UPDATE: In 2026, the “Push Button Performer” (25.2) returns to Seattle and the PNW with all new content and instrumentation. Stay tuned!
Do you like getting pushed around? Apparently Mike does. Because since 1999, Mike has been his audience’s dutiful robotic puppet as the “Push Button Performer”: a live, audience-directed piece busked and performed nearly 40 times in classrooms, carnivals, street festivals, theaters and art galleries. After a 20+ year hiatus, this performance is now being re-crafted to make more fun of bots. Sorry. It’s only cold comfort for button-pushing humans living in a world where the line between machines and real people gets blurrier everyday.
PBP 25.2
Inspired by Nam June Paik, Laurie Anderson, Max Headroom and more, The PBP is a live performance of spoken word and music directed by the audience to start, stop, or change the speed or volume. This robot-human beatnik is often left frozen for great lengths of time, waiting for a button to be pushed. Someone presses “start” and the barrier between performer and audience is broken. The roles reverse. An audience member’s performance becomes the bit of entertaining content to watch.
Invariably, young boys and men make The PBP go fast and loud. During the performance’s original run from 1999 to 2005, an audience member at a theater once made The PBP go so uncomfortably fast and loud that the rest of the audience turned on him. With the large gentlemen forcefully clutching The PBP’s chest panel, two other large men physically grabbed the guy to peal him away. At which point the audience - grateful that the “mean” man was gone and the “show” could go on - erupted in joyful applause. It’s worth seeing this in person. There’s always a show within a show.
