When Adam Weiss arrived at a New York theater to see a Broadway show, he was dismayed to learn he would have to lock up his mobile phone.
The team behind Freestyle Love Supreme, an improvisation comedy show cocreated by Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame, requires audience members to keep their mobiles in a locked pouch during the performance.
“It’s a bit like being without a part of myself,” 39-year-old Weiss said.
However, once the show began, worries over what Weiss might miss online faded.
“I actually didn’t think about it, once it was gone,” he said.
Weiss’ experience is part of a growing trend at concerts, theatrical performances and even art exhibitions — attendees need to not only stow their mobile phones, but make them unusable.
Pop icon Madonna and comedian Dave Chappelle are among the performers who have latched onto the commonly used Yondr system.
Here is how it works: Upon arrival at a theater or auditorium, personnel place an audience member’s silenced phone into a pouch that is then locked with magnetic closures. The only way to open the bag is to visit an unlocking device in specified areas.
The goal is to reduce the unwelcome distractions for both performers and spectators of phone use, get audiences to be more engaged, and protect sets and content from leaking online.
For actor Andrew Bancroft, a Freestyle Love Supreme performer, the lack of phone flashes has led to a more attentive audience and ultimately a better show overall.
“There’s this feeling nowadays — is there something better that I’m missing?” Bancroft said of society’s smartphone addiction. “You’re neither here nor there — you don’t fully get to be in one place.”
Considering the ephemeral nature of improvisation performances — which can involve audience participation and a tendency to get vulnerable or profane — the elimination of phone recordings allows actors to get real and audiences to tune in, he said.
“We want to have complete freedom because that’s what makes it dangerous and exciting,” the 41-year-old actor said. “It protects us in a way that allows us to really go there and surprise people, but I think that’s secondary to: Why don’t you sit with who you came with, and really have your eyes, ears and hearts open to this present moment.”
When he began pitching his idea in San Francisco, Yondr founder Graham Dugoni initially met with a lot of resistance, but he remained adamant that such a start-up, which he founded in 2014, was necessary to “help people move into the digital age in a way that doesn’t erode all meaning in people’s lives.”
“People need to have some reasonable expectation of privacy, even in the public sphere,” Dugoni said. “It’s very important that the artist has a safe space to perform in, that fans can enjoy getting swept up in something.”
On a more philosophical level, Dugoni said “there’s a base feeling that the easier everything gets in life, the meaning is getting hollowed out.”
Today, the 33-year-old chief executive has renounced life with a smartphone and communicates via an old-school mobile phone, saying that he simply “had too many sensory inputs.”
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