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For A Good Time Call: Scratching The Surface Off Of Philadelphia with 14th Street


This year’s SoLow Fest, a performance art festival geared toward minimal stress and expense and heightened exposure for local artists, will be hosting a performance piece by 14th Street called For A Good Time Call. The piece is a highly interactive exploration-themed experience from the mind of Mike Durkin, a local performance artist, artistic director of The Renegade Company and second year MFA student.

14th Street is Durkin’s moniker and the attribution of his work, which often centers around relationships: Relationships between time and space, between two people, between people and themselves, and between people and their city, among other things.

Durkin’s For A Good Time Call is about “finding a shared experience with someone that you may or may not know in a very brief encounter with that person, and then meeting up with that person and then going on a journey together. It’s something that’s really exciting for me. [It’s] unique and something that’s a little unexpected.”

Between June 16th and June 22nd, participants are invited to call the phone number 267-343-2009 “for a good time.” Once Durkin answers, he will lead the participant in a discussion about the world around them and then the two will meet for a journey.

The idea came from daily walks from place to place, says Durkin. “I walk around all the time. That’s my primary mode of transportation. And from there, I’m observing what’s out there.”

A previous piece of Durkin’s, his faux cheesesteak-eating-contest, entitled Cheesesteaks Cheesesteaks Cheesesteaks Cheesesteaks Cheesesteaks Cheesesteaks, was inspired by his own neighborhood where both Pat’s and Geno’s are located.

As I walked through I would see the same people there eating cheesesteaks day after day and for me it became like, ‘well, why are they eating it?’ It’s partly because they like the taste of it, but it’s something deeper,” Durkin said. “So I went on an interesting exploration of the role food has in our lives, particularly in emotional eating.”

Durkin turned this simple observation into a piece centered around emotional eating and the grandeur of eating competitions, a loud piece rife with drama, where “characters were sort of exaggerated figures and it culminated into the death of one of the characters because of consuming that amount of cheesesteaks.”

Durkin’s unorthodox approach to exploring the neighborhood in For A Good Time Call got its first test in the form of a workshop in January, where he took 10-15 people around to various areas.

“I’ve doubled the amount of places I’m going to now, and working on it these last couple of weeks, we’re finding a lot of themes about development: the Philadelphia of yesterday and the Philadelphia of tomorrow and us always caught in between those two worlds versus dealing with the Philadelphia of today,” he said. “And that’s the purpose of this piece, it’s to explore the Philadelphia of today, understanding the past and the future but really [seeing] what’s happening right now.”

Durkin says that his role in the experience is to facilitate the discoveries of his audience and lead them in making parallels and reaching higher consciousness in regard to the way their community functions and the way that other communities can mirror these functions.

“It’s ways in which there are universalities between communities in the city,” Durkin explained. “A population in West may on the surface look drastically different, but in Pennsport, that community is grappling with the same issues or similar issues. Also, finding hidden gems in the city or finding different places that you didn’t know existed, and that’s without any guidance or checkpoint you never would have discovered that.”

Some experiences are personalized, said Durkin, who speaks on the example of a random decision between him and a participant to purchase scratch-off lottery tickets at a gas station on their Port Richmond route.

“I was like, do you want to play the lottery right now?” said Durkin. “We actually won $5, and it was great and it was a completely improvised thing that happened in just being present, being there in the moment.”

Durkin calls the performance “a chance in which you’ll have a completely unique experience that you’ll never have again,” learning about how a community works and where one’s role is within it, “whether it’s where you work, where you play… it’s just understanding what’s beyond the surface.”

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