[...] WSD [World Sousveillance Day] is only one way people can express their dislike of being under constant surveillance in public places. The New York Surveillance Camera Players have pioneered another interesting form of protest. Instead of photographing video cameras, SCP performs specially adapted versions of famous plays under their unblinking gaze. The SCP troupe has played many times since 1996 to anonymous audiences of New York policemen and private security guards who monitor the cameras. Their Web site (http://www.notbored.org/the-scp.html) has useful information for those thinking of staging their own security camera dramas. To perform Beckett's Waiting for Godot, for example, SCP says you will need to have "two actors, wearing signs that identify them as ESTRAGON and VLADIMIR, respectively, sit or kneel beneath a third actor who is wearing a sign that says THE TREE." The directions are simple: "Estragon and Vladimir knock each other around, switch positions, chase each other around the tree, etc." The SCP's amusing site has additional synopses for works by Orwell, Poe and Jerzy Kosinski[...]
(Written by Neil Hrab and published in the 2 January 2003 edition of
The National Post.)
By e-mail SCP@notbored.org
By snail mail: SCP c/o NOT BORED! POB 1115, Stuyvesant Station, New York City 10009-9998