Find Familiar Spaces Anew with ‘The City At Your Feet’ (Review)

The City At Your Feet is an immersive dandelion. It doesn’t need a fancy location or complicated narrative to thrive; it will grow literally anywhere. I could torture the metaphor by saying that The City At Your Feet is as mundane as it is beautiful or that it’s gone as quickly as it appears (the run was one day only, starting at 14:00 CET on September 12, and lasting just under 4 hours), but you get the idea. This is a show about what we take for granted in the spaces we think we know. Created by Gabi Linde & Katherine Leung as part of Tender Absence’s global “online-offline” performing arts festival, The City At Your Feet asks its audience to reconsider what about their personal experience is beautifully unique and what might be universally beautiful.

Here’s how: at exactly the same time, on exactly the same day, a handful of strangers (myself included) from cities around the world went outside and logged into the Telegram messaging app. The plan was for each of us to start somewhere familiar and then — through a series of text messages — allow ourselves to be guided somewhere else. After a couple of hours, we would get paired with a traveler in another city to compare notes.

Providence, Rhode Island (my port of operation) is a quirky little city filled with art, restaurants, a few universities, and a bunch of people just trying to make life a little more interesting. So, it turns out, is Leipzig, Germany. It’s amazing how many similarities a stranger named Kim and I found between our two spaces. After sharing a few pictures and videos, we learned that she and I were both walking through neighborhoods that were in mid-transition, moving from industrial (and therefore undesirable) areas towards becoming shiny commercial zones. We each stood next to a small café, while 3,810 miles apart, and wondered who was getting displaced by these hip new shopping areas. Kim showed me an old fighter plane. I showed her the concrete blocks that used to be part of an office building’s foundation. We watched gray clouds float overhead while a patch of sunflowers continued to grow in their respective unused lots.

Going in, what I knew about The City At Your Feet was that I’d need my phone and a good pair of walking shoes. The show’s blurb promised that I would be guided through a city I thought I knew well, only to “discover hidden gems, tiny treasures, and untold stories of the spaces/places” which can be easy to miss when we’re on autopilot. I also knew that I had to be in my starting place (anywhere that felt safe and familiar; my doorstep or maybe a public park) by 8:00 am and that I would need to have some suggested supplies on hand. At half-past seven, I filled my fanny pack up with a charger, a notebook, a pen, a postcard, a stamp, some cash, and a coin. I grabbed a cup of coffee and set out for the Providence River Pedestrian Bridge.

With remote shows, I’m used to rolling out of my office and logging into Zoom or whatever a few minutes before the virtual curtain. That morning, I was nervous about making sure all my tech was mobile and functional. I didn’t feel settled until my guide Gabi texted right before 8:00 to introduce herself.

She assured me that I was where I needed to be, and, after a few pleasantries, I got my first instruction:

“Look around. Show me a short video of your surroundings.” What followed was a gentle choose your own adventure-style series of choices.

“Flip a coin: are you going left or right?” I went left — my personal journey was going to take me to Providence’s East Side.

“Are you feeling brave or curious?” I was feeling curious — my tasks would center around the five senses.

Honestly, it was a bit like being back in kindergarten. Gabi wanted to know everything about how I felt and what I saw. What could I smell? What would happen if I followed that smell to its source? Her curiosity was infectious. The smell I followed turned out to be a snubbed cigarette butt sitting on the empty wax shell of a Babybel cheese. Normally this would be trash, today it was art.

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Over the course of an hour and a half, I wandered onto a university campus, wrote a poem, followed my nose to a laundry room, hid a message for a stranger, and made a little piece of floating art for a flock of indifferent geese and two very interested pigeons. Providence hadn’t compelled me to do any of those things over the past 15 years. The City At Your Feet gave me traveler’s eyes: instead of seeing a place where I lived and worked and went about my daily chores, it saw a place of possibility and exploration.

Throughout the experience, Gabi gave me plenty of time to complete tasks on my own schedule. When I was ready, I could check in, share my results and ask for new instructions. These relatively low guardrails left lots of room for self-directed play, which ended up being both a feature and a bug of The City At Your Feet. I loved being able to explore things at my own pace, but the lack of direction made me a little nervous about whether or not I was “doing the show right.” Luckily, a two-hour runtime (with the option of extending for an additional two hours) gave me plenty of time to burn off any self-consciousness and embrace a more explorative mindset. This led me to a nurturing, reflective experience that I’d wholeheartedly recommend to anyone who’s feeling a little stuck after two years of little-to-no travel.

But my experience wasn’t all sunshine and poetry. Prepping for The City At Your Feet (even though I was “just” an audience member) stressed me out. Getting a ticket meant having to create a festival account, which meant slogging through a series of unrelated emails before being asked to check into a show portal that didn’t have anything to do with the actual experience. As someone who gets easily overwhelmed by excessive detail, I didn’t see my list of “things to prepare” email until it was almost too late. I’m glad that I had already installed Telegram on my phone and that I was able to find an old postcard lying around on short notice. If I hadn’t double-checked my email before leaving the house, I definitely would not have had the tools I needed to participate fully.

My other quibbles with The City At Your Feet have to do with the relationship it creates between guide and participant. When prompted to describe how I was feeling at various points throughout the show, I routinely chose “curious” because it was an honest answer. I would have liked to have been pointed towards an option like “brave” because I find value in being asked to leave my own comfort zone. Despite her pleasant and encouraging attitude, I was disappointed that I didn’t connect with my guide. Responses like “you’re very observant!” and “wow, that’s great!” struck me as condescending (at least before I acknowledged and then embraced my discomfort with being treated like a student), even if they had the intended effect of nudging me towards adopting an attitude of wonder. Perhaps I prefer my immersive experiences to be more direct and less coddling. The City At Your Feet is lovely, but it skews away from heavy emotions and towards polite socio-cultural exploration.

At one point during the show, Gabi told me to stop and meditate. I quickly discovered that I was in a space without safe public seating. This says more about American infrastructure than it does about the show’s creators, but it made me aware of how I was being implicitly asked to walk, climb, see, touch, or otherwise interact with public spaces that weren’t very accessible. I’m sure that the designers would have accommodated me had I been using, say, a wheelchair. But I’d also suggest that creators Gabi Linde & Katherine Leung expand their understanding of accessibility so that their playful brand of theatre can better reach a wider and more diverse audience. Beyond that, the duo’s ability to create a show that was both highly personalized and relatively location-agnostic was delightfully impressive.

One of the things I’m working on as a critic is decoupling the intensity of a show from its impact. The City At Your Feet was an excellent place for me to put that policy into practice. This wasn’t the loudest, most breathtakingly produced show in the universe. It was quiet and occasionally hokey. It asked me to rediscover a childlike sense of play by shifting my relationship with whatever happened to be right in front of me at the moment. And that’s ultimately what made The City At Your Feet feel so impactful. After my first two hours of play and connection were up, I surprised myself by asking Gabi to extend the experience for another two hours. I had seen the city I loved — and thought I knew — through new eyes, and I wasn’t ready to go back. That’s not an experience I’m going to forget anytime soon.

The City At Your Feet has concluded.

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