stranger allows its participants to realize their alienation and to act accordingly. Brecht never allows a cathartic experience; instead, he provokes the audience to think politically and culturally. Project Perfect Stranger never supports a make-belief towards people's lives and relationships, and in contrast, it propounds genuine communities of social action and resistance. 

23Project Perfect Stranger invites its audience to co-create, which makes it post-immersive theatre. Here, the audience or the participants are the co-creators of the event. The experience they share through chats, pictures, smileys, and voice-notes produces the text of this performance. This multilayered text of Project Perfect Stranger makes it a post-dramatic theatre where the digital interaction/performance goes beyond a written dramatic text. Each participant's creativity and political vibrations become instrumental in the gradual formation of the text of this interactive theatre experience. Thus, one can say each chat page is a different performance text. 

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Bibliography

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References

Electronic reference

A.Y. Eldhose, Let’s Chat with a Perfect Stranger: Multiple Literacy and Learning the Pandemic through Whatsapp TheatreMiranda [Online], 28 | 2023, Online since 13 October 2023, connection on 17 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/55979; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.55979

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About the author

A.Y. Eldhose

Assistant Professor in English
Mar Athanasius College (Autonomous), Kothamangalam, India
eldhoseay@macollege.in

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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