NEW YORK, NY

By Shannon Rothenberger

Washington Square Park is one of those diminished neighborhood places I try not to think about. A curfew and police surveillance have not fulfilled their original purpose of discouraging pot dealers, who have merely moved their trade to adjoining West Fourth Street. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's relentless "quality of life" campaign has made the park an obstacle rather than a gathering place at night. Like the anti-graffiti chain-link fence that now surrounds the arch itself like a prison yard, you have to go around it.

That arch was the meeting place and starting point for countless adventures for most people I know who grew up in New York City. When we were ten, my friend Edna and I used to sprawl on top of one of those odd asphalt hummocks on the park's southwest side where we would watch the sky patterning through the trees above. We were blissfully free of adult supervision, free to tell each other stories inspired by the shifting leaves and the aural collage of drumbeats, folk guitars and "Smoke. Smoke. Smoke."

My first spinning drunk, at fourteen, was on sangria with my Baskin Robbins coworkers on a Washington Square Park bench. At sixteen, the park was the place to join my first NOW rally. It was also the place to buy a nickel bag before the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which played at the Waverly theater at midnight. (Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" would mean nothing to my generation - we'd heard "Give Yourself Over To Absolute Pleasure" from Tim Curry.) When I was an art student, I often went to Washington Square to draw people, since a wilder and more diverse assortment of models couldn't be found anywhere else in the city. During the past 20 years, as real estate prices rose and the park gradually became a formal courtyard for wealthy Village residents and NYU students, it lost its appeal, and the Village lost its heart. I don't like to think about that lost space, just like it's better not to miss the low-rise river views lost to millionaire towers on both sides of the island.

The message of the current (selective) economic boom is that there's nowhere commerce can't go. It can block your view and it can watch you through video cameras as if everyone is a potential customer, or criminal. These days, proliferating surveillance cameras poke their noses from luxury apartment buildings to spy on the surrounding public sidewalks. Stores not only videotape shoplifters, but window shoppers.

Whether for consumer or "security" profiling, surveillance is a $2 billion nationwide business. At last count by the New York Civil Liberties Union, 2,397 privately owned closed circuit cameras threaten the privacy and anonymity that New York City is known for.

Simultaneously, city government is compounding the message that if it's not strictly business, people have no business gathering in public. Giuliani routinely thwarts the First Amendment right of free assembly with his biased and limiting permit system. No demonstrations have been permitted in public parks since his election. Yankees fans could take over downtown, but the Million Youth March was confined to a few barricaded Harlem blocks from noon to four. The St. Patrick's Day Parade continues to exclude homosexuals, while gay marchers protesting the murder of Matthew Shepard were arrested. Demonstrators who try to make it to City Hall are thoroughly corralled and surveilled by sophisticated video cameras with the capacity to create a visual file of "troublemakers."

Like the Trumping of New York's skyline, the proliferation of unauthorized data collection has an implacable, inevitable trajectory that most people feel powerless to resist.

Not if the Surveillance Camera Players can help it.

With a core membership of five people, the Surveillance Camera Players have been performing plays for video surveillance cameras in New York since 1996. Washington Square Park is their favorite venue because of its history and the many closed circuit cameras there, which are secreted inside streetlamps. The intended audience for the SCP's plays in the park is a squad of New York City police stationed in a large van on Washington Square South, where they can be surprised by the drama on their monitors.

Bill, a co-founder of the SCP-the anarchist group members usually go by first names only-jokes that the police should watch something besides sex and violence. He believes that literature is better for them.

Because surveillance cameras record images, not sound-speech is still protected by privacy laws-the SCP's plays are silent. The script is reduced to minimal words and images on poster board. The actors, sometimes in costume, pantomime the action. The plays have been performed in subway stations, at Liberty Plaza, at a housing project in Peekskill, New York, and for a webcam on the corner of 45th Street and Fifth Avenue, where Manhattan Transfer, a video production company, constantly films and downloads footage of passersby to its Web site for no apparent reason.

Susan, the other founder of SCP, told me that the next SCP performance would be based on Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism. It will be prefaced by the one-minute Headline News, the first play written especially to be performed for surveillance cameras. The SCP's other plays, each of which runs about ten minutes, are adaptations from literature, such as Ubu Roi, Waiting for Godot and 1984.

On a clear, cold December weekday in Washington Square Park, I search the lampposts and trees for cameras, but I can't see any. While I wait for the Surveillance Camera Players' noontime arrival, it's impossible not to notice that the players will have some competition for an audience. Bigwords.com, an online college textbook store, has constructed a promotional soundstage at the east end of the park. Recorded hip hop music is booming out to a crowd of about 200 spectators surrounding the stage. Bright yellow signs and flyers announce Bigwords' Y2K Ball Drop Beta Test: 20,000 yellow superballs will imminently drop from a soundstage tower onto its target crowd of "Gen Y" students. A Dick Clark impersonator announces that "specially marked" blue balls are worth cash prizes, redeemable, of course, on the store's Web site.

Verne Troyer ( a.k.a. Mini-Me in Austin Powers 2) takes the Bigwords stage. He sings a song about Y2K, vaguely to the tune of something else. The crowd cheers for Troyer, who, according to the Bigwords flyer, "at

2 foot 8 inches, is one of the smallest men in the world." This is the scene that greets the Surveillance Camera Players as they arrive on the northeast side of the park.

The Surveillance Camera Players also have flyers, which are handed out by two prospective members at today's performance site, a spot below one of the park's hidden surveillance cameras. The flyers, headlined "You Are Being Watched For Your Own Safety," are illustrated with a Yield-sign-shaped triangle with an eyeball inside - coincidentally, the same highway-warning yellow as Bigwords.com's giant banners and the thousands of superballs that are being dumped by guys in yellow jumpsuits from the tower and boinging around the crowd.

A small knot of supporters gathers around the pair of SC players, Bill and Kimberly, who lean their stack of large signs against a fence. The sign on top reads: "Who Is Watching?"

People crossing the park stop to read the SCP's flyers, which inform them that there are ten surveillance cameras in the park, all secreted in light fixtures. Washington Square's cameras are monitored 24 hours a day by the police. Not only are the cameras equipped with infrared night vision, they can be remotely controlled to tilt, zoom and track individuals. Some people have reported to the SCP that when they flipped off the cameras, they were stopped by the police and asked for ID.

With grim cheer, the SCP flyer notes that the police are capable of reading its very words over your shoulder: "So relax; you're safe here. Forget we mentioned any of this. Smile! Big Brother is Watching You."

Whether the SCP is performing for Big Brother's video monitors in police vans and subway token booths, or for Little Brother's screens at corporate security desks, a NYCLU legal representative usually accompanies the players, since they rarely get to finish a play without police or security guard interference. Today, however, the union rep doesn't arrive.

Bill and Kimberly, in dark glasses, begin the play by silently holding their sequence of signs up for the camera's eye. Simple black marker pictograms illustrate the messages "Cops Will Shoot Pictures/Like Cops Shoot Guns/No More Racial Profiling/No More Invasion of Privacy." Two other SCP members prompt the actors to position their signs for maximum video visibility. An onlooker remarks sarcastically, "Now that's entertainment!"

As if on cue, "Jungle Boogie" pumps from the Bigwords show as Bill holds up the title card for Mass Psychology of Fascism. The players juxtapose a dollar sign with "Why Do People Act Irrationally?" A hail of little yellow balls bounces over from the soundstage. People scramble for the balls that swarm around the SCP like bees.

As the placard play reaches its inevitable Reichian conclusion that sexual liberation will free us from patriarchy, authoritarianism, religious repression, racism and capitalism, the Bigwords crowd falls silent, waiting for the winners to be announced. Watching the signs shuffle their sexual symbols to the hum of the soundstage generator, I experience a high school flashback-an older hippie guy who had recently read Marcuse calling me "bourgeois" for rejecting his seduction.

My disappointment at the revival of this stillborn philosophy is interrupted by "the Man," as we children of hippies smirkingly say, in the person of a Parks Department officer in a green uniform. The SCP perk up at his gruff "Excuse me - do you have a permit for this?" Traditionally, according to its proponents, Street Theater truly unfolds when unwitting official "actors" attempt to stop it.

The action proceeds with orders to move along, collection of IDs, a ticket written for unlawful assembly and the arrival of uniformed enforcements. Supporters of the SCP, seasoned veterans of confrontation, don't miss their cues. While Tony Torn, a local activist, demands to know the charges and questions the officers' humanity, his comrade Peggy shouts, "This is about free speech! We're allowed to congregate. Corporations don't want us to. They want to control public space. We're trying to make this gathering more fun than that stupid thing over there!"

A crescendo of yellow balls rolls under Peggy's feet, and she does a neat mock pratfall, remarking, "See! These things are more dangerous than we are!" Under pressure from Torn, a female Parks Department supervisor thumbs through her tiny green rulebook. The tickets are finally scrapped. Apparently Parks rules prohibit signs on fences, but not held in hand. The show can go on, but Bill doesn't care: "I don't feel like it now." The point has been made that, at least where he stands, behavior in public space will not be predicted or controlled. For an instant, the sublimely silly spirit of Washington Square Park is redeemed from the grim haze of surveillance.

Several articles have been written about the Surveillance Camera Players. There are critics who say that SCP shows are not theater, the plays are elitist, the players can't act, and that they are paranoid kooks. But these critics are missing the larger picture. According to SCP statements, their plays are neither protest nor theater but a combination form designed to overcome the limitations of both. Their goal is the elimination of surveillance cameras; if their protests spark a public outcry, and the cameras are banned, there will be no more need for Surveillance Camera Players.

By performing for surveillance cameras, the SCP are reclaiming public space and returning the intrusive stare. They are redeeming what they call enforced "transparency" by being perversely and creatively opaque.

The SCP point out that their name is intentionally not copyrighted. If you can do better, put on your own show. The cameras are waiting.

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New York Civil Liberties Union list of surveillance camera locations: www.mediaeater.com

Blackout Books (anarchist bookstore): www.panix.com/~blackout

After 3 years of art school, SHANNON ROTHENBERGER's chequered career began as ghostwriter of the timeless memoirs of decorator Charleton Varnish. She reached new lows in subcontracting as the ghost of a ghost for It's Not What You're Eating: It's What's Eating You (Simon & Schuster), then authored Victorian Calling Cards and Country Living Cats at gunpoint (Hearst). She contributed to Turner's The Native Americans (Go, Braves!) and received a nice letter, but no credit, for producing and totally rewriting Encyclopedia of The North American Indian (Thanks, Scholastic). However, she did produce the only mainstream NA history book illustrated exclusively with images of/by Native Americans (though they did sneak in that photo of Custer's wagon train, damn). Shannon also appears in the Talking Heads video Storytelling Giant and was a storyteller on an indigenous panel at the Museum of Natural History in Spring 2000.