by Nathan Zoob
Carnegie Mellon student Dawn Weleski does her best to act surprised when Sheela Ramesh, a young Indian-American woman in bright blue scrubs, breaks the quiet of the Wood Street T station by launching into a musical theater-style song, accompanied by a three-piece string and brass band.
Up and down the platform startled commuters put down their crossword puzzles and take off their headphones to pay attention. An elderly gentleman strains to hear the music from across the tracks; near the bandstand a young man in a red leather jacket flips open his camera phone.
Weleski, leaning her shoulder against a grey slate wall, watches the crowd's reaction and smiles softly to herself. The first show of the night has begun. For the next twenty minutes, this light rail platform will act as a stage, and the commuters have become the unsuspecting audience of Pittsburgh's newest guerilla theater troupe, the Bus Stop Opera. This happenstance of spontaneous opera is equal parts performance art and grand social experiment, writ large on the canvas of downtown Pittsburgh's urban environs.
Making Connections
Always on the lookout to connect, Dawn spies a middle-aged woman in a white pantsuit, watching the performance from a spot near the bench. She looks confused, and Dawn sidles up beside her.
"What is all this?" Dawn asks?
"I'm not sure," replies the woman, her eyes moving back and forth from the performer to the musicians. "That girl just started singing. I think she's putting on a show."
"Wow, at a train station?"
"Strangest thing I ever saw."
Dawn smiles. The Bus Stop Opera is her brainchild, a project conceived in her years as an art major at Carnegie Mellon. In late 2008 she set out to launch a show that would carry on the traditions of guerilla theater, a genre of performance art that seeks to challenge and confront its audience by surprising them in public spaces. The name refers to the practice of staging performances in non-traditional venues like street corners and shopping malls, in order to sneak up on an unsuspecting audience, similar to how guerilla warriors stage quick and covert attacks on their enemies during battle.
Dawn's first solo attempt at guerilla theater bore similarities to the Bus Stop Opera. Dressed in full period garb, Dawn would go by herself to bus stops and train stations around Pittsburgh and lip-synch famous eighteenth and nineteenth century arias.
As thrilling as Dawn found it to put herself out where people could watch and judge, and as excited as she was at the potential of guerilla theater to challenge an audience, "The lip-synching wasn't engaging to people. It didn't communicate anything." Dawn believed her performances simply weren't confrontational enough to snap the public to attention.
Several people on the platform are doing their best to ignore the show. Though many are watching and enjoying the performance, a select few have their eyes cast deliberately downward, as if to allow the proceedings to wash over them. The Opera has a few audience participation elements built in to coach out these holdouts.
The first is in the spoken intro to a duet performed by two Carnegie Mellon students, Kaleigh Cronin and Sergi Robles. Before the song begins Sergi approaches a large black woman trying who is doing her best to keep her attentions fixed firmly on her Sudoku puzzle.
"Do you see that girl over there?" he says, pointing to a Kaleigh, who is standing at the lip of the platform, preening into her pocket mirror.
The woman looks up, unsure whether to answer. "Yes," she offers quietly.
"Isn't she beautiful?"
The woman hesitates and then smiles. "She's very pretty."
"I know her name," says Sergi, "do you want to know what it is?" The woman nods.
"It's Britney!" he says, and then the song, a bouncy tune about love found at the train station, begins. The woman closes her book of puzzles and places it on her lap. She doesn't return to it for the rest of the show.
Engaging a hostile or disinterested audience is one of the primary challenges and goals of the Opera. Dawn wants to use the element of surprise coach the citizens of Pittsburgh out of their shells, possibly teaching them something in the process. "I think there's something to be learned from seeing ourselves in the mirror. Art can reveal things...it can help us understand ourselves." Her hope was that by presenting common stories in an uncommon way, she might get an audience thinking about how rich and how interesting their lives, and the lives of those around them, really are. "It's about saying something that's probably average, but because it's average, it's significant."
In that spirit, all of the scenes in the Opera are based on real stories, encountered and transcribed on Pittsburgh public transportation by participants in the project. "I want to move people to see that their collaborators in the making of art whether they realize it or not, " she says. "I want them to think about the fact that everyone has stories, and they are all worth telling."
Mixing In, Bringing Out
There is an interesting phenomenon unique to guerrilla performances, especially ones where the cast is dressed to blend in with the audience. Because anyone could be a performer, the people watching the show have no idea who among them is a normal person, and who is covertly a part of the show. It leads to an interesting bit of tension between acts, as the commuters look around, wondering which of them will reveal themselves to be a plant.
As it happens, the boy in the red leather jacket, recording the performers with his camera phone is not waiting for the train after all. His name is Adam Atkinson, he is a Carnegie Mellon alumnus, and he is the next act.
Atkinson's song is the second in the night to involve the audience. It's a creepy Cabaret style number, in which Atkinson hits on almost everyone on the platform, men and woman. It's dirty and sleazy, but a lot of fun, and the folks he propositions take it all in stride. All except one.
One young man, his five o'clock shadow and deep-set eyes nearly obscured by his hoody and baseball cap jumps up in annoyance.
"Shut up!" He yells.
The music stops and a hush falls over the crowd. The platform is airless as the uncertainty of the moment takes over. Is he one of us or one of them, the commuters wonder. Is he just a guy who's fed up, or is he part of the cast? And more importantly, what's he going to do next?
As it turns out, what he's going to do next is sing, a fact made apparent when he points to the band and yells "hit it!" His name is Will Brill, he's an acting major at Carnegie Mellon, and he's in the show, another element designed to confront and agitate the audience, to make it impossible for them not to pay attention.
Brill's number parodies those isolated people determined to not to talk, touch, or interact with anyone else on their rides to and from work. "I am just in transit," he sings. "I'm not really present."
When the song is done the band quietly packs up and the cast shuffles towards the escalators. It's a low-key ending to a high-energy show, but that's part of the point. The performance is done, the T station is just a station again, and the audience has turned back into commuters. Still, it's clear the people on the platform have been affected by the performance. Most follow the cast with their eyes as they leave; one young man, a heavyset African-American teenager named Brandon, actually tags along, actually breaking his routine to watch the next few stops of the night.
The Feedback Loop
At the end of the night, after all of the shows are over, Dawn mulls over the highs and lows. "One of the best thing about performing on the street is that we reach the audience instantly. The feedback loop is much quicker."
Dawn's mind is already on the next show?what works, what doesn't, what needs to be changed. That's not to say the show wasn't successful. "The measure of success is just us doing it." Still, it's an ongoing process. Over the next few weeks she, and the students she works with, will keep their eyes and ears open on public transportation, looking for new stories they might be able to include in the next incarnation of the Opera.
Dawn sees a bright future for the Bus Stop Opera, and hopes to keep it going after the end of the school year, when she graduates. In May they will be taking the show on the road, staging performances in New York City, and Dawn is currently applying for a grant that would allow her to set up a permanent headquarters on the North Side of Pittsburgh. If she is lucky enough to see this through, the doors of her offices will always be open. "A community production belongs to the community," she says.
Nathan Zoob
