How do you imagine a more perfect future?
During the pandemic, a New York-based theatre company invited people to leave voicemails on their visions of the future through a public telephone hotline, the product of a brainstorm about space travel and exploration. That original work later inspired Theater Mitu’s Utopian Hotline performance, which made its West Coast debut last weekend in Mesa.
Rubén Polendo is the founding artistic director of Theater Mitu. Polendo said at first, the organizers didn’t expect anyone to call. But soon the voicemails flooded in, ranging from thoughtful to doom-and-gloom. And some folks did their most humorous android impressions.
The project also took inspiration from the Golden Records that were included on the Voyager spacecrafts launched by NASA in 1977. Loaded with sounds depicting life on Earth, they were intended to be found by any extraterrestrial life that might be out there.
Polendo says most of the people who worked on the Golden Record project figure it’s actually more likely that we humans will find it hundreds of years from now.
